Zipporah at the inn is the name given to an episode alluded to in three verses of the Book of Exodus. This much-debated passage is one of the more perplexing conundrums of the

Torah The Torah (; hbo, ''Tōrā'', "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In that sense, Torah means the ...

Passage

The verses in question are Exodus 4:24–26, the context is

Moses Moses hbo, מֹשֶׁה, Mōše; also known as Moshe or Moshe Rabbeinu (Mishnaic Hebrew: מֹשֶׁה רַבֵּינוּ, ); syr, ܡܘܫܐ, Mūše; ar, موسى, Mūsā; grc, Mωϋσῆς, Mōÿsēs () is considered the most important pro ...

, his wife

Zipporah Zipporah, or Tzipora (; he, צִפּוֹרָה, ''Ṣīppōrā'', "bird"),, ''Sepphōra''; ar, صفورة, ''Ṣaffūrah'' is mentioned in the Book of Exodus as the wife of Moses, and the daughter of Reuel/Jethro, the priest and prince of Midia ...

and their son

Gershom According to the Bible, Gershom ( ''Gēršōm'', "a sojourner there"; la, Gersam) was the firstborn son of Moses and Zipporah. The name means "a stranger there" in Hebrew, ( ''ger sham''), which the text argues was a reference to Moses' flight ...

reaching an inn on their way from

Midian Midian (; he, מִדְיָן ''Mīḏyān'' ; ar, مَدْيَن, Madyan; grc-gre, Μαδιάμ, ''Madiam'') is a geographical place mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and Quran. William G. Dever states that biblical Midian was in the "northwest Ar ...

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning the North Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via a land bridg ...

to announce the plagues to the

Pharaoh Pharaoh (, ; Egyptian: '' pr ꜥꜣ''; cop, , Pǝrro; Biblical Hebrew: ''Parʿō'') is the vernacular term often used by modern authors for the kings of ancient Egypt who ruled as monarchs from the First Dynasty (c. 3150 BC) until the ...

Leningrad Codex The Leningrad Codex ( la, Codex Leningradensis [Leningrad Book]; he, כתב יד לנינגרד) is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, using the Masoretic Text and Tiberian vocalization. According to its colopho ...

text: :24. :25. :26.

King James Version The King James Version (KJV), also the King James Bible (KJB) and the Authorized Version, is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, by sponsorship of ...

translation: :24. And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the Lᴏʀᴅ met him, and sought to kill him. :25. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, "Surely a bloody husband art thou to me." :26. So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.

New Revised Standard Version The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) is an English translation of the Bible published in 1989 by the National Council of Churches.rite of circumcision of his son. Zipporah averts disaster by reacting quickly and hastily performing the rite, thus saving her husband from God's anger. (

Shemot Rabbah Exodus Rabbah (Hebrew: שמות רבה, ''Shemot Rabbah'') is the midrash to Exodus. Contents Exodus Rabbah is almost purely aggadic in character. It contains 52 sections. It consists of two sections with different styles, dubbed "Exodus Rabba ...

5:8)

Various interpretations

The details of the passage are unclear and subject to debate. One problem is that the text uses

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not c ...

s multiple times, without ever identifying which of the three individuals (God, Moses, or Zipporah's son) is being referred to by each instance. In particular, it is unclear who God sought to kill (Moses or Zipporah's son), whose feet (God's, Moses's, or her son's) Zipporah touches with the foreskin, who (God, Moses, or her son) Zipporah is addressing as her "bloody bridegroom," and the meaning of the phrase "bloody bridegroom."

Rabbinic

The ambiguous or fragmentary nature of the verses leaves much room for extrapolation, and rabbinical scholarship has provided a number of explanations. The earliest Jewish interpretations almost unanimously infer that Moses failed to circumcise his son, thereby angering God and provoking the attack, but Zipporah's quick action in circumcising her son appeases God and ends the confrontation. The Talmud understands this episode to underscore the primacy of the biblical command for fathers to promptly circumcise their sons (either on the eighth day or at the first opportunity thereafter), such that even someone of Moses's accrued merit and stature was not exempt from punishment by death for delaying his son's circumcision even briefly. While the passage is frequently interpreted as referring to

, Moses's firstborn, being circumcised,

Rashi Shlomo Yitzchaki ( he, רבי שלמה יצחקי; la, Salomon Isaacides; french: Salomon de Troyes, 22 February 1040 – 13 July 1105), today generally known by the acronym Rashi (see below), was a medieval French rabbi and author of a compre ...

, citing the

Midrash ''Midrash'' (;"midrash"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. he, מִדְרָשׁ; ...

Exodus Rabbah Exodus Rabbah (Hebrew: שמות רבה, ''Shemot Rabbah'') is the midrash to Exodus. Contents Exodus Rabbah is almost purely aggadic in character. It contains 52 sections. It consists of two sections with different styles, dubbed "Exodus Rabba ...

, states that the passage instead refers to

Eliezer Eliezer (, "Help/Court of El") was the name of at least three different individuals in the Bible. Eliezer of Damascus Eliezer of Damascus () was, according to the Targums, the son of Nimrod. Eliezer was head of the patriarch Abraham's house ...

, Moses's other son. The Targum Neophyti, a medieval

midrash ''Midrash'' (;"midrash"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. he, מִדְרָשׁ; ...

translation Translation is the communication of the Meaning (linguistic), meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The ...

of the Pentateuch into Aramaic, expands Zipporah's enigmatic "you are truly a bridegroom of blood" to "How beloved is the blood that has delivered this bridegroom from the hand of the Angel of Death." The question of how Moses, of all people, could have neglected to have his son circumcised and thus incurred the wrath of Hashem (God) was debated in classical Jewish scholarship. Rabbi El'azar ha-Moda'i argues that Jethro had placed an additional condition on the marriage between his daughter and Moses—that their firstborn son would be given over to idolatry and thus explaining why Moses was viewed negatively by Hashem. One Midrashic interpretation is that, while Hashem allowed Moses to put off circumcising his son until they reached Egypt, rather than weaken him before the journey, Moses did not hasten to perform the task as soon as possible after he had arrived. Rabbinical commentators have asked how Zipporah knew that the act of circumcising her son would save her husband. Rashi, citing Talmudic and Midrashic sources, explains that the angel of God (which the Talmud, Nedarim 32a identifies as either Af or Hemah, the personifications of anger and fury), in the shape of a serpent, had swallowed Moses up to, but not including, his genitals, and that Zipporah therefore understood that this had happened on account of the delay in circumcising her son.Bonna Devora Haberman, 'Foreskin sacrifice - Zipporah's Ritual and the Bloody Bridegroom' in: ''The covenant of circumcision: new perspectives on an ancient Jewish rite'', Brandeis series on Jewish women, ed. Mark, UPNE, 2003, , 23. "Like Eve, Zipporah tangles her references to her son, her lover and God. ... Male figures coalesce in Eve sand Zipporah's consciousness." Haberman (2003), connecting this episode to the story of Eve and the serpent, argues that Zipporah immediately understood that the threat was related to circumcision by a "psychoanalytic link" between Moses's penis and his son's, the ambiguous use of pronouns taken as indicating the fundamental identity of the deity, her husband and her son in the woman's subconscious.

Samaritan

The

Samaritan Pentateuch The Samaritan Torah (Samaritan Hebrew: , ''Tōrāʾ''), also called the Samaritan Pentateuch, is a text of the Torah written in the Samaritan script and used as sacred scripture by the Samaritans. It dates back to one of the ancient versions o ...

differs from the Jewish

Masoretic Text The Masoretic Text (MT or 𝕸; he, נֻסָּח הַמָּסוֹרָה, Nūssāḥ Hammāsōrā, lit. 'Text of the Tradition') is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Rabbinic Judaism. ...

in many details. According to the Samaritan version of this episode, Zipporah took a sharp flint and cut ''herself'' as a physical sign of repentance, because she realized that God was angry at Moses for bringing her and their two sons along on the divine mission to free the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. In an attempt to demonstrate her repentance and prove herself worthy of joining her husband. This different narrative arises from the voweling of the Hebrew root word בנה (b-n-h). Whereas the Masoretic version states the Zipporah circumcised "her son" ("b'nah"; בְּנָהּ), the Samaritan text describes her as having circumcised "her understanding" or "her blocked heart" ("binnah"; בִּנָּהּ,

Samaritan alphabet The Samaritan script is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally Arabic. Samaritan is a direc ...

: ࠁࠪࠍ࠙ࠣࠄ ). Moses saw Zipporah's act of self-mutilation as a remnant of his wife's idolatrous upbringing, and a demonstration that God's displeasure at her presence was indeed well-founded. Therefore, Moses sent Zipporah and their two sons back to her family in Midian. This assuaged God's wrath and spared Moses's life. It was only after the parting of the Red Sea and the Israelites' miraculous escape from Egypt that Moses's father-in-law Jethro brought Zipporah and her sons to rejoin Moses at the Israelite camp in the desert.

Modern scholarship

Many biblical scholars consider the passage fragmentary.

James Kugel James L. Kugel (Hebrew: Yaakov Kaduri, יעקב כדורי; born August 22, 1945) is Professor Emeritus in the Bible Department at Bar Ilan University in Israel and the Harry M. Starr Professor Emeritus of Classical and Modern Hebrew Literature at ...

(1998) suggests that the point of the episode is the explanation of the expression "bridegroom of blood" , apparently current in biblical times. The story would seem to illustrate that the phrase does not imply that a bridegroom should or may be circumcised at the time of his marriage, but that Moses by being bloodied by the foreskin of his son became a "bridegroom of blood" to Zipporah. The story has also been interpreted as emphasizing the point that the circumcision must be performed exactly at the prescribed time, as a delay was not granted even to Moses. German orientalist Walter Beltz thought that the original myth behind this story was about the right of

Yahweh Yahweh *''Yahwe'', was the national god of ancient Israel and Judah. The origins of his worship reach at least to the early Iron Age, and likely to the Late Bronze Age if not somewhat earlier, and in the oldest biblical literature he poss ...

, as an ancient

fertility god A fertility deity is a god or goddess associated with fertility, sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and crops. In some cases these deities are directly associated with these experiences; in others they are more abstract symbols. Fertility rites may ...

, to receive in sacrifice the first born son. He reasons that the pronouns cannot refer to Moses, since he is not mentioned in the text preceding the passage. Moreover, the preceding text speaks of Israel as Yahweh's first born son and that Yahweh would kill the

's first born son for not letting Israel out of Egypt. It is obvious, he concludes, that this leads the writer to insert this story about another first born son, Moses's. Accordingly, it can only mean that Yahweh wants to take possession of the son of Moses because he is entitled to the first-born male. The mother undertakes the circumcision, an ancient

matriarchal Matriarchy is a social system in which women hold the primary power positions in roles of authority. In a broader sense it can also extend to moral authority, social privilege and control of property. While those definitions apply in general ...

relic, and touches Yahweh's genitals with the child's foreskin. Only this makes sense when she uses the marriage formula "you are my bridegroom of blood". For in doing so, she transfers the child of Moses into a marriage with Yahweh, making him a child of Yahweh. The complete sacrifice of the boy is replaced by the sacrifice of a part of the penis. The biblical redactor still bore this in mind when he added: "At that time she said 'bridegroom of blood,' referring to circumcision." Originally, young boys were sacrificed to the pantheistic Cretan and Phoenician goddesses only after the priestesses had consummated ritual intercourse, the sacred marriage, with them. Thus, some scholars argue this text comes from the same category as such practices. Meanwhile, William H. Propp argues that, assuming that this episode derives from the

Jahwist The Jahwist, or Yahwist, often abbreviated J, is one of the most widely recognized sources of the Pentateuch (Torah), together with the Deuteronomist, the Priestly source and the Elohist. The existence of the Jahwist is somewhat controversial, ...

("J") source, links God's attack with Moses's killing of the Egyptian taskmaster (Ex. 2:11-12), which had not yet been expiated. Just as the paschal sacrifice would later on cause the Angel of Death to "pass over" the homes of the Hebrews, here the ritualistic spilling of his son's blood through circumcision atones for Moses's wrongdoing – "the bloodied child became a symbol of the paschal night, when the endangered first-born of Israel were saved by the blood of a lamb."

Identity of the attacker

The Masoretic text of Exodus suggests that

himself performed the attack on Moses (or on his son). However, the

Septuagint The Greek Old Testament, or Septuagint (, ; from the la, septuaginta, lit=seventy; often abbreviated ''70''; in Roman numerals, LXX), is the earliest extant Greek translation of books from the Hebrew Bible. It includes several books beyond th ...

makes the attacker an "

angel of the Lord The (or an) angel of the ( he, מַלְאַךְ יְהוָה '' mal’āḵ YHWH'' "messenger of Yahweh") is an entity appearing repeatedly in the Tanakh (Old Testament) on behalf of the God of Israel. The guessed term ''YHWH'', which occur ...

" ("angelos kyriou"), although this change may have been done to "mitigate the harshness of the account." The version in the

Book of Jubilees The Book of Jubilees, sometimes called Lesser Genesis (Leptogenesis), is an ancient Jewish religious work of 50 chapters (1,341 verses), considered canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as well as Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews), where it is ...

(2nd century BC) attributes the attack to Prince Mastema, a title that was another name for

Satan Satan,, ; grc, ὁ σατανᾶς or , ; ar, شيطانالخَنَّاس , also known as the Devil, and sometimes also called Lucifer in Christianity, is an entity in the Abrahamic religions that seduces humans into sin or falsehood. ...

: :''... and what Prince Mastema desired to do with you when you returned to Egypt, on the way when you met him at the shelter. Did he not desire to kill you with all of his might and save the Egyptians from your hand because he saw that you were sent to execute judgment and vengeance upon the Egyptians? And I delivered you from his hand and you did the signs and wonders which you were sent to perform in Egypt''. - Jubilees 48:2-4 The

version does not say "the lord" but "the angel of the lord". "Angel" () is the translation throughout the

of the Hebrew "mal'ak", the term for the manifestation of Yahweh to humanity. (It is the mal'ak that is first described as appearing in the form of a

burning bush The burning bush (or the unburnt bush) refers to an event recorded in the Jewish Torah (as also in the biblical Old Testament). It is described in the third chapter of the Book of Exodus as having occurred on Mount Horeb. According to the bibl ...

,Exodus 3:2. but the lord himself that is the subject during the rest of the conversation with the burning bush). The

precedes the Masoretic Text by at least a millennium making it the older text and closer to the time of the original Hebrew text that is lost.

References

*Walter Beltz, ''Gott und die Götter. Biblische Mythologie'', Aufbau-Verlag Berlin, 1990, . *James L. Kugel, ''Traditions of the Bible: a guide to the Bible as it was at the start of the common era'', Harvard University Press, 1998, . *Shera Aranoff Tuchman, Sandra E. Rapoport, ''Moses' women'', KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 2008, {{ISBN, 978-1-60280-017-5, 127–139. Circumcision Moses Book of Exodus Women in the Hebrew Bible Yahweh Book of Jubilees