Moses "married an Ethiopian [Cushith] woman" (Numbers 12:1, KJV, NKJV). Moses "married a Cushite [Cushith] woman" (Numbers 12:1, ASV, NASV, NIV, NRSV). Moses married Zipporah, a daughter of Jethro, "the priest of Midian" in Arabia (Exodus 2:15; 3:1), far from Ethiopia.

Why did the King James translators say that Moses married an Ethiopian? Because, some 500 years after the time of Moses, the "Cushites" were called "Ethiopians" (2 Chronicles 12:3; Psalm 68:31). Apparently the KJ translators assumed that the Cushites had always been called "Ethiopians," and so they wrote that Moses had married an Ethiopian.

But Moses himself tells us that the Cushites in his day lived in Asia, not in Africa (Genesis 10:6-10). He wrote that the Gihon River (one of the four rivers that flowed out of the garden of Eden) "winds through the entire land of Cush (Genesis 2:10-14).

Moses did not write that he "had married an Ethiopian." The Hebrew word for "Ethiopian" is not in the Old Testament. He wrote that he "had married a Cushite woman" (Numbers 12:1). We know that Zipporah his wife was an Asian, not an African, and that she lived in Midian in Arabia (Exodus 2:15; 3:1), not in Ethiopia.

Since Midian in Arabia was a long way from the area of the garden of Eden in present day Iraq (the locale of the Cushites, Genesis 2:10-14; 10:6-10), one can suppose that Moses married a second wife. But one cannot suppose that a supposed second wife was an Ethiopian, for Moses said his wife was a Cushite, and in Moses’ time, the Cushites lived in Asia, not in Africa.