Why Is Moses' Life Saved by His Wife Circumcising His Son?

QUESTION: Why is Moses saved by Zipporah circumcising his son in Ex 4:24-26?

On the trip, at an overnight campsite, it happened that the Lord confronted him and sought to put him to death. 25 So Zipporah took a flint, cut off her son’s foreskin, and threw it at Moses’ feet. Then she said, “You are a bridegroom of blood to me!” 26 So He let him alone. At that time she said, “You are a bridegroom of blood,” referring to the circumcision. (HB)

ANSWER: No matter how you slice it, this passage is a little strange!  We seem to be plunged into some kind of weird spat that lacks any description of prior context, and without detail of important preceding action that might tell us what this is all about.  So even the best scholars are left with a fair amount of speculation to fill in those blanks.  This answer will therefore have plenty of speculation, but a core lesson is still very clear.

We begin to make sense of it, if we consider a few of the bare facts of the story:  Moses has had two sons.  They are clearly several years old by this point, and yet they have never been circumcised.  Why not?  This is a critical question but it's never answered in the text.

Moses is a Hebrew, and circumcision is what they do – it was a command given to their forefather Abraham and all his descendants (Gen 17:9).  Some have speculated that the Jews, living under Egyptian oppression, weren't allowed to for hundreds of year, so Moses also didn't do it.  But this cannot be true since there is no mention of a society wide neglect of this sign of the Abrahamic covenant for hundreds of years.  In fact, we do know the Hebrews neglected this rite when the freed slaves lived through the desert wanderings for forty years (Joshua 5:5).  But that very verse also notes that the previous generation that first came out of slavery were all circumcised.

So it might have come from family pressures, from Zipporah and/or Jethro (his father-in-law).  They were Midianites and thus probably ‘outsiders’ to circumcision.  Zipporah`s harsh reaction in 4:25 seems to indicate that the whole thing is arcane, disgusting, strange or unnecessary to her.  But Moses is not an outsider to circumcision; he must know it's a required sign of his participation in the Abrahamic covenant with Yahweh – the God his mother no doubt taught him about, the God he met personally in Midian at the burning bush.

Therefore, there is an implicit disobedience being exposed in this story.  And that begins to explain the seeming blindside God gives Moses as he travels from Midian to Egypt to challenge Pharaoh.  What if this is no blind side at all?  What if this is the culmination of a long standing tension between Moses and God and perhaps also between Moses and his in-laws?  What if Moses has not circumcised his sons, to please his in-laws ahead of pleasing God?  A God whose character and laws he is going to represent to the world in very short order!  And yet he, the law giver, hasn’t obeyed the first, most simple law!?

It’s like a preacher getting ready to go on a church planting tour and he’s never been baptized himself!  Or he’s never explained the gospel to his own family! 

Now, the weird thing is, Zipporah knows God is about to take his life for this offense.  So Moses' predicament can’t be a private revelation known only to himself.  Somehow, Zipporah knows that Moses is on death’s door.  And she also seems to know immediately what will turn away the curse.  This is interesting because it probably mitigates the horror we feel that God "sought to kill" the very man he, moments ago, chose graciously to be his instrument of liberation.  We should ask, how does she know Moses life is in danger?  How does she know it's God who is threatening that life?  And how does she know what to do about it?

I would suggest, all this implies that God had not made a verbal confrontation with Moses (as he had at the burning bush), but that perhaps Moses had become deathly ill on the journey.  The English says "God confronted him" which sounds like a harsh, physical fight, or a private threat.  But the Hebrew word simply means "came in contact with" - pagash.  So "confront" is not a bad translation, but I think we can put out of mind any kind of physical fight like the one between Jacob and the Angel.  There's no record of any words spoken in this confrontation.

Instead, a circumstance like a deathly illness would clearly be interpreted by them both as the hand of God and not some random event - especially since they were on such a great mission directly from God.  So perhaps Zipporah might have asked Moses why God was seemingly against them.  It might have been that Moses might then have confessed the problem:  “I haven’t done the simplest act of obedience to the Lord and his hand is against me.”

There's a subtle but important difference if we view the events unfolding like this.  To read that God sought to kill Moses, seems like God would off him for what we think of as a minor misdemeanor, meanwhile jeopardizing the much more important mission of liberating the Israelites without a care for either.  But what if the situation was more like Jonah?  The storm is a threat and directly allowed by God, and it was potentially deadly.  And Jonah knows it's deadliness is directed at him (Jonah 1:5).  It looks to Jonah and the men of the boat that God has come to kill the negligent prophet.  But no matter what it looks like in the short term lens, we know God has great plans for Jonah and the deadly storm will not end in death, and killing Jonah was never the point.

So likewise, here in Exodus, if circumstances came about which were potentially deadly, and were interpreted as discipline from God, the ancient author might look at the potential end (death) and speak of it as the end God was seeking.  But in reality it merely would be the threat of death which God wanted, in order to bring about change in Moses, before his great calling could come to pass.  The end of the story proves the threat of death was God's true aim, not to actually kill the man he has just commissioned.

So, if you are Zipporah and the threat of the death of your husband is before you, and he, (or you by some revelation) are told that disobedience in circumcision is the cause, you might feel manipulated!  Especially if it's your resistance to the rite which you know is the reason Moses hasn't performed it on his sons.  "You're going to die unless we do this repulsive thing?  Great!"  But now, what choice does she have?  So in anger she does the deed – is none too happy about it judging by her comment in verse 25!

You might ask why, if Moses knows the problem, can’t he fix it himself?  Well, this is another reason to presume a deathly illness has fallen on him that they interpret as God's death threat: if he’s literally on death's door, he can't do it himself… so she has to.  Then, she brings the evidence and throws it at his feet with her comment about him being a "bridegroom of blood".  In other words, “you have become a husband who required of me a strange, bloody sacrifice to keep you alive.”  The threatening plague (or whatever it was) lifts, Moses is healed, and off he goes to his greater mission, having finally (by force!) taken care of business at home – his first mission.

Now, regarding her phrase, “bridegroom of blood…” one scholar I read had a much softer and more romantic interpretation.  He also speculates that Moses has somehow come under a curse, an illness perhaps… but he says that it is Zipporah alone who is given insight from God as to the reason for this plague or curse of imminent death.  She is therefore heartbroken at the potential of losing her husband, and also that there is a standing offense against God in their home!

So, resolutely, she circumcises their son, and she touches Moses feet with the foreskin to associate the act with the father.  Not in spite or anger (the more natural reading), but rather as a request to God to graciously accept it as coming from Moses whose responsibility it should have been to do it.   All of this is an act of servanthood and love on her part.

But what about her comment, “Bridegroom of blood”?  This interpreter said it was a way of saying, “you were on death’s door, you were lost to me, but now, by this blood, its like you were given to me all over again, my ‘bridegroom of blood’.”  In other words, it's a reference to her gratitude in getting Moses back from the dead, "From Blood (Death), a Groom!".  Or yet another way: her marriage was threatened with termination but it's renewed through blood and she’s relieved and happy to have her husband back.

This second view is a much nicer way to read Zipporah’s attitude, certainly!  She’s a loving wife who hears God, takes action, and saves the day and is thrilled with her husband’s recovery vs. begrudging rescuer not at all thrilled with her man.

But either way, the passage has this to say:  Moses has clearly been disobedient about 'first things first'.  So you can see that this strange little story contains a profound lesson for ministers of the gospel needing to attend to their first ministry before they ever seek to venture into their larger Kingdom callings.  As Paul says to Timothy, when examining potential elders – make sure their "house is in order" first.

Isn't Science Better than Faith?

QUESTION:  I'm leaning toward atheism, because I think it offers a much richer description of the world than a faith perspective does.  All my Christian friends seem to shut their eyes when I challenge their understandings which they get from the Bible.  Science is a more elegant and authentic perspective on everything.  Isn't that a nobler path than religion which has entrenched ignorance and denied science?

RESPONSE: I really empathize with your frustration with Christians who shut down conversations about the nature of things, with the phrase, "the Bible says".  No end of damage has been done to civil discourse and a true understanding of the Christian faith by perpetuating a science versus faith war.

I understand what your Christian friends are thinking - they are probably a bit scared that some bit of scientific discovery refutes a particular biblical claim and thus the Christian faith looks vulnerable.  They don't want to entertain that.  And I understand what this looks like from your perspective:  that Christianity itself is constantly in retreat, being pushed back by science at every turn. It may seem to you that this is a reason to embrace atheism.

But i would suggest this is only a good reason to embrace science and not atheism.  And I would further suggest that the reason science is even a thing and the reason why it is "elegant" rests entirely on premises that only make sense inside a Christian worldview.   In other words, science depends deeply on spiritual/religious and specifically Christian ways of thinking about the world.  So a more reasonable and noble way to go would be to embrace both.

In his book “Stealing from God” Frank Turek makes the claim that all of science’s descriptions and even it’s very impulse borrows everything it has from the Christian worldview. The great scientific claim (by that I mean the primary hypothesis on which all other scientific hypothesis’ were ever built) is basically this threefold assumption:

the world is ordered and lawful, 

we can understand this, 

it is good to understand it. 

All science rests on those assumptions.  You won't do science unless this hypothesis makes some kind of sense, or you have some reason to accept these as starting premises.  Therefore, it is the grandest of all scientific hypothesis'.

But think about it, there is no reason, on atheism, why anyone would ever make those assumptions about the world. They are faith leaps, a priori “givens” that one either feels about the universe or does not. And on atheism, there is no inherent or logical reason anyone would go there.

Why, if there is no ordering Principle, no Mind, no Logos behind the world, would one think that at bottom, it would be ordered?  That is, layered with regular patterns, “obedient”, as it were, to invisible demands that are constant and unchanging? Wouldn’t the more natural assumption on atheism be that at bottom it would be disordered and chaotic?  Unstructured?  Un-mind-like? Unreasonable?  Un-math-like?

And even if it was ordered, on atheism, what confidence would one have that a human mind, a result of pure, unguided processes could understand any of this? (Darwin himself struggled with that notion mightily as he confesses openly in Decent of Man…). 

And even if you could assume we can understand it, on atheism, why would it be good to try to do so?  What's the point?  What is "noble" after all, on atheism?  It's a subjective feeling of a worthy enterprise, which is objectively meaningless.

Only Christianity provided the fertile ground to propose and explore the great scientific hypothesis, believing the world was a result of Mind, therefore it had inherent order, and therefore, we, made in the image of that Being, could have minds which correspond to the world made by that Great Mind, and therefore, it was good to understand it, as we were worshiping and glorifying the Maker by better knowing what he had made.

All pagan ages, and even pre-Christian atheistic thinkers (like some Greek philosophers) never thought that the world was understandable.  It was often specifically seen as the work of forces of chaos.  How could it be understood?  There was no benevolence or order to it, only mystery and fear-inducing arbitrariness.

There is a reason science was launched (only) in the Christian West – it wasn’t dumb luck. 

So now that Christians found out that all three assumptions behind Science were reasonable and supported by the evidence, atheists are happy to take those assumptions for granted and keep the study of the world going – but very few of them realize that every discovery they make about the world is actually confirming the spiritual premises on which all of science is built.  

There is a reason why only the atheists who live after the scientific revolution think that science is cool.  They stand on the shoulders of Christian giants, like Kepler, Newton, Pascal, Copernicus, Galileo etc.  Rodney Stark makes the bald point in Victory of Reason, that all the early scientists were not scientists in spite of their Christian worldview, but because of  it.  They were very explicit.  The idea that faith is a science blocker stands refuted on the inarguable historical fact that science was invented by Christians of deep faith.

So, no true scientific discovery ever refutes Christianity, but rather is another brick in the edifice of the worldview Christianity presents:  The world is a machine, a book, and it can be read and even reverse engineered.  For all our best designs come from looking at nature.

Now, I admit freely, it may refute some superficial understanding of the world we had which we thought was taught in the Bible.  Those are the places where the atheist loves to camp out and talk about faith losing the war with science.  

But they usually don’t realize that every time real science dispels an area of ignorance they are helping the larger cause of making a spiritual/ordered/Word-like/intelligible world a given, and that world does not make sense without God.

Did God Accept Jephthah's Sacrifice of His Daughter?

QUESTION: In the story of Jephthah, chapters 11-12 in Judges, Jephthah vows to God that if God allows him to win the war against the Ammonites, he will sacrifice the first thing to walk through his door to greet him when he comes home as a burnt offering. God does not object, but accepts all of this, never once intervenes to tell Jephthah what a fool he was to make such a promise, he doesn’t spare the girl. He happily accepts the human sacrifice, and she is burnt to death as an offering to God.  Why is this?

ANSWER: Thanks for your question.  First, I should mention that many people believe Jephthah did not actually sacrifice his daughter as a burnt offering.  Instead, they believe that Jephthah gave his daughter in service to the Lord as a lifelong virgin.  This view notes how the text stresses that she remained a virgin, not that she died.  This is possibly what happened, but it relies a bit too heavily on a unique rendering of the Hebrew and is contrary to a straightforward reading of the text.  For a good example of this approach look here.

Rejecting that, we're left with Jephthah actually sacrificing his daughter, tragic and horrifying as that is.  Every time I’ve read this, my heart revolts.  But then I remember that this is in fact, what you are supposed to think as you read the entire book of Judges.  Truly!

The theme verse of Judges is “everyone did what was right in their own eyes” (17:6, 21:25).  During this, post-Moses, pre-King period, the nation of Israel is a loose federation of tribes.  Their religious identity doesn't have a strong unifying tradition and without that, everyone is just acting according to their own lights, doing whatever seems best to them.

So the entire culture of Israel is not really seeking God, not looking to his moral instruction, doesn't yet have a robust priestly tradition or king to enforce that instruction, and so they're just assimilating to the culture's values around them.  Look at the backstory of Jephthah and you see this clearly:  he was a son of a prostitute, from a polygamous home that rejected him and drove him away from the family inheritance, where he became a mob boss!  Which part of this situation looks like it was guided by any of the 10 commandments?

So the real message of Judges is that everyone was doing it their own way, including (in some ways), the Judges!  For more evidence, just keep reading to the story of Sampson.  Sampson was also a Judge, and yet also a liar and fornicator and extremely foolish in trusting wicked people, and he marries outside of Israel - something God explicitly forbade (Deut 7:1-4).  This doesn't discount that he was used by God to protect and save his people, as with Jephthah.

There are many more examples in Judges, but the writer is clearly wanting you to get a feel for the depravity of that time where there is no king, no overarching authority in the land, and while God was supposed to be the King, people had installed themselves as King in God’s place.  This is what is being taught. And that gets to a very important rule for correct bible interpretation:  you must discern the difference between what is being PREscribed, and what is being DEscribed.  

Do you actually think God is prescribing child sacrifice in this story? It's OK to kill your kid 'if you promised to' - do you really think that the Jews took that as the lesson?  So perhaps the problem is simply that God doesn’t say explicitly to Jephthah, “hey dude, if you sacrifice 'whoever comes out of your house', it might be, like, a human, and I uh, believe I was very clear about the whole, don't kill people thing..."  We all want God to step in and be more clear with Jephthah that it's wrong to kill your children... but how could God have been any clearer than this:

Lev 18:21-22: “You are not to make any of your children pass through the fire to Molech. Do not profane the name of your God; I am the Lord.” ?

If you think God should have repeated himself, there's this:

Deut 12:31-32: “You must not do the same to the Lord your God, because they practice for their gods every detestable thing the Lord hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods.” 

Jephthah knows all this, since he seems to be very familiar with Mosaic history (Judges 11:12-28).  Yet he still kills his own grown child to fulfill a very foolish vow he made.  You have to dig a little to realize just how foolish it was.  Even if you assume Jephthah assumed an animal would come greet him, what if it was an unclean animal?  It would have been unacceptable!  Also, God says that one should never make a vow that will violate our conscience to carry it out (Prov 20:25).  He says never make an impulsive vow (Eccl 5:2-5).  Also, if Jephthah was so grieved by his vow, he should have known Moses allowed for a sin offering if a man had to void a impulsive oath (Lev 5:4,5).  It's no wonder there's no mention of God instigating this vow, there's nothing godly about it.

So here's how you should understand this:  Jephthah had heard the laws, probably knew them, but was influenced by the Canaanites (for whom child sacrifice was normal) and so felt more obligated by his vow, no matter how immoral or rash, than by the explicit law of God.

This ought to change the assumptions you've made about how God feels about Jephthah.  You assume, “God accepts this”, you even say “God happily accepts all this.”  What in the text gives you the impression that God happily accepts all this?  If you read the entire book (and remember no Bible author assumed people read only cut out verses without getting the whole picture), you see the author is saying the exact opposite.

Now, you might push back on that and say, but Jephthah is “anointed by the Spirit of the Lord”, so shouldn't we understand that everything he does has the sanction of God?  Actually, no.  In fact, back to Sampson, the idea of him being God's instrument as a Judge is directly tied to his disobedience to God's Law!!  He takes a wife from the Philistines, something God expressly forbade (Deut 7:3-4) yet this was "from the Lord" (Judges 14:4) as the means God would use to engage the Philistines to throw off their oppressive rule.

We simply have no biblical warrant for assuming that any person said to be used or anointed by God had God's approval for all he/she did.  David was said to be a man led by God’s Spirit, and yet he did several things that were explicitly horrible.  Same with Saul.  The only difference in those accounts is that their sinful actions are specifically condemned by a prophetic voice, which gives the reader God’s explicit feelings on the sinful action.

Yes, we lack such explicit condemnation here, but we would be very presumptuous to argue from that silence that “God happily” accepts child sacrifice – especially when we know very well how God feels about child sacrifice over and over again: Jer 32:35: “I have never commanded such a horrible deed; it never even crossed my mind to command such a thing. What an incredible evil…”  So much for “happily”.

Furthermore, it is a Jewish writing style to be frustratingly coy about such things.  I’ll give you an example.  Read the entire account of Solomon’s greatness in 1 Kings 4-11.  At first you are led to think, this author believes Solomon can do no wrong!  But if you know the backdrop of Moses (and all the writings of the Old Testament should be read with that knowledge), you realize that the author is not, in fact, praising Solomon, but condemning him!  For in acquiring all his wealth and power and foreign alliances and women, Solomon is breaking almost every single command Moses had laid out for kings in Deuteronomy 17!  

This is how the ancient Jews wrote.  They assumed you, the reader, knew some things; like, God’s hatred for child sacrifice, for example.  If you get that, then you know the author could not be whitewashing a Judge, he’s showing how bad it is that even the Judges had fallen to Canaanite practices.  The community wide sorrow at the end of the story does nothing to diminish this impression.

Now that anguish felt by Jephthah and his daughter is expected given the tragedy, but it also shows how they both seem to think that fulfilling the vow is the only viable moral course of action.  Basically his daughter says, "you have to do it" (Judges 11:36).  What an interestingly lopsided moral development – to believe God would value honoring of a vow (no matter how foolish) over the value of a human life.  As mistaken as he is, it does show a stunning commitment to promise keeping!  And that is what is behind all lopsided moral developments.  They are usually not driven by purely amoral lawlessness.  No, they are driven by putting one good value (in this case, honor) over all others (the sanctity of life, love, compassion etc).  And based on what?  What is "right in our own eyes".

So, speaking of lopsided moral developments, perhaps we've done the opposite today.  Our culture puts the value of honor so extremely low that, rather than put up with great personal cost to fulfill our responsibilities, we would prefer to treat literally millions of babies as badly as this one man did his grown daughter.  Is our moral moment, when people today also do “whatever is right in their own eyes” any better; We who dismember the bodies of fetuses who have done no wrong?  I think not.  If we were to write the moral history of our time, just the last 100 years or so, when the peoples in charge have explicitly rejected the ways of Israel’s God to do what is right in their own eyes, it would be a ghastlier read than Judges, by a landslide.