13 And it came to pass on the morrow, that Moses sat to judge the people: and the people stood by Moses from the morning unto the evening.

14 And when Moses’ father in law saw all that he did to the people, he said, What is this thing that thou doest to the people? why sittest thou thyself alone, and all the people stand by thee from morning unto even?

15 And Moses said unto his father in law, Because the people come unto me to inquire of God:

16 When they have a matter, they come unto me; and I judge between one and another, and I do make them know the statutes of God, and his laws.

17 And Moses’ father in law said unto him, The thing that thou doest is not good.

Moses had played host to Jethro when he first arrived, but on the next day he had to get back to his work as Israel’s judge. This was quite fortuitous, as it allowed Jethro to observe Moses’s process, and in the following verses we will see the key improvement that he had to offer.

Moses stood between all the disputes and difficulties of the people, delivering God’s judgment for them all. This is a key function that any large populace needs to have filled. Isolated individuals become a unified people in part by having

1. A shared vision.
2. Reliable rules that they all adhere to.
3. Their smaller issues resolved before they can escalate into egregious affronts.

Moses was meeting all of those needs by sitting in judgment. Put more abstractly, a society needs a locus of control, just as an individual does, and without one it will dissolve into anarchy. But since the society is not a single person, that locus of control must be external instead of internal.

Of course, among a people that may have numbered over two million, the number of disputes that Moses heard must have been immense. As we will see tomorrow, this is exactly the problem that Jethro saw in Moses’s approach. Judging two million people was already too great of a burden, and the population was only going to increase, and Moses’s approach would not be able to scale upwards indefinitely. It would become literally impossible for one man to judge these people in this way. Something had to change.