Zipporah Brings the Blood to the Destroyer's Feet

An Angel Waiting at the Inn

The commission had come. The bush had burned without burning. The voice had named the name. Moses had taken his wife and his sons and set out from Midian on the road back to Egypt, and somewhere on that road, at the stopping place for the night, the destroying angel was waiting.

The destroying angel. The Targum names him precisely: Mashchit, the same one who would stand over Egypt on Passover night and pass through the households that had no blood on their doorposts. Here he had come earlier, and his quarry was not Pharaoh's people but the man God had just appointed to lead Israel out from among them.

Moses had not circumcised his son Gershom. The Torah's plain text offers no explanation. The Targum supplies one in a single sentence: his father-in-law Jethro had blocked the procedure. Moses had not been negligent. He had been overruled. The omission belonged to Jethro, not to the man who had just accepted the most consequential mission in the history of his people. But the angel did not care about the circumstances. The covenant had not been kept on the child's body, and the angel had come to enforce what was missing.

Zipporah Acts Alone

Zipporah took a stone. She did not wait for permission or instruction or the arrival of someone more qualified. She circumcised Gershom herself, there at the inn, with what was at hand. Then she brought the severed foreskin to the feet of the destroying angel and she named what she had done and why.

The husband sought to circumcise, but the father-in-law obstructed him. Now let this blood of the circumcision atone for my husband.

One sentence. It laid out the cause of the omission, it identified the blood being offered, and it named the result she demanded. Zipporah did not petition the angel. She explained the situation to him as one who had understood the terms of the crisis and met them precisely. The blood at his feet was not a plea. It was a discharge of the covenant debt, paid in the only currency the moment had left to her.

The Angel Steps Back

The destroying angel desisted.

The Targum closes that part of the scene in four words. After the angel steps back and Moses lives, Zipporah speaks again. The first speech had been urgent, the words of someone working under immediate threat. The second speech is relief given voice: How lovely is the blood of this circumcision that has delivered my husband from the angel of destruction.

The Aramaic phrase rendered as how lovely is kammah chaviv, an expression of warmth and wonder rather than clinical observation. A woman who had just performed emergency surgery with a flint knife, in a foreign country, at night, in the middle of an angelic confrontation her husband was losing, found when it was over that she could call the blood lovely. The covenant blood was lovely because it had worked. Because it had purchased back the life of the man who had been appointed to speak to Pharaoh, and because she had been the one to pay it.

What the Targum Explains

The Torah's three verses on this episode, Exodus 4:24-26, are among the most contested in the entire Pentateuch. Who is the attacker? Whose feet receive the foreskin? Why does Zipporah call Moses a bridegroom of blood, and what does that phrase mean?

Pseudo-Jonathan answers every question. The attacker is the destroying angel, named and identified. Moses's feet receive the foreskin, and the blood placed there is the atoning payment for his uncircumcised son. The bridegroom of blood phrase appears in the Targum as a conclusion to the crisis rather than a mystery lodged at its center. Zipporah speaks not in confusion but in relief, and the relief is fully earned. She has just saved the prophet of Israel on the road to his commission by meeting a divine agent with a stone knife and a line of argument that turned out to be exactly right.