Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Norman Cohn <normanncohn AT yahoo.com.br>]

Hi, Kenneth!

 

Interestingly enough, this is one of the passages tackled by Steven Mckenzie and John Kaltner in the book I mentioned in the the newly created thread "Role of euphemism...".

 

The authors acknowledge that this is a notoriously difficult passage to interpret and that many different readings have been proposed over the centuries. They address on particular reading - the one by Pamela Tamarkin Reis, who is a self-taught scholar. 

 

Reis' interesting reading, which S. Mckenzie and J. Kaltner ultimately reject, is basically the following: Moses and Zipporah would have had a serious fight which ended up with Moses sending Zipporah back to her father's house. She notices that the Bible does say that Moses send her back to her father's house, and that some scholars interpret this act as a divorce. The fight would have ocurred, according to this view, due to Moses' attitude of concealing from Zipporah the fact that he was both an Israeli and a slave. She would have thought that he was a the promiment Egyptian upper-class he seemed to be.  

 

At that point of the narrative we're discussing, Moses would have realized that his trick (?) was about to collapse, as upon arrriving in Egypt Zipporah would inevitably find out who he really was. Facing this unberable tragedy of seeing his reputation collapse in front of his wife, he decided to take his own life. According to Reis, saying God "tried to kill" someone was an idiom in Ancient Hebrew for having suicidal urges. 

 

However, Moses simply would not have been able to kill himself, and therefore he told Zipporah the truth about his identity. She would have gotten so mad, that she decided to mock the ritual which was central to her husband's religion: the infant circumcision. 

 

And then, I'll quote from the book, Zipporah :

 

    "reached for the nearest sharp rock and cut off her infant son’s foreskin as a way of saying, in Reis’s words, “You are     a Hebrew? Then why not perform the disgusting and barbarous rite of the Hebrews?” (Steve L. Mckenzie et al.,     Uncensored Bible, HarperCollins).

 

So, in a way, Pamela Reis agrees with you: when Zipporah says Moses is truly her bridegroom of blood, she is revealing the allegedly crude and bloody nature of a ritual which was very dear to the Israelites. Pamela Reis differs from you only with respect to the motivation, cause she thinks Zipporah does it out of spite and mockery.   

 

The authors, however, reject this interpretation, and I'm with them on this one. I won't go into their reasoning lest this post gets too long, but this passage is indeed very intriguing and mysterious!

 

** The quote and the ideas mentioned in this message come from the book Uncensored Bible, by Steven Mckenzie, John Kaltner and Joel Kilpatrick (published by HarperCollins). I'm hope I'm not breaking any copyright protocol! **

 

Thanks for starting this interesting thread!

 

Norman Cohn,

São Paulo - Brazil.

 

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