Moses at the lodging place: The devil is in the ambiguities

It would be difficult to find a passage of scripture in the Hebrew canon which is considered more enigmatic than Ex 4:24-26. It is equally difficult to find an essay on this text that does not begin with a statement to this effect, and I will not diverge from that tradition here. After witnessing the theophany of the burning bush on Mount Horeb, Moses accepts the commission of Yahweh to be the agent of liberation for the Israelites from Egypt. As Moses is returning to Egypt to fulfill his call, Yahweh sets upon either Moses or his son, seemingly out of the blue and for no reason, in order to kill him. It is a general scholarly consensus that this passage is an ancient fragment from a different and unknown tradition that has been placed in the Exodus narrative with its original context having been altered and lost.

The effort to recover the original context of this passage is what has made it such an attraction to modern scholars. I will not, however, add my voice to the cacophony of speculations about the original context. The passage is too short and too cryptic to recover from it an unknown narrative. First, since the name Moses is not in the passage, we cannot even be sure that this was originally a tradition about Moses at all. Second, since a woman performing a circumcision rite is unheard of in any ancient culture of which we know, it can be safely assumed that what we have is not a normal rite, but something abnormal (that is, Zipporah circumcising her son) occurring because of an unknown dilemma which has taken place in an unknown narrative. In my opinion, whatever tradition this text might have originally been a part of, it is irretrievable unless some archaeologist's spade might happen upon it in the desert - not impossible, but not very probable.

As interesting as some of the speculations on the passage's earlier form truly are, my work shall center on the final form of the text, its meaning(s) in its immediate and broader textual context, and the implications for the exilic and post-exilic community - that is, why this text might have been included in its present shape.

In discussing the final form of the text, the main question that arises is, "Who is being attacked?" The passage in Hebrew uses only the masculine pronoun, "he." Is "he" Moses, or is "he" Moses' son? What I propose is that the ambiguities within the passage are intentional and invite both readings. Further, the passage invokes many themes that resonate with a complex matrix of concerns relevant to the exilic and post-exilic community. The pericope may be ambiguous and enigmatic, but it has been masterfully crafted with purpose and function and it deserves a serious canonical reading.

THE LADY WITH THE KNIFE

It seems strange to have a woman perform a circumcision rite; we know of no ancient culture where circumcision is the prerogative of a woman. H. Eilberg-Schwartz makes the argument that circumcision was often a mechanism for solidifying the bonds of kinship between a father and his son, "enabling men to assert inter-generational ties to their male descendants. Men thus associate circumcision with the desire to deny the connection between mother and son and emphasize that between father and son."1 Eilberg-Schwartz even gives an example of a tribe that claimed that the blood of circumcision was dangerous to the reproductive functions of females. The women could not even walk over the spot where the blood had been buried.2 It would be difficult to determine how much of this male psychology was at work in the Hebrews. Nevertheless, we do know that women did not circumcise.3

Zipporah was not the only person at the scene who could have performed the circumcision rite. If Moses' son was under attack, Moses could have performed the circumcision. If Moses was under attack, he still could have performed the circumcision before his divine attacker reached him. Only if Moses was under attack in such a way that he was actively wrestling with his attacker could he not circumcise his son. But this is by no means mandated by the text. Why it was Zipporah who circumcised the boy is not immediately clear. But more significant than her gender, her literary importance to the passage may lie not in the fact that she was a woman, but that she was a Midianite.

Paula M. McNutt has done extensive studies on the role of Midianites and Kenites and has concluded that, as metal workers, they formed a social group on the margins of acceptability, but nevertheless "functioned as ritual specialists and/or mediators in other social realms."4 She draws on parallels to the relation of metal working groups to their surrounding societies throughout Africa and the Middle East. She notices that "the role of ritual specialist, which is often played by smiths in Africa and the Middle East, is clearly attributed to Moses' Midianite father-in-law (Exod 2:16; 3:1; 18:1, 12). It is also possible that the Kenites/Midianites in general functioned as priests or ritual specialists."5