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

by Jonathan Kirsch

  Even the most grotesque aspect of the ritual that Zipporah performs—touching the “legs” (or, more likely, the genitals) of God, Moses, or Gershom with the bloody foreskin—makes sense only if we regard the circumcision of her son as a blood sacrifice. The smearing of blood is a dramatic and effective way of demonstrating that the sacrifice of a living creature has taken place. The Bible specifically instructs the Israelite priests who carry out the ritual sacrifice of animals to make a big show of dipping their fingers into the blood of the slaughtered beast and splashing it around the altar (Lev. 3:8). In fact God himself specifies that the anointing of body parts with sacrificial blood is to be the climax of the ceremony by which Aaron, the brother of Moses, and his sons are later consecrated as high priests of the Israelites:

  “Then shalt thou kill the ram, and take of its blood, and put it upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron, and upon the tip of the right ear of his sons, and upon the thumb of their right hand, and upon the great toe of their right foot, and dash the blood against the altar round about” (Exod. 29:20).

  Zipporah, daughter of a priest and wife of a prophet, is clearly a priestess and a prophetess in her own right. She appears to understand that Yahweh is angry because her Israelite husband has neglected the commandment of his own faith that his firstborn son must be “sanctified” unto the Almighty. She seems to know that God will be appeased only if the sacrificial knife touches human flesh and draws human blood. And so Zipporah uses the only tool at hand—a crude flint knife or perhaps just a flint stone—to circumcise her newborn son. To make sure that God sees what she has done, she uses the newly cut foreskin to anoint her husband’s or her son’s body (if not God’s!) with blood, just as the priests of Yahweh will later be instructed to do by the Almighty himself. God sees what Zipporah has done—and God is pleased.

  “I WILL SLAY THY SON”

  The notion that God might demand the sacrifice of a child, even in a surrogate form, seems to contradict the fundamental teachings of the Hebrew Bible, which repeatedly and explicitly condemns the practice of human sacrifice by the Canaanites and the occasional renegade Israelite who falls under their evil influence. The prophet Jeremiah reports that God is angered and repulsed by the spilling of “the blood of innocents” in sacrifice to the Canaanite god known as Baal—a form of worship “which I commanded not, nor spoke it, neither came it into My mind” (Jer. 19:4–5). The prophet Micah ponders the question of child sacrifice—“Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”—and his answer to the rhetorical question sums up the credo that we have come to regard as the essential teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition:

  It hath been told thee, O man, what is good,

  And what the Lord doth require of thee:

  Only to do justly, and to love mercy,

  and to walk humbly with thy God (Mic. 6:7–8).

  Yet, long before Jeremiah and Micah, long before the tale of the Bridegroom of Blood, the Bible records an incident even more horrific than the night attack on Moses—an incident in which child sacrifice is precisely what God seeks of his Chosen People, and under the most appalling circumstances.

  According to the Book of Genesis, God promises Abraham and Sarah that a son will be born to them in their extreme old age. “And I will bless [Sarah],” God says, “and moreover I will give thee a son of her” (Gen. 17:15), and he delivers on his promise by causing ninety-year-old Sarah to conceive and give birth to Isaac. Then, in a moment of divine perversity that has shocked Bible readers over the last couple of millennia, God abruptly orders Abraham to sacrifice young Isaac on an altar of fire. “Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac,” says God, as if to taunt Abraham with the full horror of what he is demanding, “and offer him … for a burnt-offering…” (Gen. 22:2).

  Perhaps even more perversely, Abraham complies with the divine command to sacrifice his own son without a single word of protest. Abraham, we should not forget, is the same man who has boldly confronted God over his plan to destroy the vile and despicable Sodomites, the man who has haggled at length with the Almighty to spare the ten righteous ones who might be killed along with the sinners. But when it comes to the life of his own son, Abraham falls silent. Meekly and wordlessly, Abraham sets off toward the killing ground with his sweetly befuddled son in tow. “Behold the fire and the wood,” asks the unsuspecting Isaac, and his words tug at the heartstrings of any flesh-and-blood father, “but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?” (Gen. 22:7). Only at the very last possible moment—when Isaac is bound on the altar, the wood for the sacrificial fire is laid beneath him, and Abraham holds the slaughtering knife over his son’s throat—does God call the whole thing off.

  “Lay not thy hand upon the lad,” says “an angel of the Lord” just in the nick of time, “for now I know that thou art a God-fearing man, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from Me” (Gen. 22:12).

  The more apologetic theologians have struggled to explain away the Binding of Isaac, as the passage is known in Jewish tradition, as a test of faith by a compassionate and merciful God who never really intended to permit the sacrifice of a child at the hands of his own father God is praised by some apologists for miraculously providing a ram to replace Isaac on the altar at the last moment. “The story,” they insist, “opens the age-long warfare of Israel against the abominations of child sacrifice.”47 The terror visited upon Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac by the Almighty during the ordeal—and the prospect of what would have happened to Isaac if his father had failed the “test of faith” by refusing to slay his son—is mostly ignored in the more pious readings of the Binding of Isaac.

  But the pious readings are neither convincing nor reassuring. What kind of sadist, we might ask, would miraculously bestow a child on a yearnful old couple, then demand that the child be slaughtered by his own father—and wait until the blade is about to draw blood before saying, as it were, “Just kidding”? And what kind of father would be willing to challenge the Almighty with great passion and audacity in defense of Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin cities of evil and perversion, but remain silent and compliant when instructed to cut the throat and burn the body of his own innocent son? The Binding of Isaac, so heartrending and so perplexing, readily explains why one of the many names by which God is called in the Bible is “the Fear of Isaac” (Gen. 31:42).

  “The whole of Jewish history might have turned out differently,” a young rabbi once told me, “if Abraham had just said ‘No.’”

  The most troubling detail in the Binding of Isaac is often overlooked. God spares Isaac, but nowhere does the Almighty come out and say that human sacrifice is wrong or even that it is unnecessary. By his abject compliance with God’s bloodthirsty demand, Abraham neatly extricates himself from the Catch-2 2 in which God has placed him: precisely because Abraham is willing to slaughter his son, he is not called upon to actually do it. But God does not rule out the possibility that he might ask the same thing again of Abraham—or someone else. According to Islamic tradition, the beast that God provides to Abraham as a replacement for Isaac is the very same ram that Abel offered up in the first recorded ritual of sacrifice48—and so we are reminded that God seems to savor flesh and blood.

  “We cannot evade the fact that the core of the narrative actually seems to assume the possibility that God would demand human sacrifice,” Nahum Sarna, a distinguished commentator on Genesis, has written with uncommon candor. “God does not denounce human sacrifice as such.”49

  God’s troubling indifference toward child sacrifice in the Binding of Isaac sheds an ominous light on the events of Exodus, including not only the night attack on Moses but the whole plan of liberation that God confides to Moses at their very first encounter. God tells Moses that nine of the ten plagues that he intends to send down on Egypt—frogs, vermin, boils, and so on—will not be enough to convince Pharaoh that he must let the Israelites go. Remarkably, God reveals that Pharaoh will defy the fi
rst nine plagues not because these “signs and wonders” are too puny to frighten him but rather because God himself will “harden his heart” (Exod. 4:21)1 Thanks to God’s rather mischievous meddling with Pharaoh’s mind and heart, a tenth plague will be needed to break the will of the Egyptian monarch:

  “And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh: Thus saith the Lord: Israel is My son, My first-born. And I have said unto thee: Let My son go, that he may serve Me; and thou hast refused to let him go. Behold, I will slay thy son, thy first-born” (Exod. 4:22–23).

  The fact that two firstlings are mentioned in God’s threat to Pharaoh—the firstborn of the Lord and the firstborn of Egypt—provides an intriguing clue to the night attack on Moses at the lodging place, which takes place before the tenth plague is visited upon Egypt. “The destroyer who will strike the first born of Egypt is already on his way,” one Bible critic has proposed by way of explaining the night attack at the lodging place, “and he is endangering the first born son of Moses himself!”50 In other words, God is sometimes so impulsive in his moments of rage, so wild and unpredictable, that he is capable of striking anyone who gets in his way; once God starts killing, he cannot stop. The same horrific notion can be found in the Talmud itself: “[O]nce the destroyer has been given permission to destroy,” the rabbis warn, “he no longer distinguishes between the righteous and wicked.”51

  Even though he survives the night attack at the lodging place, Moses (along with the rest of the Israelites) finds himself at risk of death once again on the fateful night when God descends on Egypt to carry out the tenth and final plague, the slaying of the firstborn of Egypt. At midnight, the Bible tells us, God himself (and not an angel of death, as advertised in sermons and Sunday school stories) rampages through Egypt and slays every firstborn child, “from the first-born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the first-born of the maid-servant that is behind the mill” (Exod. 11:5). Yet God seems to know himself well enough to realize that he is not likely to distinguish between the Egyptians and the Chosen People once he has begun to kill. So the Almighty decrees that a lamb must be sacrificed by every Israelite household at dusk, and its blood must be smeared on the doorposts and lintels of every Israelite house, as a sign to him: “[A]nd when I see the blood,” God agrees, “I will pass over you, and there shall no plague be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt” (Exod. 12:13).

  So the night attack at the lodging place seems to prefigure the midnight plague on the firstborn of Egypt, and the bloody foreskin that Zipporah uses to stave off the divine assault on Moses is seen again in the lamb’s blood that is smeared on the lintels of the Israelite houses in Egypt.* Intriguingly, the Midrash suggests a direct link between the rite of circumcision and the blood ritual that stays the hand of God when he seeks to kill: “two bloods” were used to mark the doorposts of the Israelites, the Midrash suggests, the blood of the sacrificial lamb and the blood of circumcision. “[A]nd when the Holy One passed over to plague the Egyptians, He saw the blood of the circumcision-covenant on the lintels of their houses mingle with the blood of the paschal lamb, and He was filled with compassion for Israel.”52

  The rabbis, as we have already noted, preserved one pious fairy tale in which it was Satan rather than the Almighty who stalked and sought to kill Moses at the lodging place, a convenient if implausible way of shifting the culpability for the night attack from God to the same dark angel on whom Jews and Christians have long heaped the blame for the evil that we do to each other. How else to explain what one scholar characterizes as God’s “un-Israelite behavior” at the lodging place?53 But Satan—who does not appear in the Bible until the Book of Job, and even then only as a friendly servitor of God—was falsely accused. Despite the long and ardent efforts of pious censors, the Bible plainly states that God himself, not Satan or even an angelic destroyer, is capable of killing even the innocent and faithful among humankind.

  “The early stage of Israelite religion knows no Satan,” wrote Martin Buber, one of the towering moral philosophers of the twentieth century, in his musings on Exodus 4:24–26. “[I]f a power attacks a man and threatens him, it is proper to recognize YHVH in it or behind it, no matter how nocturnally dread and cruel it may be….”54

  And then Buber added one more crucial observation: “… and it is proper to withstand Him….”55

  Here we find what may be the real and urgent lesson of the Bridegroom of Blood: Zipporah stood up to God and faced him off and thereby saved the life of her husband and her child. Moses and his son are fortunate indeed that she did not follow Abraham’s example of silence and compliance; as we shall soon see, God does not always intervene to prevent a child sacrifice, even when he is given plenty of opportunity to do so. So the exploits of Zipporah in the face of divine wrath, so troubling and so mysterious, allow us to glimpse the innermost meaning of Exodus 4:24–26: Perhaps it is Abraham who failed the test of faith after all, and Zipporah who passed it.

  * According to the original Hebrew text of the Bible, we know that Zipporah cast the foreskin of her son “at his feet” but we are not told who “he” is. The translators of the Revised Standard Version, an updated translation based on the King James Version, boldly inserted the name of Moses into the biblical text in an effort to clarify Exodus 4:25: “Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’ feet with it.”

  * Zipporah’s father is identified as “Reuel” in the first passage where he is named (Exod. 2:18) and “Jethro” a few lines later (Exod. 3:1). The Bible uses yet a third name, “Hobab,” to identify a man who is described as Moses’ father-in-law in Judges 4:11 and as his brother-in-law in Numbers 10:29. From such ambiguities and contradictions, scholars have detected the hand of more than one author at work in the Bible. (See appendix: Who Really Wrote the Bible?)

  + An ancient tradition holds that Moses and his Midianite father-in-law struck a deal about how the children of the mixed marriage would be raised: half of the offspring would be raised as Israelites, half as Midianites. Thus, according to the rabbinical tale, the firstborn son of Moses and Zipporah, Gershom, was duly circumcised, and the second-born, Eliezer, was not. For that reason, some sages speculated that it was the failure to circumcise Eliezer that prompted the night attack, and that Eliezer was the intended victim. The Bible suggests but does not state that both Gershom and Eliezer were present during the night attack, and I have followed the text of Exodus 4:24–26 in mentioning only one of the two sons in my retelling of the tale.

  * Miriam and Aaron also “spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married” (Num. 12:1). The Book of Exodus makes it clear that Moses marries a Midianite woman named Zipporah, but the Book of Numbers suggests that he also has a Cushite (that is, Ethiopian) wife. One rabbinical tradition suggests that Moses traveled to Ethiopia before he showed up at Jethro’s house in Midian and was already married to a “woman of color” when he met Zipporah.

  * These are not the only episodes in the Bible in which God attacks one of his Chosen People by night. God manifests himself as man or angel and sets upon Jacob on the night before Jacob’s encounter with his estranged brother, Esau. God and Jacob struggle with each other all night long, and God wounds “the hollow of Jacob’s thigh,” which we might understand to mean his groin or even his genitals. But Jacob prevails and extracts a blessing from the Almighty (Gen. 32:25–30).

  CHAPTER TEN

  JEPHTHAH AND HIS DAUGHTER

  “The Lord shall be witness between us; surely according to thy word so will we do.”

  —JUDGES 11.10

  The young woman put aside her needle and glanced at her father as he worked a sharpening stone up and down the length of his battle sword and then tested the sharpness of the blade with a thickly cal’ loused thumb.

  She had seen her father at the same work many times before—honing the blade of his long sword, oiling his leathern scabbard and leather-bound wooden shield, sharpening a spearhead and fitting it to
a freshly cut length of oak. As she grew up, she came to understand that the sight of the long sword signaled the fact that her father had hired himself out yet again as mercenary in the service of some wealthy lord who was willing to pay a price to rid himself of bandits or nomads or soldiers of fortune who fought for some rival chieftain. Weeks or even months would pass before her father returned with the coins and the occasional booty that provided a livelihood for the two of them.

  If, that is, he returned at all. At least a few of the men who served with her father would be left behind in a shallow grave somewhere in the distant lands where they went to fight—one or two if the fighting went well, many more if it went badly. So far, her father had been spared such a fate, but she realized that God might not always watch over him with such care.

  Now the young woman turned back to her own handiwork, deftly working the needle along the collar piece of a long blue gown and leaving behind a pattern of entwined doves and branches in white thread. But she continued to ponder what her father had told her about the campaign on which he would embark at first light. This time he would fight as a general rather than a mercenary, and he would lead an army of his own—the army of Israel—into battle against the king of Ammon.

  “As God is my judge,” he had told his daughter in a voice that sang out in pride, “if I return at all, I will return as a chieftain—and you will live out your life as befits the daughter of a chieftain.”

  The man’s name was Jephthah, and the young woman is remembered as Seila. She was still young, but not too young to understand what burned in her father’s heart as he told her of the battle to come—the bitter hurt, the anger and defiance, the banked embers of vengeance that were ready to burst into flames. Seila had been raised by her father in that little house in the dusty border town of Mizpah, and the memories he shared with her were almost like fairy tales, except that they were peopled with his own flesh and blood.