Exodus 4:24-26

(Commonplace Book)

From: The Book of Exodus

Exodus 4:24-26

24. On the journey, when Moses had halted for the night, Yahweh came to meet him and tried to kill him. 25.At once Zipporah, taking up a flint, cut off her son's foreskin and with it she touched the genitals of Moses.  "Truly, you are a bridegroom of blood to me!" she said.   26.And Yahweh let him live. It was then that she said "Bridegroom of blood" on account of the circumcision.

*****************************

I'm double-dipping here a bit, because I used this passage before in my Bible Trivia post from years ago.  But when I encountered it again while reading through the book of Exodus, I once again thought to myself "Boy, what a strange passage!"  And I couldn't resist highlighting it again.

The above translation is from The Jerusalem Bible.  The NIV reads slightly differently:

24 At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it. “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said. 26 So the Lord let him alone. (At that time she said “bridegroom of blood,” referring to circumcision.)

***************

For reference, here is the last time I talked about this passage-from my Bible Trivia post.  The quotes in that post were from the Today’s English Version.

Question 10:

God commands Moses to go back to Egypt from Midian and talk to Pharaoh. Moses agrees. At a camping place on the way to Egypt Moses meets someone who tries (unsuccessfully) to kill him.  Who tried to kill Moses at the camping place?

The answer: God. Exodus 4:24. “At a camping place on the way to Egypt, the Lord met Moses and tried to kill him.”

            Once again, my attention was drawn to this bizarre little story by Robin Lane Fox’s book.

            Fox mentions this story in the contexts of his discussions about the difference between the E source (W) and the J source (W).

            One of the things that they never told me in Sunday School is that modern scholarship has been able to identify several different sources for the Old Testament historical books.  For example, the creation story in Genesis 1 tells one story of the creation of the world referring to God under the name “Elohim”.  Genesis 2 begins a completely different story of the creation of the world, this time referring to God as Yahweh.  It appears that because of the contradictions and the differing language that these two stories come from 2 different sources that a later editor put together.  Throughout the first 5 books of the Bible, these contradictions between the Elohim God and the Yahweh God continue. The stories with the Elohim God are referred to as the E Source, while the sections about the Yahweh God are known as the “J source” (because Yahweh was translated as Jehovah.)           

            This is, incidentally, why the English Bible keeps switching back between the words and forth between the words “God” and “Lord” when referring to the Supreme Being.  The common tradition is to translate, Elohim as “God”, and Yahweh as “Lord.”

            As Robin Lane Fox points out, each source has a different style and different themes. One of the characteristics of the J source is the anthropomorphic view of God.  In the J source, Yahweh is the God who walks in the garden with Adam and Eve, who shuts the door on Noah’s ark, and anthropomorphic Yahweh is the one who meets Moses while Moses is going to Egypt and tries to kill him.  (Why the J-source God suddenly tries to kill Moses is not clear at all—it’s a very bizarre passage.)