A Foreskin in the Night

The purpose of this post is to answer a question put to me by a friend: "Exodus 4:24-26. What is that all about?" What you are about to read is what I came up with. I didn't consult any other sources. I just looked at the Bible and did some searches for related passages based on the words in the text, and I used my own theological/biblical understanding to fill in the gaps. Feel free to disagree. Feel free to push back. Here we go.

²⁴ At a lodging place on the way the LORD met him and sought to put him to death. ²⁵ Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin and touched Moses' feet with it and said, "Surely 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. (Exo 4:24-26 ESV)

At the point in history described in Exodus 4, the full Torah had not been given yet. No Mosaic Covenant existed. The Israelites did not have a whole legal code to live by and complex social and religious rules to keep. All they had was the Abrahamic Covenant. The biblical account reads as follows (all of it is significant but I put in bold the focal points for our discussion):

⁹ And God said to Abraham, "As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. ¹⁰ This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. ¹¹ You shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. ¹² He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised. Every male throughout your generations, whether born in your house or bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring, ¹³ both he who is born in your house and he who is bought with your money, shall surely be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. ¹⁴ Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant." (Gen 17:9-14 ESV)

While that is not the only time circumcision is mentioned before Moses’ incident, it is the one that provides the cultural, theological, and literary background to the passage in question. God chooses Abraham mostly because he can. He’s a decent guy, but he is certainly not perfect. He has faith in God, and the Bible makes it clear, that’s the real redeeming quality he has. So God chooses him as the one man (along with Sarah, his wife) who will be the beginning of a whole chosen people. God promises to give them prosperity, provide the land for them to live in, and make them into a nation. The one thing they have to do—the one and ONLY condition—is they have to be circumcised. They have to circumcise anyone who wants to be part of it all, to receive God’s gift. And what happens to anyone who doesn’t do it? He is to be cut off from his people. He has to leave. He isn’t allowed to hang out with the rest of them anymore. It’s serious business. Even if that means being sent alone into the desert (because maybe that’s all there is around), they’ve got to go. They can’t just disregard the one condition and still get to benefit from the agreement, and the people are part of the benefits of that agreement.

Keep that in mind now, and follow me forward. The Israelites are with Moses in the desert. He went and led them out of Egypt (having survived the weird ordeal of being a bloody bridegroom). Now, he is giving his last sermon, and he is making it one for the record books. It is nearly the entire book of Deuteronomy. The story in question is now 40 years in the past. The Mosaic Covenant is in place, and they are supposed to obey the law, which still includes circumcising everyone. It is the distinctive for being part of the people God promised to Abraham. But there’s more. A lot more. Including and even mostly what Moses says in this passage:

¹¹ And the LORD said to me, 'Arise, go on your journey at the head of the people, so that they may go in and possess the land, which I swore to their fathers to give them.' ¹² "And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, ¹³ and to keep the commandments and statutes of the LORD, which I am commanding you today for your good? ¹⁴ Behold, ^to the LORD your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. ¹⁵ Yet the LORD set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day. ¹⁶ Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn.

¹⁷ For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. ¹⁸ He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. ¹⁹ Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. ²⁰ You shall fear the LORD your God. You shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear. ²¹ He is your praise. He is your God, who has done for you these great and terrifying things that your eyes have seen. ²² Your fathers went down to Egypt seventy persons, and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven. (Deu 10:11-22 ESV)

In the covenant with Abraham, the sign was to be physical, so there could be no denying who was part of the people. In this later covenant with Moses and the nation of Israel, they still had the physical component, but an outward designation for God is never enough, as was shown in nearly every story about Abraham's descendants all the way through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and now Deuteronomy. They didn't get it. For a people dedicated to God and by God, they weren't very godly. They lied, cheated, stole, sold their family members into slavery, murdered, took advantage of each other, and challenged everything God told them along the way. Only an inward change would make any difference. They needed to dedicate themselves, their hearts, who they were inside, not just undergo some physical ritual when they were too young even to remember it. Notice the range of implications this inward circumcision is supposed to have. It is supposed to mean they humble themselves before God and each other, stop oppressing people and start standing up for justice, change their attitude toward God, and make them more like him, recognizing what he has done for them and wanting to pass it on to others.

And summed up, what is the result of all this transformation? The following passage from later in Deuteronomy sums it up nicely:

⁵ And the LORD your God will bring you into the land that your fathers possessed, that you may possess it. And he will make you more prosperous and numerous than your fathers. ⁶ And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live. (Deu 30:5-6 ESV)

They will live. They will live, and they will love God with all of themselves, but that will happen only after God circumcises their hearts for them because they won't ever be able to pull it off on their own. All this should be sending vibrations of "that sounds like New Testament!" through your brain, because the gospel starts in Genesis and doesn't stop.

But what does that have to do with Moses and his son and a creepy ritual in the middle of the night? Everything.

Moses has just been sent to go back to his people. He is to act as God's one representative (in partnership with his brother), and as of yet, all he has to do to keep up his end of God's agreement with Abraham's family is to be circumcised and circumcise all the males in his household. He would have been circumcised when he was a baby before he took his fateful cruise down the river, so no problem there, but as it turns out, for whatever reason, he didn't circumcise his son. Maybe he didn't consider himself as part of the covenant people anymore since he left 40 years earlier and had married into a family of Midianites, not Israelites. Whatever it was, He is supposed to be the example for all the people, and he is already failing. The penalty is to be cut off from the people, but he is in the process of returning to his people. His son probably doesn't know anything about circumcision. It's Moses' responsibility. He didn't the one thing they were supposed to do. And that is right after he is told to threaten divine judgment on the Egyptian firstborns, but he hasn't taken care of his own firstborn. God shows him he is serious. Deuteronomy shows that God is concerned with the heart, but if you disobey what God has clearly told you, how right can your heart really be?

And Moses is Mr. Israel? The Chosen People poster child? Not if he doesn't fix this problem.

That's the real question about this passage. Why the sudden and harsh reaction to the state of his kid's genitalia. The rest is weird but not so crucial. I also am less confident as to what it means. First of all, why did she touch the foreskin to his feet? I have a thought, though I can't say for sure. Notice the following two passages:

² And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. ³ And Moses said, "I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned." ⁴ When the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, "Moses, Moses!" And he said, "Here I am." ⁵ Then he said, "Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." ⁶ And he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. ⁷ Then the LORD said, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, ⁸ and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. (Exo 3:2-8 ESV)

 And

¹⁸ "You shall also make a basin of bronze, with its stand of bronze, for washing. You shall put it between the tent of meeting and the altar, and you shall put water in it, ¹⁹ with which Aaron and his sons shall wash their hands and their feet. ²⁰ When they go into the tent of meeting, or when they come near the altar to minister, to burn a food offering to the LORD, they shall wash with water, so that they may not die. ²¹ They shall wash their hands and their feet, so that they may not die. It shall be a statute forever to them, even to him and to his offspring throughout their generations." (Exo 30:18-21 ESV)

The first passage takes place just before the story in question. His feet seem important. They carry the dust of the road, which as indicated by Exodus 30 symbolizes the uncleanness of the person. In the ritual system of Israel, most of the time, uncleanness won out. If something that was ritually clean touched something that was ritually unclean, they both became unclean. But when the clean thing is God, or something especially full of God's presence, God cleanses whatever it is. She anointed him with the blood from the foreskin--blood being a central part of how they ceremonially removed guilt--and she did it on the part of him that most represented his uncleanness, his being at odds with God. She ceremonially took away his guilt and made him right with God at the same time she corrected what the problem had been in the first place--the uncircumcised state of his son.

The rest gets even more speculative. I believe it was acceptable for her to be the one to fix the problem for two reasons. The first is that she is his wife, and Genesis is clear that husband and wife become intimately united. I think the truth of that concept runs far deeper than we really get, especially in our individualistic culture. The second is that in the communal culture of this people, guilt doesn't really belong to just one person, and neither does goodness. People are responsible for each other and contribute to each other's lives.

As for what she meant by a bridegroom of blood, I'm guessing it was something along the lines of lashing out at him as her husband for forcing her to have to cut off part of her son's penis, which I'm sure was very bloody. Any more than that, and I would trying to speculate on what a woman from another part of the world over 3000 years ago had going through her head. I just don't think I'm ready to go there, nor do I have any idea how she knew what to do, or how they even knew God was going to kill Moses. The text doesn't say, so I can't either.

There are certainly other ideas out there. Some people think the reference to blood points back to his murder, meaning that what God was mad about was the murder that was never atoned for, but nothing in the context suggests that to me. I believe the best interpreter of the Bible is the Bible, so the best approach is to find what it has to say about related ideas in other places, not reading in things that aren't there. Of course,  I could have spent a lot more time researching, and maybe it would have turned up other ideas. Feel free to compare this to what commentaries and other sources have said about it and let me know if I'm wrong!