This elliptic story is the most enigmatic episode in all of Exodus. It
seems unlikely that we will ever resolve the enigmas it poses, but it
nevertheless plays a pivotal role in the larger narrative, and it is worth
pondering why such a haunting and bewildering story should have been introduced
at this juncture. There is something starkly archaic about the whole episode.
The LORD here is not a voice from an incandescent bush announcing that this is
holy ground but an uncanny silent stranger who “encounters” Moses, like the
mysterious stranger who confronts Jacob at the Jabbok ford, in the dark of the
night (the Hebrew for “place of encampment” is phonetically linked to laylah,
“night”). One may infer that both the deity here and the rite of circumcision
carried out by Zipporah belong to an archaic—perhaps even
premonotheistic—stratum of Hebrew culture, though both are brought into telling
alignment with the story that follows. The potently anthropomorphic and mythic
character of the episode generates a crabbed style, as though the writer were
afraid to spell out its real content, and thus even the referents of pronominal
forms are ambiguous. Traditional Jewish commentators seek to naturalize the
story to a more normative monotheism by claiming that Moses has neglected the
commandment to circumcise his son (sons?), and that is why the LORD threatens
his life. What seems more plausible is that Zipporah’s act reflects an older rationale
for circumcision among the West Semitic peoples than the covenantal one
enunciated in Genesis 17. Here circumcision serves as an apotropaic device, to
ward off the hostility of a dangerous deity by offering him a bloody scrap of
the son’s flesh, a kind of symbolic synecdoche of human sacrifice. The
circumciser, moreover, is the mother, and not the father, as enjoined in
Genesis. The story is an archaic cousin of the repeated biblical stories of
life-threatening trial in the wilderness, and, as modern critics have often
noted, it corresponds to the folktale pattern of a perilous rite of passage that
the hero must undergo before embarking on his mission proper. The more
domesticated God of verse 19 has just assured Moses that he can return to Egypt
“for all the men who sought your life are dead.” The fierce uncanny YHWH of
this episode promptly seeks to kill Moses (the same verb “seek”), just as in
the previous verse He had promised to kill Pharaoh’s firstborn. (Here, the more
judicial verb, himit, “to put to death,” is used instead of the blunt harag,
“kill.”) The ambiguity of reference has led some commentators to see the son as
the object of this lethal intention, though that seems unlikely because the
(unspecified) object of the first verb “encountered” is almost certainly Moses.
Confusions then multiply in the nocturnal murk of the language. Whose feet are
touched with the bloody foreskin? Perhaps Moses’s, but it could be the boy’s,
or even the LORD’s. The scholarly claim, moreover, that “feet” is a euphemism
for the genitals cannot be dismissed. There are again three male candidates in
the scene for the obscure epithet “bridegroom of blood,” though Moses strikes
me as the most probable. William H. C. Propp correctly recognizes that the
plural form for blood used here, damim, generally means “bloodshed” or
“violence” (though in the archaic language of this text it may merely reflect
intensification or poetic heightening). He proposes that the deity assaults
Moses because he still bears the bloodguilt for the act of involuntary
manslaughter he has committed, and it is for this that the circumcision must
serve as expiation. All this may leave us in a dark thicket of bewildering
possibilities, yet the story is strikingly apt as a tonal and motivic
introduction to the Exodus narrative. The deity that appears here on the
threshold of the return to Egypt is dark and dangerous, a potential killer of
father or son. Blood in the same double function it will serve in the Plagues
narrative is set starkly in the foreground: the blood of violent death, and
blood as the apotropaic stuff that wards off death—the bloody foreskin of the
son will be matched in the tenth plague by the blood smeared on the lintel to
ward off the epidemic of death visiting the firstborn sons. With this troubling
mythic encounter, we are ready for the descent into Egypt. (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 1:228-29)
