Three different names are given for Moses' father-in-law. Exodus 3:1, 4:18, 18:1, 18:5 all call him Jethro (the priest of Midian). Numbers 10:29 and Judges 4:11 call him Hobab. Exodus 2:18-21 calls him Reuel. The verses directly identify different men by different names in the same narrative role.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
1Now Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the back of the wilderness, and came to God’s mountain, to Horeb.
18Moses went and returned to Jethro his father-in-law, and said to him, “Please let me go and return to my brothers who are in Egypt, and see whether they are still alive.” Jethro said to Moses, “Go in peace.”
1Now Jethro, the priest of Midian, Moses’ father-in-law, heard of all that God had done for Moses, and for Israel his people, how Yahweh had brought Israel out of Egypt.
11Now Heber the Kenite had separated himself from the Kenites, even from the children of Hobab, Moses’ brother-in-law, and had pitched his tent as far as the oak in Zaanannim, which is by Kedesh.
29Moses said to Hobab, the son of Reuel the Midianite, Moses’ father-in-law, “We are journeying to the place of which Yahweh said, ‘I will give it to you.’ Come with us, and we will treat you well; for Yahweh has spoken good concerning Israel.”
18When they came to Reuel, their father, he said, “How is it that you have returned so early today?”19They said, “An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and moreover he drew water for us, and watered the flock.”20He said to his daughters, “Where is he? Why is it that you have left the man? Call him, that he may eat bread.”21Moses was content to dwell with the man. He gave Moses Zipporah, his daughter.
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Moses' father-in-law appears under three names. Exodus 3:1, 4:18, 18:1, and 18:5 consistently call him Jethro, the priest of Midian. Numbers 10:29 names "Hobab the son of Reuel [Raguel] the Midianite, Moses' father in law," and Judges 4:11 likewise calls Hobab "the father in law of Moses." Exodus 2:18-21, however, names Reuel as the priest of Midian whose daughter Zipporah Moses marries. Three names, one narrative slot.
The harmonizing tradition offers two main strategies, and in their strongest forms they are not frivolous. The first treats Reuel as a clan name or grandfather, Jethro as the personal name, and Hobab as a separate man — Moses' brother-in-law rather than father-in-law. This leans on the genuine breadth of the Hebrew חֹתֵן (ḥōtēn), which derives from a root for marriage-alliance and can in principle denote a range of in-law relations, so that "Hobab…Moses' father in law" in Numbers 10:29 might be parsed as referring to Reuel as the in-law and Hobab as the son. The second strategy holds that one man bore several names: Reuel ("friend of God") as a given name, Jethro ("his excellency," from a root for abundance/pre-eminence) as a priestly title or honorific, and Hobab as an additional name or epithet. Multiple naming is well attested in the world of the text — Abram/Abraham, Jacob/Israel, Gideon/Jerubbaal, Solomon/Jedidiah — so the phenomenon itself is unobjectionable. Archer, Kaiser, and Cole (TOTC Exodus) deploy these moves; the lexical observation about ḥōtēn is real and the multi-name parallels are genuine.
The source-critical reading accounts for the same data without the strain. Propp (AB Exodus) and Friedman (Who Wrote the Bible?; The Bible with Sources Revealed) assign the names to different documents: J uses Reuel (Exod 2:18), E uses Jethro (Exod 3:1; 4:18; ch. 18), and Numbers 10:29 — itself reckoned to J — gives "Hobab son of Reuel," while Judges 4:11, a separate (likely Deuteronomistic) tradition, simply calls Hobab the father-in-law. On this view the variation is exactly what one expects when independent traditions about a peripheral Midianite figure are stitched together: each source preserved its own name, and the redactor harmonized them only partially, leaving the seams visible. Baden (The Composition of the Pentateuch) treats the case as a textbook instance of distinct source-vocabulary.
Weighing the two: the multi-name defense is logically available and cannot be disproved, since people in this milieu did carry several names. But it pays in complexity. It must read ḥōtēn in Numbers 10:29 against the surface grammar (which calls Hobab, not Reuel, the father-in-law), it must coordinate Judges 4:11 (which also makes Hobab the father-in-law) with that reparsing, and it must explain why one man would be called by three different names in three different documentary contexts with no text ever noting the identification. The source-critical reading explains all of this at once: different traditions, different names, incomplete redaction. Neither is demonstrable, but parsimony favors the documentary account; the harmonization survives only by multiplying assumptions.
Where the critical reading lands: disputed — reconcilable by the multi-name/in-law route, but the distribution of names across sources is more economically explained as conflated traditions.
Sources for this reading
William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1-18 (AB 2; Doubleday, 1999) on Exod 2:16-22; 3:1; 18:1Exodus 2:16-22, Exodus 3:1, Exodus 18:1
Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (HarperOne, 1987)
Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003) on Num 10:29Numbers 10:29
Joel S. Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch (Yale University Press, 2012)
Baruch A. Levine, Numbers 1-20 (AB 4; Doubleday, 1993) on Num 10:29Numbers 10:29
Gleason L. Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Zondervan, 1982)
R. Alan Cole, Exodus (TOTC; InterVarsity Press, 1973) on Exod 3:1Exodus 3:1
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Moses' father-in-law appears under three names. Exodus 3:1, 4:18, 18:1, and 18:5 consistently call him Jethro, the priest of Midian. Numbers 10:29 names "Hobab the son of Reuel [Raguel] the Midianite, Moses' father in law," and Judges 4:11 likewise calls Hobab "the father in law of Moses." Exodus 2:18-21, however, names Reuel as the priest of Midian whose daughter Zipporah Moses marries. Three names, one narrative slot.
The harmonizing tradition offers two main strategies, and in their strongest forms they are not frivolous. The first treats Reuel as a clan name or grandfather, Jethro as the personal name, and Hobab as a separate man — Moses' brother-in-law rather than father-in-law. This leans on the genuine breadth of the Hebrew חֹתֵן (ḥōtēn), which derives from a root for marriage-alliance and can in principle denote a range of in-law relations, so that "Hobab…Moses' father in law" in Numbers 10:29 might be parsed as referring to Reuel as the in-law and Hobab as the son. The second strategy holds that one man bore several names: Reuel ("friend of God") as a given name, Jethro ("his excellency," from a root for abundance/pre-eminence) as a priestly title or honorific, and Hobab as an additional name or epithet. Multiple naming is well attested in the world of the text — Abram/Abraham, Jacob/Israel, Gideon/Jerubbaal, Solomon/Jedidiah — so the phenomenon itself is unobjectionable. Archer, Kaiser, and Cole (TOTC Exodus) deploy these moves; the lexical observation about ḥōtēn is real and the multi-name parallels are genuine.
The source-critical reading accounts for the same data without the strain. Propp (AB Exodus) and Friedman (Who Wrote the Bible?; The Bible with Sources Revealed) assign the names to different documents: J uses Reuel (Exod 2:18), E uses Jethro (Exod 3:1; 4:18; ch. 18), and Numbers 10:29 — itself reckoned to J — gives "Hobab son of Reuel," while Judges 4:11, a separate (likely Deuteronomistic) tradition, simply calls Hobab the father-in-law. On this view the variation is exactly what one expects when independent traditions about a peripheral Midianite figure are stitched together: each source preserved its own name, and the redactor harmonized them only partially, leaving the seams visible. Baden (The Composition of the Pentateuch) treats the case as a textbook instance of distinct source-vocabulary.
Weighing the two: the multi-name defense is logically available and cannot be disproved, since people in this milieu did carry several names. But it pays in complexity. It must read ḥōtēn in Numbers 10:29 against the surface grammar (which calls Hobab, not Reuel, the father-in-law), it must coordinate Judges 4:11 (which also makes Hobab the father-in-law) with that reparsing, and it must explain why one man would be called by three different names in three different documentary contexts with no text ever noting the identification. The source-critical reading explains all of this at once: different traditions, different names, incomplete redaction. Neither is demonstrable, but parsimony favors the documentary account; the harmonization survives only by multiplying assumptions.
Where the critical reading lands: disputed — reconcilable by the multi-name/in-law route, but the distribution of names across sources is more economically explained as conflated traditions.
Sources for this reading