I've never read the Bible but I ran across this story while reading Habibi by Craig Thompson. I looked it up and Wikipedia and learned that Moses' wife is described as being Cushite, which is modern Ethiopia. Was it unusual for somebody to marry outside their culture/ethnicity/tribe in ancient Southwest Asia? Did they have a concept of race in our modern sense?
You may also want to ask this at /r/academicbiblical.
In earlier periods, Cushite referred not to (or only) Ethiopia, but morso all dark-skinned sub-Saharans, especially (and I believe originally?) to the Kushites and inhabitants of Kush/Nubia. It seems like you're conflating Cushite with a branch of the Afroasiatic language family native to the Horn of Africa (where Ethiopia located) and northeast Africa named "Cushitic", whose speakers in antiquity I believe were referred to as "Berber" and "Barbar" - this is not counting ancient Ethiosemitic peoples whom are referred to as "Habasa" and "Habashah" in some Semitic texts. Of what commonly the ancient Axumites were referred to were variations of the same name (Axum-, Auxum-) in Latin and Greek texts and as one of the "Indias/Indies".
Well in Numbers 25:7-9 an israeli-midianite couple is killed because the woman is a madonite midianite. 24 thousand israeli get killed by a scourge from god until the couple is killed by Phineas son of Eleazar son of Aaron, that to say a very high rank priest. Later in the same chapter, the verse 16-17 reads like "The Lord said to Moses: 'Harass the midianites and strike them.'"
I thought Tzipora was Arabian?
Cush never refered to all dark skinned sub saharans it reffered to a specific group of people that were located south of Egypt. Some historians thing this is because the inhabitant of ancinet kush included most part of semetic Modern day Ethiopia as There are plenty of Axumite texts sound in modern day Sudan/Nubia . Others think this is because of axumite conquest which brought forth the doom of the nubian kingdom far after biblical times. In the new testament there is a story that Philip the Evangelist was told by an angel to go to the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, and there he met the Ethiopian eunuch. He had been to Jerusalem to worship (Acts 8:27), and was returning home. This and the fact that Ethiopia is the only christian kingdom in the region and oldest christian kingdom in the world implies that kush/Ethiopia in the bible refers to or includes for the most part semetic modern day Ethiopia.