Zipporah recognizes this God and knows what to do in response. How does she know this?
Exodus 2:21-22 and 4:18-20, 24-26
July 28, 2024
Dr. Todd R. Wright
When we were last together, we heard in Exodus 2 about how Moses met seven sisters watering their sheep at the well in Midian. When other shepherds harassed them, Moses defended them (whether they needed his help or not). He was welcomed into their home for a meal and their father, sometimes called Reuel/sometimes Jethro, invited him to stay.
We find out in today’s passage that one of the sisters was named Zipporah and that Reuel/Jethro gave her to Moses to be his wife and that she bore him a son.
The narrator is surprisingly stingy with details. We do not know whether this was a marriage designed to cement an alliance, or a shotgun wedding, or true love!
Whenever there is a gap in scripture, Midrash is happy to step in! The story goes like this:
“When Moses showed up in Midian and admitted to Jethro that he was fleeing from Pharaoh, Jethro — who was an advisor to Pharaoh at the time — threw him into a pit and left him there to die of starvation. But Zipporah had compassion on Moses and brought him bread and water.
After 10 years, she turned to her father and said: ‘This Hebrew who has been jailed in the pit for the past 10 years, nobody has come asking for him. It is no longer dangerous to have him in our home. If it is good in your eyes, Father, let us send for him and see if he is alive or dead!’
Jethro hadn’t known of his daughter’s kindness to Moses, so he was quite shocked: ‘Is it possible for a man to be locked up for 10 years and survive without food?’
His daughter replied: ‘Father, haven’t you heard that the G‑d of the Hebrews is great and awesome, and does miracles for them all the time? He saved Abraham from the fire, Isaac from the sword and Jacob from the angel who fought him. And how about this very Moses who was saved from the Nile and from the sword of Pharaoh? I’m sure that G-d could have saved him as well.’
So, they went to the pit and found Moses alive, praying to the G‑d of his fathers. He was taken out, cleaned, given a haircut and brought to the family table for a meal.
It was then that Moses asked for Zipporah’s hand in marriage. She had kept him alive and shown him great kindness.”[1]
That story isn’t in the Bible, but there is another, a couple chapters later, that tells of another time when Zipporah saves Moses.
Fair warning: it is a strange story! In fact, one author writes, “For mystery, mayhem, and sheer baffling weirdness, nothing else in the Bible quite compares with the story of Zipporah [saving Moses from an angry God.]”[2]
Read Exodus 4:18-20, 24-26
18 Moses went back to his father-in-law Jethro and said to him, “Please let me go back to my own people in Egypt and see whether they are still living.” And Jethro said to Moses, “Go in peace.” 19 The Lord said to Moses in Midian, “Go back to Egypt, for all those who were seeking your life are dead.” 20 So Moses took his wife and his sons, put them on a donkey, and went back to the land of Egypt, and Moses carried the staff of God in his hand.
24 On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met him and tried to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, touched his feet with it, and said, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” 26 So he let him alone. It was then that she said “a bridegroom of blood,” because of the circumcision.
This story comes after they have had a son; after the burning bush encounter with I Am who I Am; after the call to return to Egypt and the commission to set his people free!
Just like the last time we dug into this story, Moses is being asked to choose who he is, who his people are, where his loyalties lie – is he an Egyptian or a Hebrew, or something else?
The text makes clear that he could have lived out his days as an adopted Midianite: husband to Zipporah, father, son-in-law to Jethro/Reuel, an ordinary and anonymous sheepherder.
He could have ignored the burning bush and dismissed the voice of God as a hallucination.
We’ve all known people who have run from God’s claim on their lives.
So, while Exodus explains in detail that Moses was reluctant and took some convincing, in
the end, it says that he went, taking his family with him, like Abraham, all those years before!
Except, unlike Abraham, it appears that Moses has not completely embraced being in a covenant relationship with the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The sign of this failure is that he has not circumcised his sons.
Since Abraham, circumcision is the way God’s people are identifiable as God people,
separate from their neighbors, body and soul. And yet, Moses has not done it.
Again, the narrator is stingy with the details. We do not know if Moses has refused or resisted or merely procrastinated. We don’t know if he and Zipporah argued over the decision, the way mixed-religion couples often do over how to honor conflicting traditions. We don’t even know for sure that anybody had taught Moses the importance of circumcision. You’d think that would have been part of what Jochebed passed on to him along with Hebrew prayers and stories, but we don’t know. So he may not have even realized the importance of what he hadn’t done.
But God noticed and took great offense!
Exodus says, “On the way [back to Egypt], the Lord met him and tried to kill him!”
Can you imagine? God has just revealed the divine name to Moses. God has made him the central figure in the divine plan to liberate the Israelites and bring them to the Promised Land. God has had to argue and encourage and offer assurances and allies and a magical staff to get Moses to agree to go … and now God is ready to flush the whole thing?!
It is a disorienting and disconcerting story!
God is supposed to be loving, right? How can God want to kill Moses?
C.S. Lewis may be of help here.
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he presents Aslan, the lion, as a picture of God.
At one point Lucy asks, “Is he safe?” "’Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver. ‘Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.’”
And then Mr. Tumnus adds, "He's wild, you know. Not a tame lion."
Later in the book Lewis elaborates on the point: “People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time”.
So perhaps the God Exodus reveals in this strange-to-our-ears story, is one who is wild and dangerous, but also profoundly, purely, good.
Zipporah recognizes this God and knows what to do in response.
How does she know this? Kelley Nikondeha, in her book Defiant, imagines Zipporah’s life after her marriage: “Less time spent wrangling livestock created more time for Zipporah to study traditional medicine. She listened to the elder women as they performed various rituals, and she committed their words to memory. It was her father, a priest of Midian, who taught her to handle a flint, to balance its weight in her hand. Making a clean cut with what was essentially a stone took practice. She dedicated herself to mastering the sharp edge of the flint. Her strong grip and steady hand served her well. She observed the herbs used to calm rashes, ease muscle tension, reduce pain, and combat sleeplessness. In her tent she was wife, mother, and priestess.”[3]
Zipporah would have drawn on all this knowledge that dark night when God appeared, and her husband was in danger. She intervened. Nikondeha writes, “She knows exactly what is needed to appease God and send the Hunter away. She performs the [necessary] ritual. What is ambiguous to us – the exact rite, what part of Moses makes contact with the cut skin, what her declaration means – is clear to her. She performs without hesitation, without a hint of fear … She birthed two children and served as [a] midwife for [her sisters]; she knew how precarious life was, how thin the line between blessing and a curse. As one well versed in sacramental life, she understood that while God is steadfast, God is not safe.”[4]
Nikondeha continues, “None of us is ever safe when the Holy Hunter is roaming the night – so we watch, we pray, and we live ready to perform sacraments that save lives.”
And that is the thread that holds all these stories together: we cannot tell the story of Moses, the one used by God to deliver Israel from bondage, without recognizing all the women who save his life, over and over again! They are worthy of our notice, our celebration, our emulation. They are compassionate and courageous and creative. And in this world, that often means being defiant.
May we be faithfully defiant, too! Amen
[1] Yalkut Shimoni on Shemot
[2] From Jonathan Kirsch’s book, The Harlot by the Side of the Road.
[3] From Defiant, page 133
[4] Ibid, pages 143-144
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