Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Kenneth Greifer:

 

 

You wrote:  “This is probably my last guess I will make here on this subject because no one really knows what the quote says, but maybe the Midianite wedding ritual involved the bride touching the groom's body the same two places she touched her son when she circumcised him and then touched his feet. Maybe that is why she might have said the baby was a bridegroom of blood to her. Who knows?”

 

 

Although I have no personal knowledge of any relevant wedding ritual, I was able to find a short, readable account of various midrash approaches to this famous, ambiguous incident.  See pp. 127-139, chapter 27 ‘The Incident at the Inn’, in “Moses’ Women”, by Shera Aranoff Tuchman and Sandra E. Rapoport (2008), especially p. 137, here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=uIq_rVBTkKIC&pg=PA137&dq=bridegroom+of+blood&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZXTtUK3uGKKE2gW0kYDgBg&sqi=2&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=bridegroom%20of%20blood&f=false

 

 

In particular, that chapter discusses competing views in midrash as to whether it’s the baby, or whether it’s Moses, who is the “bridegroom of blood”, and why that would be so.  Several of the midrash explanations of this ambiguous incident focus on the fact that Zipporah is a Midianite, not a Hebrew, which was one main point that I made in my first post on this thread.  [My sincerest apologies for some of my later posts on this thread getting off-topic, as George Athas properly noted.] 

 

 

For what it’s worth, even after reading those various midrash explanations, I myself agree with your statement that “no one really knows what the quote says”.

 

 

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois