If you asked people what's the hardest part of the Bible to interpret, you'd get a wide range of answers, but "Zipporah At The Inn" would probably be one of the most common:

"On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the LORD met him and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin, and touched his feet with it, and said 'Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!' So he let him alone. It was then she said, 'A bridegroom of blood by circumcision.'" -Exodus 4:24-26, NRSVA [^1].

The context is that God sent Moses down to Egypt, only to try and kill somebody when Moses went to an inn with his wife Zipporah and their son Gershom. There's no clear reason for why God's angry, or even who God's trying to kill here. A lot of translations will try to gloss over this by saying that Moses was the target for God's wrath and that Zipporah threw the foreskin at Moses, but that's just information the translator added to make the verse easier to understand. I won't say that adding information is necessarily a bad thing to do (translation is inherently interpretive), but translation choices need to be justified, and there isn't really good justification for this change. In this article, I want to take a good look at this verse and try to come up with my own interpretation.

The Pronoun Game

The main problem with reading this verse is that it's hard to tell who's doing what to who. Like I said before, it's usually assumed that God wanted to kill Moses, but this interpretation has some problems. At this point in the story, it's pretty clear that Moses is meant to play a major role in freeing the slaves from Egypt. You could argue that portraying Moses as expendable could help elevate Aaron's status within the Exodus narrative, which is a common theme in the Priestly source (more on that later), but this is very abstract. It also doesn't explain why Zipporah felt the need to circumcise her son and who she threw the foreskin at. Again, the conventional wisdom is that the foreskin was thrown at Moses, mainly because she refers to the recipient of the foreskin as a "bloody husband". The problem here is that they were already married, so there's no reason to reaffirm their marital status through a circumcision ritual. It certainly couldn't have been the case that God felt that their marriage was invalid unless their son was circumcised, since there's absolutely no evidence that ancient Israelites ever associated circumcision with marriage, regardless of the terminology used in this verse. I also doubt that the foreskin was thrown at Gershom, since referring to your own son as a husband would be extremely taboo. We shouldn't ignore the possibility that God was the recipient of the foreskin either, although this is difficult to reconcile with Zipporah referring to the recipient as her husband. Finally, there's a deep emphasis that's placed on circumcision and its ability to quell God's wrath. Interpreting this story and figuring out who does what requires us to understand how ancient Israelites viewed circumcision. Traditionally, it's been held that the story is about God trying to kill Moses for failing to circumcise his son, based on the belief that Israelites were commanded to circumcise their children. However, I disagree with this interpretation.

Source Criticism And The Abrahamic covenant

Exodus is part of a collection of Biblical books called the Torah, with the other 4 books of the Torah being Genesis, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Tradition says that Moses wrote the 5 books himself, but modern Biblical scholarship says that the Torah was actually compiled from a variety of similar but diverging sources, leading to basic plot points repeating themselves with meaningful differences between them. There's some controversy about how many sources there are and what verses come from which sources, but there's a rough consensus on there being 4 sources:

-The Elohist (Noted for its reluctance to say YHWH and for portraying God has transcendent)

-The Yahwist (Noted for its anthropomorphic portrayal of God)

-The Priestly Source (Noted for promoting the interests of the Aaronic priestly caste and focuses on properly performing rituals)

-The Deutronomist (Noted for its concern for social justice and centralizing worship in Jerusalem)

When viewing the Torah through the lens of source criticism, we see a major problem with the traditional interpretation of Exodus 4:24-26. The commandment for the Israelites to be circumcised comes from Genesis 17, where it's said that every male must be circumcised at 8 days old as part of the Abrahamic covenant. However, a different account for the Abrahamic covenant is given in Genesis 15. In this account, the covenant is sealed by an animal sacrifice, with no mention of circumcision. Clearly, these accounts come from different sources. Specifically, the Wikiversity article on the Bible identifies Genesis 15 as mostly Elohist and Genesis 17 as Priestly. By comparison, Exodus 4:24-26 is identified as Yahwist. Since they aren't from the same source, there's no reason to think that the author saw a failure to circumcise as a sin. In that case, what's going on?

Circumcision As Human Sacrifice

If Exodus 4:24-26 is one of the most difficult verses because of its ambiguous grammar, Exodus 22:29-30 is one of the most difficult because of how its implications. "You shall not delay to make offerings from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses. The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep: for seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to me." - Exodus 22:29-30, NRSVA.

Viewed in isolation, this verse clearly indicates that the ancient Israelites used to sacrifice their children to God. Of course, you clearly shouldn't view verses in isolation. This verse aside, there's several other verses that clearly denounce human sacrifices. In fact, one of the most famous stories from the Bible is "The Binding Of Isaac", where the climax of the story is God telling Abraham not to sacrifice his son.[^2] Isn't that enough to say that Exodus 22:29-30 has nothing to do with human sacrifices? Well, no.

Exodus 13:12-13 provides some idea of what's going on here:

"You shall set apart to the LORD all that first opens the womb. All firstborn of your livestock that are males shall be the LORD's. But every firstborn donkey you shall redeem with a sheep; if you do not redeem it, you must break its neck. Every firstborn male among your children you shall redeem." -Exodus 13:12-13, NRSVA.

Okay, that seems to settle it. Taking these two verses together, clearly the commandment to dedicate your firstborn to God means to redeem the child. Does that solve everything? No. It's still notable that firstborns are even mentioned in a verse about what animals needs to be sacrificed. Rather than outright say that children aren't supposed to be sacrificed, the verse says they need to be redeemed to avoid sacrifice. This creates a de facto ban on child sacrifice, but the verse implies that firstborn children are still de jure valid sacrificial creatures. Turning the page to Ezekiel 20:25-26, we see the following:

"Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am the LORD." -Ezekiel 20:25-26, NRSVA.

Okay, so according to this verse, God actually did make the Israelites sacrifice their children, but just as a temporary punishment. This is mostly what Exodus 13:12-13 says, but implies that firstborn children aren't actually de jure sacrifical creatures. More importantly, it implies that firstborn children really were sacrificed at one point. We run into even more problems when we turn to Jeremiah: "And they go on building the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire--which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind." -Jeremiah 7:31, NRSVA

Now we have a verse saying that God actually never wanted the Israelites to sacrifice their children in the first place. How do we reconcile this with the other verses? The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that the ancient Israelites really did sacrifice their firstborns, but rapidly developed a stigma around the practice and attempted to find ways to avoid killing their children. True to the often fragmented nature of the ancient Israelite religion, this resulted in a variety of different traditions about why the Israelites were wrong to perform child sacrifice. Since the ancient Israelites believed that life-essence is stored in the blood, we might expect them to have developed a tradition that involves shedding a child's blood without killing them. With that in mind, here's my interpretation of "Zipporah At The Inn":

"Moses failed to sacrifice his firstborn son, angering God. In retribution, God descends to Earth to personally kill Gershom. Desperate to save her son, Zipporah circumcises her son with a sharp piece of flint, implicitly showing that she didn't have a knife on hand because she never planned on doing this. After circumcising him, she throws the foreskin at God's feet as an offering. To convince God that this sacrifice is valid, she emphasizes the blood that was shed. God accepts this offering as valid and leaves. Triumphantly, Zipporah proclaims that the blood was shed by circumcision, as opposed to child sacrifice."

This would have started out as being exclusively for firstborn males, but it's easy to see how this would expand to all male children out of ambiguity over what to do if the firstborn is a girl or if the firstborn dies before reaching 8 days old, which is when Exodus 22:29-30 says the firstborn son is supposed to be sacrificed. Speaking of which, let's go and take a proper look at Genesis 17:

"This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring." -Genesis 17:10:12, NRSVA

While this verse says that circumcision is meant as a visual reminder of the covenant, it's notable that it says to circumcise on the exact same day that firstborns are supposed to be sacrificed. It also creates a nice parallel to Genesis 15: The Elohist account seals the covenant with an animal sacrifice, while the Priestly account seals the covenant with a form of human sacrifice that's neither literal nor symbolic. Also, the Sanchuniathon says that El (a Caananite deity that God is based on) circumcised himself after sacrificing his son. If this is true, then the ancient Israelites already had a cultural link between circumcision and child sacrifice, making it a natural choice to serve as an alternative to child sacrifice.

Difficulties

While I think that this is the best way to interpret Exodus 4:24-26, there's counterarguments that you could make to it. For starters, not everybody thinks that the ancient Israelites sacrificed every firstborn. Specifically, Joel Baden, Yale professor of the Hebrew Bible, thinks not only did the ancient Israelites not sacrifice every firstborn, this practice didn't happen anywhere in the ancient Near East. Instead, he thinks that the firstborn sons became priests before the tradition that the Levite tribe were the only ones allowed to serve, as recorded in Numbers 3:12. However, I'm not convinced.

Even if there isn't much evidence of the ancient Israelites sacrificing literally every firstborn, there's plenty of evidence that child sacrifice was practised with some frequency in the ancient Near East and Israel itself. I also think that Dr. Baden is too quick to discard Exodus 22:29-30 as evidence for this practice. After all, if we have a civilization that Dr. Baden admits practised child sacrifice, and a text from that civilization says to sacrifice every firstborn child, that's pretty good evidence that they actually did sacrifice every single firstborn.

Another thing is that even if this story actually is about human sacrifice, this isn't a straightforward reading of the text. It doesn't tell us anything about what Zipporah referred to the recipient of the foreskin as a bridegroom, and while its plausible that the story is about human sacrifice, the story doesn't outright say it. It's totally possible that the story is a splinter from a larger (now lost) story that had a completely different message. While we can't discount this possibility, it's pointless to speculate about the message of the hypothetical lost story. Even with the parts that are difficult to explain, the best explanation for the story as a whole is that it's a text about human sacrifice.

TL;DR

Exodus 4:24-26 seems to be an origin myth for the practice of circumcision, which emerged as an alternative to child sacrifice.

Footnotes

[^1] The NRSVA translation says that the foreskin was flung at Moses, but this isn't in the actual Hebrew.

[^2] There's actually a theory that this story was originally about a completed human sacrifice, and that the story was later changed by an editor to match changing norms about sacrificial laws. I'm probably going to write an article about this, but I personally don't believe this.