What say Miriam About Moses?
Miriam and Aaron who were talking about Moses behind his back: “Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses about the Kushite woman he had married, because he had married a Kushite woman. They said, ‘Does the Lord speak only through Moses? Does He not speak through us also?’ And the Lord heard it.”
1. She Was Speaking About Tzipporah Most commentators, including Rashi, explain that Miriam was speaking about Tzipporah, Moses’s wife from Midian. The term “Kushite” is not literal; it is a euphemism for beauty—just as a person of striking skin color is universally known, so was the beauty of Tzipporah.
Miriam discovered—by overhearing Tzipporah’s lament—that Moses had separated from his wife to maintain a state of prophetic readiness. She questioned this decision: “Why did Moses separate from his wife? The Lord also speaks with me and with Aaron, yet we remain with our spouses.” Rashi emphasizes that even though she was motivated by concern and her words were not intended as a slander, because it involved discussing Moses’s private life without his knowledge, the Lord rebuked them.
Baal Haturim adds that the Hebrew word “הכושית” (“the Kushite”), has the same numerical value (gematria) as the phrase “יפת מראה,” which translates to “beautiful in appearance”—both equal 736.
2. Miriam Accused Moses of Separating from His Wife Because She Was a Convert Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (known by the acronym Netziv) states that Aaron and Miriam assumed that Moses had separated from her because, in their view, it was beneath his dignity to remain married to someone who was not from a respectable Israelite lineage. They argued that this was improper because Moses had willingly married her, even knowing her background. Miriam had not deceived him, so it was wrong for him to now hurt Miriam by separating from her. However, the actual reason he separated was to maintain the proper state of readiness to speak with God “face to face.”
3. Miriam Was Referring to a Kushite Wife Moses Had Taken Years Earlier Rashbam, who explains the “plain meaning” of these verses, understood that the Kushite woman mentioned in the verse was not referring to Moses’s wife, Tzipporah, but to a Kushite queen he had married during the 40 years he reigned in Kush, as detailed in the Book of Chronicles.
Miriam criticized the fact that he had taken this woman as a wife. However, Moses had never consummated the marriage with that woman, and Miriam and Aaron were unaware of this when they spoke about Moses. This explanation fits the literal meaning of the verse, for if the complaint were about Tzipporah, there would have been no need to introduce her as a “Kushite”—we already know she was a Midianite. Furthermore, Tzipporah could not accurately be called a Kushite, as Midian was a descendant of Keturah, Abraham’s wife, whereas Kush was a descendant of Cham.
This is similar to the reading of Bechor Shor, who articulated Miriam’s complaint: “Were there no women among the daughters of Israel for Moses to marry, so that he went and took a wife from among the Kushites, who were uncircumcised? Was it because the Lord speaks to him that he considers himself higher than others—too arrogant to marry a Jewish woman, and instead sought a wife from afar?”
He explained that the fact that Moses married Tzipporah, who was also not of Jacob’s lineage, was not something to be criticized, as he had no control over those circumstances. He had to flee Egypt to Midian after Pharaoh sought to execute him and was therefore unable to marry a woman of Jewish descent.
4. She criticized the fact that he married Tzipporah in the first place Some commentators, while agreeing that the criticism was not about Tzipporah’s appearance or character, understood it as questioning how Moses—Israel’s greatest prophet—could marry a foreign woman. This view refers to the earlier tradition that Moses had once married a Kushite queen, but applies that criticism to Tzipporah, his wife from Midian. In this reading, Miriam and Aaron did not criticize Moses for separating from his wife, but for marrying someone who was not from the daughters of Israel in the first place.
5. That Wasn’t What She Was Saying In an intricate discourse that addresses Rashi’s explanation of the connection between this episode and the disastrous spying mission that immediately followed, the Rebbe reveals the core of Miriam’s error.
Her mistake was not that she meant to speak ill of her brother, Moses, just as Rashi said: “She did not mean to speak ill of him.”
So, what was her mistake? The problem, as Rashi explained, was that she “engaged in conversation”—she was punished simply for speaking about her brother. If Miriam saw something in Moses’s conduct that bothered her, the proper course of action would not have been to speak about it to others. Such conversations rarely produce constructive results. If she truly had an issue, she should have addressed it—discreetly and directly—with Moses himself.
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