Numbers 12:1, Whom he had married. Some Jewish sages (e.g. Rashi, Baal HaTurim) teach that Moses divorced Zipporah and remarried an Ethiopian or Cushite woman. Was Moses’ marriage to the Ethiopian woman legal in YHVH’s eyes? If not, perhaps this is what the siblings’ complaint was about. Consider this. When Moses married Ziporah, he was not “saved.” His first encounter with YHVH occurred at the burning bush after he had already married Zipporah. This is when Moses received his spiritual calling. He received salvation on Passover night in his house with the lamb’s blood painted on the door. He was baptized in the Red Sea and received the Torah at Mount Sinai.

There is no indication that Zipporah accepted Moses’ heavenly calling to follow YHVH. Even though her father, Yitro, as a descendant of Abraham, knew and seemed to have followed YHVH, this may not have been the case with his daughter. To the contrary, she seems to have resisted YHVH and obedience to him (Exod 4:24–26). In fact, it appears that she returned to Yitro, her father, in Midian and did not accompany Moses in the exodus (see Exod 18:2).

The point is that sometimes YHVH will call, commission and grant salvation to a married person, but the person’s spouse is not open to receiving that calling and salvation. In such instances if the unsaved spouse remains hard hearted toward YHVH and after a period of time has passed, the saved spouse is released from their marriage and is free to remarry a believer.  Paul discusses this in 1 Corinithians 7:10–16.

Though the Torah doesn’t tell us, it is entirely possible that Zipporah was dead by the time Moses married the Cushite woman, since he was an elderly man (somewhere between the age of 80 and 120). Yeshua accepts the fact that because of the hardness of hearts, the Torah permits divorce (Matt 19:8) and presumably remarriage, as seems to have been the case with Moses.

Presumably, the Cushite woman was part of the mixed multitude that accompanied the Israelites in their exodus out of Egypt.