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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  WHO IS DOING WHAT TO WHOM?

  The tale of the Bridegroom of Blood has prompted hot conjecture among otherwise sensible Bible readers not only because of what is revealed in the biblical text but also because of what is concealed. Although we are eyewitnesses to the bloody encounter between God and Zipporah, the text is so encrypted, so heavy with secret meanings, that we must suspect that some early biblical author or editor felt obliged to blur the picture. Before we can begin to decipher the deeper meanings of the text, we must first try to figure out exactly who is doing what to whom in Exodus 4:24–26.

  The original Hebrew text of the Bible states plainly that it is Yahweh who “met him and sought to kill him” (Exod. 4:24), but the object of Yahweh’s attack is never actually named in that text. Moses is commonly understood to be the intended victim, although some sources insist instead that one of his two sons was the target rather than Moses himself.5 But the notion of the Almighty stalking and seeking to kill the very man he had just anointed as his prophet was so unsettling to the sages and scribes that the earliest translators of the Bible insisted on interposing a celestial hit man between Yahweh and his victim—“the Angel of the Lord,” “the Angel of Death,” or sometimes “the Destroyer” appear in place of Yahweh in the account of the night attack in some early Aramaic and Greek translations of the Bible.6 The Talmud preserves an especially bizarre tradition that Zipporah was alerted to the urgent need to perform a circumcision by an angel who descended from heaven and swallowed the whole of Moses’ body except his uncircumcised sexual organ, thus calling Zipporah’s attention to the problem at hand!7

  Indeed, a few of the sages recoiled against the notion of any divine assault, even a vicarious one, against the man destined to become the greatest prophet in the history of Israel. So they suggested that it was Satan who sought to kill Moses by swallowing him alive: “Satan appeared to him in the guise of a serpent, and swallowed Moses down to his extremities,” goes one version of the story as retold in rabbinic literature. “As soon as [Zipporah] sprinkled the blood of the circumcision on her husband’s feet, a heavenly voice was heard to cry out to the serpent, commanding him, ‘Spew him out!’ ”8 Later, the renowned Jewish sage known as Rashi, an eleventh-century rationalist who was plainly uncomfortable with such pious fairy tales, insisted that the divine attack on Moses ought to be understood as nothing more than a metaphor for a life-threatening illness that Zipporah manages to cure by performing the ritual of circumcision.9 Similarly, contemporary Bible critics tend to throw up their hands at the Bridegroom of Blood and ascribe the whole confounding mess to “the mysterious saving power of circumcision which it is the purpose of this story to celebrate.”10

  A deeper mystery is the nature and purpose of the bloody ritual that Zipporah uses to stave off the night attack. The Bible tells us that she is somehow moved to perform a hasty circumcision on her infant son using the only tool at hand, a crude flint knife or perhaps just a flint stone of the kind used to start fires. Then Zipporah does something with the bloody foreskin, although the Bible does not tell us exactly what. One common but misleading English translation tells us that she “cast it at his feet” (JPS), but a more accurate translation of the biblical Hebrew reveals that she “touched his legs” (New JPS) with the bloody foreskin.11 Even this translation, however, is misleading because it fails to disclose that “legs” is sometimes used by the biblical authors as a euphemism for the male sexual organ. “Just where the ‘blood(y) husband’ was dabbed with the son’s prepuce we can only surmise,” cracks the high-spirited Bible scholar Marvin Pope, “but the best guess seems the area where foreskins are located.”12 Thus, the most candid reading of Exodus 4:25 is that Zipporah uses her son’s foreskin to smear the fresh blood of his circumcision on someone’s genitals. Still, the original Hebrew text of the Bible does not tell us whose genitals are painted with blood by Zipporah—it might be Moses, or her son, or perhaps God himself.*

  Even the words that Zipporah speaks out loud at the climax of her encounter with Yahweh—“Surely a bridegroom of blood [hattan damim] art thou to me”—are suggestive, provocative, and yet profoundly enigmatic. The biblical author does not identify the person to whom these words are addressed—it might be God, Moses, or Gershom—nor does the author explain why Zipporah speaks them out loud. All we know is the phrase seems to be a bit of potent verbal magic, an incantation that brings the blood ritual to a successful conclusion and somehow persuades God to break off his attack.

  One of the words that Zipporah speaks out loud—hattan—means “bridegroom,” among other things, in biblical Hebrew, but hattan may be related to an Arabic word that refers specifically to the rite of circumcision.13 Some tribes of the Arabic world in biblical times (including, it is thought, the Midianites) required an adolescent male to undergo circumcision in preparation for marriage—a practice that has survived among the contemporary Bedouins—and so Zipporah’s words may preserve a long-forgotten linkage between marriage and circumcision in the ancient Near East.14 Indeed, the same tradition may be at work in the ill-fated betrothal of Dinah and Shechem, a tale in which a suitor is required to undergo circumcision before he is permitted to marry. When Zipporah declares Moses to be a “bridegroom of blood” (or a “bloody husband,” as the phrase is rendered in some English translations), she may be saying out loud what many a bride thought to herself in biblical Canaan!

  THE MAN GOD BEFRIENDED

  The deepest mystery of all in the Bridegroom of Blood, of course, is why God would seek to kill Moses so soon after befriending him, anointing him as a prophet, arming him with the power to perform works of divine magic, and sending him on the crucial mission to liberate the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.

  The story is especially troubling precisely because Moses is such a commanding figure on the biblical landscape. By tradition, he is the author of the first five books of the Bible, including the one in which the night attack itself is described. He is depicted in the Bible as the liberator and the lawgiver of the Israelites, a potent and deadly miracle-worker, a fierce military commander, and the role model of the Messiah in both Jewish and Christian theology. Moses is the only human being in the Bible to whom God reveals himself in all of his glory, the only human being to whom God speaks “face to face.” The Book of Deuteronomy hails Moses as the greatest prophet in the history of Israel, past, present, and future. Yet the tale of the Bridegroom of Blood reminds us that if Moses is the only man whom God befriended, he is also the only man whom God stalked with intent to kill.

  Some commentators, both Jewish and Christian, argued that God seeks to kill Moses because he is angered by Moses’ apparent lack of enthusiasm for his divine mission. They claimed to discern in the biblical text evidence that Moses delayed in hitting the road,15 took his own sweet time in journeying toward Egypt,16 and—of course—insisted on schlepping his Midianite wife and their young children to Egypt along with him.17 But the blood-soaked text of Exodus 4:24–26 has convinced most Bible critics that foreskins (or the lack of them), rather than Moses’ bad attitude, are what drives God into a homicidal frenzy.

  Circumcision, it is sometimes argued, was first adopted as a ritual practice by the ancients because they somehow discerned that it was hygienic and healthful. Herodotus, for example, reports that the Egyptians engaged in circumcision “for the sake of cleanliness, considering it better to be clean than comely.”18 Others suggest that circumcision was arbitrarily chosen by primitive peoples as a physical sign that marked a young man’s coming of age, his formal initiation into the clan or tribe, and his eligibility for marriage.19 But the Bible itself presents circumcision as an unmistakable and ineradicable symbol of a man’s adherence to the covenant between God and Abraham: “My covenant,” says God to Abraham, “shall be in your flesh—–” (Gen. 17:13).

  The traditional explanation of the Bridegroom of Blood is that Yahweh seeks to kill Moses because he has violated the single most important clause of the covenant between God and Abraham by
failing to circumcise his firstborn son, Gershom. “And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every male throughout your generations,” God has already decreed to Abraham. “And the uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that soul shall be cut off from his people” (Gen. 17:12, 14). One early Aramaic translation of the Bible places the blame on Jethro,* the father of Zipporah and a priest of the Midianites, who supposedly circumcised their male children only at the onset of puberty or in preparation for marriage. “The husband wanted to circumcise,” Zipporah is made to say in a bit of explanatory dialogue that does not appear in the original text of the Bible, “but the father-in-law would not permit him.”20+

  Other traditional sources speculated that God waxes so wroth because Moses is not circumcised.21 Zipporah performs the ritual of circumcision on her infant in place of her husband, they speculate, because the risk of infection while traveling under such primitive circumstances makes it too dangerous to perform the procedure on Moses himself. Rather preposterously, it is suggested that God will not accept an uncircumcised man as the liberator of the Chosen People—but, at the same time, the Almighty is content with a vicarious circumcision by means of Gershom rather than the real thing.22

  Now it is true that the Bible nowhere reports that Moses was circumcised, but the rabbis were so horrified at the thought that the Lawgiver might possess a foreskin that they came up with a number of ingenious arguments to prove otherwise. Moses had been duly circumcised as an infant by his Israelite family before he was cast adrift on the Nile. Or he was circumcised in his youth along with the other young men of Pharaohs court, where the rite of circumcision was routinely practiced. Or perhaps Moses was born circumcised, a minor miracle that has been attributed to other biblical figures, ranging from Adam to Noah to Jacob, whose circumcisions are not mentioned in the Bible.23

  The conventional wisdom about the night attack is reassuring and even comforting because it appears to solve the mystery of Exodus 4:24–26 with the clarity and certainty of a fast game of Clue. God is angry because someone is not properly circumcised, either Moses or his son, and the quick-witted Zipporah succeeds in calming down the Almighty by performing a hasty circumcision just in the nick of time. She tosses the foreskin at someone’s feet (or genitals)—or, more likely, she uses it to smear blood on those body parts—so that God will not fail to notice that she has corrected the oversight. God is mollified and breaks off his attack. When Zipporah, weary and perhaps slightly in shock, rebukes her Israelite husband for putting her through such a strange ordeal by uttering those baffling words—“Surely a bridegroom of blood art thou to me”—she is saying, in effect, “I never suspected when I agreed to take an Israelite as a husband that things would turn out to be such a bloody mess!”

  But the official explanation does not make much sense to any reader who pays attention to what the Bible actually says about God and his weirdly intimate relationship with Moses. From their very first encounter at the burning bush, God knows that Moses is not exactly fired with enthusiasm for the long journey to Egypt: Moses plainly tells him so, and God is reduced to wheedling and cajoling the reluctant prophet into taking the job. When Moses tries to beg off by telling God that he is “slow of speech, and of a slow tongue”—a phrase that is traditionally interpreted to mean that Moses suffered from a severe speech impediment24—God is quick to accommodate his special needs by naming his brother, Aaron, as his spokesperson (Exod. 4:10, 14-15). Not once during their long tête-à-tête does Yahweh bring up the subject of circumcision, nor does he even hint that the lack of it might bear on Moses’ suitability for the role of liberator and wonder-worker.

  Clearly, if circumcision was such a touchy subject, the Almighty did not have to wait until Moses was already on the road to Egypt before doing something about it. God has already demonstrated that he sees exactly what is going on in far-off Egypt. “I have surely seen the affliction of My people that are in Egypt,” says God to Moses during the first of their many summit conferences. God has already made it clear that he sees what will happen in the distant future, too: “And I know that the king of Egypt will not give you leave to go, except by a mighty hand” (Exod. 3:7, 19). Surely the all-seeing and all-knowing Yahweh is able to see and know the intimate anatomy of Moses and his sons, which is so much closer at hand, and to say and do something about their foreskins, if these really mattered to him.

  Indeed, we might wonder whether it was some priestly redactor, rather than God, who cared so passionately about circumcision. The fact is that circumcision was not a uniquely Israelite ritual in the era of the Exodus; it was practiced by the Egyptians and many of the native-dwelling peoples of Canaan, too. So a circumcised sexual organ could not have served to readily distinguish the Israelites from their neighbors in their early history. Among the peoples of Canaan, the Bible identifies only the Philistines and the unfortunate kinsmen of Hamor, prince of the Hivites, as uncircumcised. (See chapter five.) And the Bible tells us that the Israelite children born during the Exodus are not circumcised at all until Joshua leads them out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land, where he pauses to make a set of flint knives and conduct a mass circumcision at God’s command, thereby creating a new landmark known, appropriately enough, as the Hill of Foreskins (Josh. 5:2–6)1

  Some Bible critics argue that the sanctity of circumcision is a relatively late addition to the biblical text, one that reflects the special concerns of the priests and scribes who assembled and edited the Bible sometime after the end of the Babylonian Exile. By the fifth century B.C.E. and after, some scholars suggest, circumcision may have fallen out of favor among the other peoples of Canaan, and so the ritual took on new importance in distinguishing the Israelites from the seductive pagan-worshippers whom the priests feared so much.25 Indeed, one scholar proposes that the story of the Bridegroom of Blood was “rescued from oblivion” and inserted into the Book of Exodus at a late date precisely because the text appears to be so ancient and thus so authentic; the biblical redactor may have believed that the “new-fangled Priestly notion” of circumcision as a ritual of supreme importance would be given “an aura of antiquity” by an incident that appeared to come from the distant past.26

  But it is not enough to conclude that circumcision is the alpha and the omega of the Bridegroom of Blood. Even if the story is an ancient fragment that was inserted belatedly into the Bible by a scribe with a hidden agenda, the fragment itself may preserve a tradition that predates—and explains—the ritual of circumcision. Surely something more is needed to explain what is really at stake in the mano a mano between Zipporah and the Almighty. As Zipporah seems to understand, and as the biblical authors may be trying to conceal, even the God of Abraham appears to demand the flesh and blood of his Chosen People, and anyone who dares to deny him is at risk of his life.

  THE CULT OF THE GODDESS-RESCUER

  The text of Exodus 4:24–26 is a kind of Freudian slip by the biblical author that allows the cosmic id to assert itself against a censorious celestial superego. Thus, what we find in these three lines may be a distorted remnant of long-lost and long-forbidden traditions about God—or the gods—once embraced by the Israelites or their brethren. Once liberated from the literal meaning of the biblical text, as we shall see, the conjectures and imaginings of biblical exegetes begin to resemble something out of a fever dream, if not the writings of the Marquis de Sade.

  The night attack has been so alarming to sages and scholars, even in our own day, that every effort has been made to blame the divine assault and its bloody consequences on some deity other than the one we know as Yahweh. Some sources suggest that the story itself was borrowed from the Midianites, a Bedouin-like tribe of desert-dwellers who were contemporaries of the Israelites, and then transplanted into the Bible at some later date. Others suggest that Zipporah’s encounter with God is patterned after an incident that first appeared in the myths and legends of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. We are invited to imagine tha
t the deity who attacks Moses is not really Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but rather some vengeful Midianite demon, and that the woman who rescues Moses is not Zipporah but an incarnation of the Egyptian goddess Isis. These pagan images were painted out of the scene, it has been suggested, and painted over with the names and images of Yahweh and Zipporah by the biblical writers who gave us the biography of Moses as it appears in the Book of Exodus.

  For example, an intriguing clue to the secret meaning of the Bridegroom of Blood is found in the ruins of a third-century synagogue at Dura-Europos in what is now Syria. Archaeologists who excavated the synagogue in the 1930s came upon a mural that depicts the familiar Sunday school story of Moses among the bulrushes—but the ancient muralist included a detail that the author of Exodus omits. A naked goddess, wearing only a golden pendant around her neck and attended by three demigoddesses, is watching over baby Moses.27 Some Bible scholars are encouraged by such intriguing evidence to suggest that Zipporah may be a stand-in for a goddess-rescuer who appeared in some long-lost folktale but was written out of the story by the priests and scribes who could not tolerate the presence of a pagan goddess in Holy Scripture—and especially not a goddess who confronts and prevails over the Almighty.

  The Bible confirms the provocative but mostly overlooked fact that Moses depends on women, again and again, to preserve his life against various deadly perils, human and divine. We tend to think of Moses as a potent figure, a prophet who is privileged to encounter God face to face because he is so nearly godlike himself. Yet an attentive reading of the Bible reveals that Moses is a flawed prophet, a man who cycles between assertion and passivity, strength and frailty, courage and fear, good cheer and deep depression. Above all, he is a man who survives long enough to play the divinely appointed role of liberator and lawgiver only because of the heroic efforts of what one mythologist called “the shadowy women who surround [him].”28