Zipporah

More than three thousand years ago, a black child was found on the shore of the Red Sea. She was given the name Zipporah, 'the bird'. But because of the colour of her skin, her fate was sealed: in the tribal lands where she lived, no man would want her as a wife. But one day, as she was drawing water at a well, Zipporah met a man like no other she'd met before. An outcast like herself, his name was Moses and he was a fugitive from Egypt. A passionate lover and a generous wife, Zipporah the Black, the stranger, the non-Jew, was to share Moses' destiny. Thanks to her, he would forget his fears and hear the message of God, bequeathing to mankind laws that, even today, protect the weak against the strong. But Zipporah's love for Moses would condemn her - for among the Hebrews of the Exodus her status as a black woman was to have catastrophic consequences...A forgotten protagonist of the Old Testament, Zipporah was the embodiment of intelligence and love. Although the weakest of the weak, she was the first to understand the full potential of the role given to Moses, her emotional bravery and strength in adversity making her, like Sarah, an astonishing modern heroine: a woman for her - and our - troubled times.