The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (25 page)

Zipporah crawled to her baby’s side, pulled off the swaddling, and fumbled to find the tiniest and most delicate part of his small body. The baby fell silent for a moment, so that all that Zipporah heard were the
muffled gasps of her husband on the bedding behind her. She bit her lower lip, squinted in the darkness, and then pressed the edge of the flint against the flesh, timidly at first but then with greater force when she realized that the edge was not sharp enough to cut quickly or smoothly. Her baby gasped and then cried out angrily, but Zipporah persisted. Then, suddenly, she saw that she held a bit of flesh in her hands—and that her hands were stained with blood.

So much blood, she thought to herself, from such a tiny bit of flesh.

Zipporah stood and turned, but she saw that the intruder had not broken off the attack on her husband, whose desperate cries seemed qui’ éter now, as if the attacker were choking off the last breath of life in his body. Amid the bedding on the tent floor, now in even greater disarray, Zipporah saw flailing limbs, but she could not make out in the shadowy darkness whether they belonged to the attacker or Moses or both. But Zipporah realized that her husband’s all-powerful God had not yet noticed the blood ritual that she had just performed. Or, if he had noticed, he did not seem to care.

Zipporah still held the bloody foreskin delicately between her thumb and first finger, and now she stepped forward and thrust the flesh toward the legs that flexed and kicked as Moses struggled against the attack. She drew the foreskin down one leg and then another, painting a bright red smear of fresh blood on each limb, just as she had seen her father anoint an arm, a hand, a face with the blood of a freshly sacrificed lamb. Zipporah could not be sure whether the blood-smeared legs belonged to Moses or his attacker, but she figured with a kind of crazed logic that if the cutting of flesh and the shedding of blood were what the attacker wanted, the sight of blood might be enough to call his attention to the fact that the child had been circumcised, flesh had been cut, blood had been shed.

Then Zipporah was called back to her baby by his staccato cries, each one punctuated with a gasp. She saw that his face was slightly blue, but the fresh wound that she had just inflicted was no longer bleeding. Quickly, and with far greater deftness than she had just displayed with the flint, Zipporah swaddled him tightly, lifted him into her arms, bared one breast, and gave him to suck. The infant sighed, snorted, snuggled into his mother’s bosom, and suckled rhythmically on her teat. Within a moment or two, he was fast asleep.

Zipporah looked up at the scene of the struggle, and she saw that
the flailing of limbs atop the bedding had ceased. All was perfectly quiet and still inside the tent. Moses was lying on his back, his arms splayed out, his clothing disheveled, but his breathing was deep and steady. Zipporah watched the steady rise and fall of his chest—he was asleep and alone. The intruder, whoever or whatever he had been, if he had truly been there at all, was gone.

Gershom stirred briefly in her arms, she gave him the other breast, and soon he slept again. Zipporah gazed at her infant son, whose swaddling showed a tiny spot of red from the blood of the circumcision, and then at her husband, whose exposed legs were painted with crude stripes of blood that was now turning brown and crusty.

“Surely a bridegroom of blood art thou unto me,” Zipporah said aloud, mimicking the solemn words and phrases of the priestly incantations that her father recited at the sacrificial altar. And then, as if to explain herself, she added: “A bridegroom of blood on account of the circumcision.”

The slumbering Moses did not hear her words, nor was Zipporah sure that he would understand them if he did.

Zipporah as the Goddess-Rescuer of Moses

F
or mystery, mayhem, and sheer baffling weirdness, nothing else in the Bible quite compares with the story of Zipporah and the “Bridegroom of Blood” in Exodus 4:24–26. Like some grotesque insect preserved in biblical amber, the spare three lines of text in Exodus that describe God’s night attack on Moses—and the blood ritual that Zipporah uses to defend her husband and son—suggest that the faith of the ancient Israelites was far stranger and richer than the biblical authors are willing to let on.

The enigmatic text of Exodus 4:24–26 has distressed Bible readers and scholars—and excited their imaginations—for at least three millennia. No other passage in the Bible has been tortured into such odd and even scandalous readings by otherwise pious hands. Yet no other passage has been quite so resistant to the biblical code-breakers. The original Hebrew text is especially difficult to decipher because only two of the players in the scene are identified by name. The Bible tells us that it is Zipporah and Yahweh who encounter each other by night at the lodging place, but Moses is not named at all. Nor are we allowed to see with clarity who is doing what to whom—or why. So
our reading of Exodus 4:24–26 must begin with a litany of troubling questions:

Is it Moses whom God attacks, or his firstborn son, Gershom, or perhaps his second-born son, Eliezer?

Is God himself on the attack, or is it one of his minions—the Destroyer, the Angel of Death, or Satan? Or is the attacker actually a pagan deity or a demon from the pantheon of Egypt or the Midianites?

To whose sexual organ does Zipporah apply the sharpened flint in the ritual of circumcision—her son’s? Moses’? or God’s?

Does she use the foreskin to smear blood on someone’s
legs
, as the biblical text states, or is the word used euphemistically to refer to someone’s
genitals
, as it is elsewhere in the Bible? And if we are to understand that “legs” actually means “genitals,” we must ask:
Whose
genitals are painted with blood?

And what does Zipporah mean when she utters the mystical phrase: “Surely a bridegroom of blood art thou to me”?

More than a few exegetes, ancient and modern, amateur and professional, have broken their analytical lances on the armor of Exodus 4:24–26. Two ancient Jewish authors of the Roman world, Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, were so baffled by God’s night attack on Moses that each of them simply left the story out when he retold the life of Moses
¹
—and, for that matter, so did Cecil B. DeMille in
The Ten Commandments
two thousand years later. One contemporary biblical scholar surveyed the battlefield of biblical exegesis that is the study of Exodus 4:24–26, a landscape littered with discredited theories and deflated arguments, and simply admitted defeat: “The original gist of the story,” he declared, “is now lost beyond recall.”
²

What we do know is that the text of Exodus 4:24–26 is an old and primitive fragment of folklore that somehow found its way into the Book of Exodus in spite of its faintly blasphemous depiction of the Almighty as a night stalker who is appeased only by a woman’s blood offering. The passage does not seem to fit into the biblical narrative that comes before and after the incident at the lodging place,
³
and the notion that God would seek to kill the very man he had just selected and anointed as his personal emissary is at odds with the intimate relationship between God and Moses that is depicted in Exodus and elsewhere in the Bible. At least one scholar claims to detect in the Bridegroom of Blood (and other passages of the Bible) the echoes of
“an anti-Moses tradition”—the faint “murmuring and accusations” of ancient dissenters—that somehow survived the censor’s blade and quill.
⁴
Still, the story was apparently too memorable to be left out entirely, and yet too shocking to be told clearly and straightforwardly by the priests and scribes.

So the enigmatic text, a mere seventy words in English translation, may be regarded as a window—tiny, cracked, and dirty—through which we glimpse some of the earliest stirrings of spirituality in the ancient Near East and the most primitive ritual practices of the people who would become the Israelites. The bloody and baffling tale is a crack in the wall erected around the Bible by the priests and scribes, a crack through which we can glimpse, in the words of the archaeologist who first peered into the tomb of Tutankhamen, “wonderful things.”

The tale of the Bridegroom of Blood has prompted hot conjecture among otherwise sensible Bible readers not only because of what is revealed in the biblical text but also because of what is concealed. Although we are eyewitnesses to the bloody encounter between God and Zipporah, the text is so encrypted, so heavy with secret meanings, that we must suspect that some early biblical author or editor felt obliged to blur the picture. Before we can begin to decipher the deeper meanings of the text, we must first try to figure out exactly who is doing what to whom in Exodus 4:24–26.

The original Hebrew text of the Bible states plainly that it is Yahweh who “met him and sought to kill him” (Exod. 4:24), but the object of Yahweh’s attack is never actually named in that text. Moses is commonly understood to be the intended victim, although some sources insist instead that one of his two sons was the target rather than Moses himself.
⁵
But the notion of the Almighty stalking and seeking to kill the very man he had just anointed as his prophet was so unsettling to the sages and scribes that the earliest translators of the Bible insisted on interposing a celestial hit man between Yahweh and his victim—“the Angel of the Lord,” “the Angel of Death,” or sometimes “the Destroyer” appear in place of Yahweh in the account of the night attack in some early Aramaic and Greek translations of the Bible.
⁶
The
Talmud preserves an especially bizarre tradition that Zipporah was alerted to the urgent need to perform a circumcision by an angel who descended from heaven and swallowed the whole of Moses’ body
except
his uncircumcised sexual organ, thus calling Zipporah’s attention to the problem at hand!
⁷

Indeed, a few of the sages recoiled against the notion of
any
divine assault, even a vicarious one, against the man destined to become the greatest prophet in the history of Israel. So they suggested that it was Satan who sought to kill Moses by swallowing him alive: “Satan appeared to him in the guise of a serpent, and swallowed Moses down to his extremities,” goes one version of the story as retold in rabbinic literature. “As soon as [Zipporah] sprinkled the blood of the circumcision on her husband’s feet, a heavenly voice was heard to cry out to the serpent, commanding him, ‘Spew him out!’ ”
⁸
Later, the renowned Jewish sage known as Rashi, an eleventh-century rationalist who was plainly uncomfortable with such pious fairy tales, insisted that the divine attack on Moses ought to be understood as nothing more than a metaphor for a life-threatening illness that Zipporah manages to cure by performing the ritual of circumcision.
⁹
Similarly, contemporary Bible critics tend to throw up their hands at the Bridegroom of Blood and ascribe the whole confounding mess to “the mysterious saving power of circumcision which it is the purpose of this story to celebrate.”
¹⁰

A deeper mystery is the nature and purpose of the bloody ritual that Zipporah uses to stave off the night attack. The Bible tells us that she is somehow moved to perform a hasty circumcision on her infant son using the only tool at hand, a crude flint knife or perhaps just a flint stone of the kind used to start fires. Then Zipporah does
something
with the bloody foreskin, although the Bible does not tell us exactly what. One common but misleading English translation tells us that she “cast it at his feet” (JPS), but a more accurate translation of the biblical Hebrew reveals that she “touched his legs” (New JPS) with the bloody foreskin.
¹¹
Even this translation, however, is misleading because it fails to disclose that “legs” is sometimes used by the biblical authors as a euphemism for the male sexual organ. “Just where the ‘blood(y) husband’ was dabbed with the son’s prepuce we can only surmise,” cracks the high-spirited Bible scholar Marvin Pope, “but the best guess seems the area where foreskins are located.”
¹²
Thus, the most candid reading
of Exodus 4:25 is that Zipporah uses her son’s foreskin to smear the fresh blood of his circumcision on
someone’s
genitals. Still, the original Hebrew text of the Bible does not tell us
whose
genitals are painted with blood by Zipporah—it might be Moses, or her son, or perhaps God himself.
*