The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible

by Jonathan Kirsch

  Jethro offered the stranger a safe refuge in the land of Midian and, not much later, the hand of his eldest daughter in marriage. Only then did Zipporah learn the name of the stranger, the man who would be her husband and the father of her children. He was called Moses.

  A sudden noise from just outside the tent, a hiss and a rattle like a serpent arching to strike, interrupted Zipporah’s thoughts and sent a chill through her body. She sat up with a start, her heart racing.

  “Moses!” she whispered, but her husband did not stir, and the baby only snuffled and then fell silent again.

  She heard the rustle of flesh against cloth as someone or something moved against the fabric of the tent, and she imagined that she saw an odd bulge that moved slowly but steadily toward the tent opening. A wheezing noise reached her ears—the sound of labored breathing—but it came from neither her husband nor her baby. A stench that reminded her of the greasy smoke that poured from the altar when her father sacrificed a bloody hunk of flesh to the gods wafted into the tent.

  “Husband!” she said again, and again he did not stir.

  Now she recalled the strange tale that her husband had told her when he first announced that he must return to Egypt and asked her to accompany him. Moses had been tending Jethro’s flocks on a mountainside in the wilderness when he saw a strange sight, a bush that burned with fire but did not burn up. Then he heard a voice that seemed to come out of the bush, a voice that announced itself as “the God of your fathers,” a god whose name was Yahweh, a god who demanded that Moses go back to the place where his own people were enslaved, the place where he had killed the Egyptian taskmaster, the place where Pharaoh sought his life.

  “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh,” the voice said from within the burning bush, “and you shall free My people, the Israelites, from Egypt.”

  Zipporah would have laughed at her husband’s tale if he had not told it to her in such a plainspoken and quiet voice. She noticed that his stammer disappeared and she marked the urgency in his voice when he asked her to return with him to Egypt. Without allowing herself to think much about the implications of her husband’s tale—Was Moses truly called by the God of Israel? Was he jesting? Was he mad?—she agreed to undertake the long, difficult, and perilous journey from the sheltered wilderness of Midian to the land of the Egyptians and the mighty, Pharaoh.

  Now she could no longer drive the mounting terror from her breast. The spirits and demons of her own people were so familiar to Zipporah that they had lost the power to frighten her, but her husband was a stranger whose curious ways seemed grotesque and dangerous, too. Among her own people, for example, a man was circumcised when he reached his thirteenth year, when he was old enough to take a bride and strong enough to endure the circumciser’s knife. But Moses insisted that a son must be circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, when the child was still frail and vulnerable to every sort of peril. “This is what the God of my fathers demands,” he told Zipporah’s father on one of their long walks, and Jethro later complained to Zipporah: “What a bar-baric people to circumcise so young!”

  And there the whole matter had been left by her father and her husband, but now Zipporah found herself seized with anxiety at the thought that her infant son lay beside her with his foreskin intact on that tiny bit of flesh between his fat little thighs. Perhaps she had been wrong to allow her father to argue with Moses over the matter of the circumcision; perhaps she had placed all of them in terrible danger by allowing her son to remain uncircumcised. After all, what might the strange and demanding god of the Israelites do to them if they defied his commandments?

  A sound that Zipporah could not recognize now reached her ears, a sound that might have been water running over stones or the night wind in the branches of a palm. Her eyes were drawn to the opening of the tent, and there she saw a silvery mist reaching into the tent, moving over the ground like a morning fog except that it glowed with a light that resembled the glare of the full moon. Pouring into the tent, swelling like a freshening stream, the mist surrounded the bedding on which Zipporah, Moses, and Gershom lay as if on an island of clouds in a quicksilver lake.

  “How pretty,” Zipporah thought to herself, suddenly calm and even enchanted by the sight and sound. She wanted to wake her husband, not out of fear but to show him what she beheld, but the mist filled her throat and prevented her from speaking.

  Now a figure seemed to rise up out of the swirling mist, and Zipporah beheld the shape of a man, or something like a man, and yet not a man at all. The figure began to swell up like a corpse that had been in water too long—and then she saw its mouth open wide to reveal two rows of yellowed and twisted donkey teeth in which she saw bits of flesh and bone, eyeballs, fingertips, fragments that could be recognized as bloody pieces of lung and scalp and kidney. Zipporah watched in silent terror as the mouth slowly closed around her sleeping husband, drawing into that vast maw his head and his feet, his arms and his legs, his chest and his thighs, until only a single organ of his body was still visible, the organ with which Moses had first implanted a seed in her womb.

  Zipporah awoke from the nightmare with a start. Her eyes burned, her head ached. She shuddered as she remembered the enormous jaws that had closed around her husband’s body—and then, to her immense relief, she looked around the tent and saw that her husband was still asleep next to her, and her baby was still safely nested in the crook of his arm. Perhaps I do have a fever, Zipporah thought to herself, and she snuggled comfortably under a fold of the bedding.

  Then Zipporah heard a snigger from someone standing inside the tent, someone standing so near to her that she could hear his breathing, and she knew that she was no longer dreaming.

  His laughter reminded Zipporah of the pig-nosed shepherd who had tormented her and her sisters when they watered their flock at the well, and the mad thought occurred to her that it was the young bully who was in the tent with them now.

  “Who are you?” she said, choking out the words. “What do you want?”

  The intruder did not speak. Zipporah glanced around the tent to see if she might find something to use as a weapon—her husbands new walking staff, perhaps, or a spare tent stake, but neither was within sight or reach. On the tent floor were the supplies she had used to prepare their evening meal—a water jug, a pouch of milled flour, a tiny jar of oil, a little bundle of kindling, a flint stone that she had used to strike a spark and start the cooking fire.

  Then, suddenly, something moved quickly through the still air in the tent. Zipporah felt the slightest breeze but still saw only a shadow. But now Moses awoke with a start, sat up awkwardly, and raised his arms as if to defend himself against a blow. The baby tumbled out of his arm and rolled to the ground, crying out in surprise and indignation. Zipporah sensed rather than saw the attack on her husband—somehow, without quite knowing why, she realized that the intruder, whoever or whatever it was, had come to kill him.

  At that moment, Zipporah dived to the floor where the cooking supplies were neatly arranged and snatched the flint stone in her right hand. She felt the jagged edge of the stone with one finger—was it sharp enough, she wondered, to cut the attacker? Would a blow or even a knife-cut be enough to stop him? Or would something else be needed, some more potent magic, to stave off the ghostly figure in the shadows? She wished she had something longer or sharper at hand—a long-bladed knife like the one Jethro used to slit the throats of the bleating sheep that were led to the sacrificial altar, or even the short, sharp blade that was used to circumcise a young Midianite man before his marriage to a virgin bride. But the flint stone was all she had now, and she would inflict as much damage on the attacker, draw as much blood, as the jagged edge would allow.

  As Zipporah raised the stone and looked around for the attacker, she heard two anguishing noises: her husband’s strangled cry, as if the attacker were already on top of him, and the sharper cry of their infant son, who lay helplessly on his back, arms and legs flailing, shrieking in panic. A strang
e image from her fever dream suddenly formed in Zipporah’s mind at the sound of her baby’s desperate cry—the image of her husband swallowed up in the mouth of the demon, the whole of his body captured between ravening jaws except one crucial limb—and then she recalled the angry words that her husband and her father had exchanged over the circumcision of Zipporah’s newborn son.

  Now Zipporah burned with the urgent knowledge that Moses and not her father must have been right. The god that Moses worshipped, the god that had summoned Moses and sent him on the road to Egypt, demanded the flesh and blood of the firstborn sons of his Chosen People—and yet their own child was alive and intact! The intruder in the tent—angel or devil or perhaps God himself—was bent on punishing Zipporah’s husband and son for disregarding what Moses had always insisted was a holy ritual. Zipporah did not understand why the tiny foreskin of an infant boy, a bit of flesh not bigger than the tip of her little finger, was so important to the deity that Moses called all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-seeing, but she realized that it no longer mattered why. All that mattered now, Zipporah told herself in that moment, was to confront the attacker and turn him away.

  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.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE BRIDEGROOM OF BLOOD

  Zipporah as the Goddess-Rescuer of Moses

  WHO IS DOING WHAT TO WHOM?

  THE MAN GOD BEFRIENDED

  THE CULT OF THE GODDESS-RESCUER

  THE BLOOD OF A VIRGIN BRIDE

  FIRSTLINGS “I WILL SLAY THY SON”

  For 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 Moses1—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 A
lmighty 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.”