Circumcision... Again - Exodus 4:22-26

4:24-26 - There’s a strange and interesting incident that happens kind of out of the blue while Moses is traveling with his wife and two sons from Midian to Egypt. The JST has the incident as being the God was angry with Moses and appeared to him “and his hand was about to fall upon him, to kill him; for he had not circumcised his son.” The timing is interesting because this wasn’t a baby boy, I believe that he was quite a bit older, but why wait until Moses was traveling for God to bring the issue up? Maybe it was because back in Midian Moses was in his wife’s domain with her family, under her influence, I don’t know. And why was God ready to kill Moses after he had just sent him on a journey to free millions of Hebrews? I’m not exactly sure of the answers, but the questions it raises is interesting.

Both the IM and TB note that “the Tradition of the early Israelite sages is that Moses knew full well he was to circumcise his son, but Tzipporah wouldn’t let him. It was the man’s, the father’s duty to perform the circumcision on his own son.” TB suggests that this is to demonstrate, “that Moses was anything but a strong man. He was no born leader! Not even of his own family. So, how in the world was God going to use HIM to lead 3 million stiff-necked Israelites out of bondage? More evidence that it is never by our might, but by the Lord’s that all things are accomplished for good.”

So Moses finally, after much pleading, accepts the call from God to return to Egypt and help free the Hebrews from bondage, but at that point God has to come threaten to KILL Moses to get him to even speak to his wife about the circumcision issue. Even with God’s threatening, Moses doesn’t go out and do the deed himself, he talks to his wife about it and she finally has to relent and do it herself. It’s really an interesting dynamic here. Zipporah gets 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… A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.” The footnote for “bloody husband” says “HEB bridegroom of blood. (There is some covenant significance in this.)” I have no idea what this means, but it seems to me that she is not pleased with the whole situation.

TB asks, “Who was Tzipporah mad at? Moses, because he had ‘chosen’ this God that demanded such a thing. See, that was the thinking in those days because men were not chosen by the gods, gods were picked, and sometimes dumped in favor of another, by men. Don’t like your gods?... get a whole new batch! Here we have a good lesson that ancient man, perverted by the Mystery Babylon religious system, thought HE was in control when it came to choosing whom and what to worship.”

To me, all this is to show that the power of God can use people’s individual weaknesses for great things and also to demonstrate just how little Moses and ancient people as a whole understood God at this point. It’s easy for us to have a firm knowledge or belief in something, but this is only after 2,000 years of intense Christian saturation of our culture. It’s hard for us to understand just how hard this new God concept was for even the most elect people to understand at this point, regardless of whether or not their father is the high priest of Midian or if they have been groomed by God for decades.

Zipporah circumcises their son and God let’s Moses live to carry on the journey.