In last week’s Torah portion, we finished the book of Bereshit (Genesis). This week, we move on to the first chapters of Shemot (Exodus), and it’s one of the strangest and most pondered portions of all. The questions focus on a few verses at Exodus 4:24-26. God has been telling Moses (who is in Midian with his wife, Zipporah, and their two sons) to go back to Egypt and liberate his people. Moses is to tell Pharoah that if he doesn’t let the people of Israel go, God will execute a punishment. “Behold, I will slay your son, your first-born.†And then comes this:And it came to pass on the way at the lodging-place, that the Lord met him, and (he) sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a flint, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet; and she said: “Surely a bridgegroom of blood you are to me.†So he let him alone. Then she said: “A bridegroom of the blood of circumcision.
What the heck was going on here? Well, there’s been an awful lot of speculation, but no one really seems to know. And the task is complicated by the ambiguity of some of the personal pronouns. Who exactly is seeking to kill whom? And which of her two sons is it that Zipporah circumcised so abruptly there on the road? The infant Eliezer or the older (first born) Gershom? At whose feet did she throw the foreskin and who let whom alone? And is there some connection between the immediately preceding verse where God threatens to kill the first born (presumably of Egypt, but is that entirely clear?) and this averted killing on the road?
The general interpretation is that God wished to kill Moses for some reason but was placated by Zipporah’s action. But there are others. Some believe that it was the uncircumcised son that was the intended victim. Many commentators have taken this passage to be an expression of God’s displeasure with Moses for procrastinating in carrying out his parallel duties of liberating his people and of bringing his own son into the Covenant. But it’s a pretty murky passage, to say the least.
There’s a wonderful analysis here by Rabbi Alex Israel, who develops the procrastination theme in some new ways and also draws some interesting parallels between this story and that of Jacob wrestling with the angel. Oddities like this are often used to support the belief that the Torah was handed down precisely as dictated by God to Moses, without human intervention. Otherwise, why leave something so disturbing, so confusing in the text? Why not clean it up? On the other side, it’s argued that the oddities are simply the result of a corruption, a mistake, by fallible human copiers, at a time when it was no longer considered permissible to make “corrections†to the text. I have no idea, but I do, obviously, enjoy the exercise of contemplating the possibilities.
Shabbat Shalom.
