Moses’s Wife Performs an Emergency Circumcision

WARNING: Attempted murder, human disfigurement

CONTEXT: ~ 125 BCE  This time frame precedes the main Exodus story, set in Midian (Arabia) prior to returning to Egypt after 40 years of self exile..

With no break or warning, Exodus 4 drops us into one of the strangest, most disturbing and bewildering incidents in the Bible. Following the burning bush discussion, Moses is grudgingly making his way to Egypt. At an inn, he is waylaid by none other than the LORD, who intends to murder him. This is sudden and unexplained. Last the reader knew, Moses had been given his marching orders and was on the way to Egypt to meet his brother.

“And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him.” 

- Ex. 4:24 [KJV]
 

With YHWH and Moses apparently in the midst of a physical struggle, Moses’s wife Zipporah demonstrates some quick thinking. She picks up a flint stone and performs a jiffy circumcision by cutting her son Gershom’s foreskin off with a flint knife. She casts the foreskin at Moses’s feet. Seeing this, the Lord lets him go. Zipporah describes Moses as “a bloody husband” or” bridegroom of blood,” and doesn’t seem pleased in any way with the whole incident.
 

Following this confrontation, there don’t appear to be any hard feelings and there is no further discussion (that we are aware of) of the field circumcision incident.
 

There are lots of theories as to why this story exists in the first place, but no scholar or theologian has come up with anything convincing. However, if we bear in mind that we are dealing with a god who thinks mutilating male genitalia is part of a divine loyalty program, then the core of the tale seems fairly clear: God is pissed that Moses hasn’t circumcised his son or sons. If this is the case, we are inclined to query why he hasn’t mentioned it in previous conversations with Moses? 

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"Oh by the way, before you start the whole Exodus thing with Pharaoh and kill all the Egyptian children, could you get the kids circumcised. It's really about the optics."

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Since circumcision is the physical manifestation signifying the agreement between YHWH and the people he has chosen (about eight hundred years ago from the viewpoint of this story according to the internal Bible timeline) then what exactly is Moses’s relationship with YHWH at this point? If Moses is a practicing Yahwist, why isn’t Gershom circumcised. Did Moses over look this key requirement for Hebrew men? Was he even aware of it?

After forty years as a shepherd in Arabia, married to the daughter of a pagan Midianite priest, why is Moses a candidate to save the chosen in the first place? He was raised in Pharaoh’s court as an Egyptian noble (the second Israelite to have this privilege) by the king’s daughter. There is no evidence in scripture that he was exposed to the god of his enslaved people at all. And to be honest here, let’s not forget that YHWH had by his own account forgotten his chosen people for at least four hundred years.1 

"And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob." – Exodus 2:24 [ESV]

In other words: why now and why Moses?

Remember that the purpose of the burning bush conversation was for the god of the Old Testament to re-introduce himself to Moses by his new name, YHWH. This was one of his first re-brandings.

The topic of Gershom's foreskin opens the door to other interesting questions. At the top of this list is what happened to Gershom’s little brother? 

In the story, Moses’s sons are described as being placed on a donkey with their mom. But Moses and Zipporah have been married forty years. These are grown men close to middle edge, not little tykes. While Gershom is standing there with a bleeding penis, most likely howling in pain, where is his little brother? We as readers don’t know, because second son Eliezer isn’t mentioned by name until Ex. 18 (just as we didn’t know Moses had a brother until this chapter).

In the narrative anyway, it t is clear that both sons were on the donkey with mom.2the status of Eliezer’s schwanz is unknown, as is his reaction to his brother’s involuntary surgical procedure.

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1. A Biblical timeline running from Abraham to the beginning of the New Testament is about 2,000 years. During that period, God/YHWH is missing in action for eight hundred of them.

2. Either a very large donkey or very small people.