[In the previous post on this chapter, we featured commentary from Pentateuch & Haftorahs, ed. Dr. J.H.Hertz as well as Sinaite’s discussion; here, the commentary is from EF/Everett Fox, RA/Robert Alter, whose translations are similarly titled The Five Books of Moses; additional commentary is from REF/Richard Elliott Friedman. When there are more than one commentators featured, there is a tendency for redundance; we are choosing only those comments that do not duplicate another, since it is tedious work to be typing these comments line by line on verse after verse.
Why do we dot this? Consider these posts on the TORAH as a Sinaite’s notebook being shared with any and all who are interested but have no resources as those we have already accumulated in our library and have highly and repeatedly recommended as MUST OWN in your personal library. We are a RESOURCE website, we are learners and teachers and sharers all in one. You get the benefit of all this work!
Reformatted and highlighted for this post.—Admin1]
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- First; it serves as an end bracket to Moshe’s sojourn in Midyan. As mentioned earlier, Moshe flees Egypt under pain of death b( 2:15; here, on his return, he is in mortal danger once more.
- Second, our passage seems to be an inclusion or bracketing passage for the entire Plague Narrative (Kosmala and others) this is confirmed by the use of vv.21-23 as an introduction God, designating Israel his firstborn and alluding to the future killing of Pharaoh’s/Egypt’s first born sons, demonstrate his power as life-taker, to be pacified or turned away only by a ceremonial blood-smearing—parallel to the Israelite s smearing of blood on their doorposts when their own firstborn are threatened by the Tenth plague (12:12-13)
First, it is with the act of his son’s circumstance that Moshe finally becomes a true Israelite (that, after all, was the major term of God’s covenant with Abraham in Gen. 17). Similarly, Yehoshua (Joshua), Moshe’s Successor, will circumcise the nest generation of Israelite s in the process of conquering the Promised Land (Josh.5:2).
And second, it is telling again, that the person who saves Moshe’s life in adulthood is a woman. In a sense Moshe’s early life is now over, having come full circle.
Exodus/Shemoth 4
REF: they won’t listen to my voice. Moses’ third response is surprising because he appears to doubt even to contradict what God has already told him explicitly. YHWH instructs him to gather the elders of Israel and tell them that their ancestors’ God has appeared to him and is going to take them out of Egypt, and YHWH informs him directly that “They’ll listen to your voice” (3:18). God then goes on for five verses with details of what Moses should say to the king of Egypt, what the king’s response will be, what YHWH will do in return, and how Israel will leave and despoil Egypt. But Moses, appearing to have missed the content of these last five verses, questions the earlier point, the last point that directly referred to him himself. He says, “And here, they won’t believe me and won’t listen to my voice” (4:1). This can also be understood to mean “And what if they will not believe me and will not listen to my voice.” Even on this understanding, it is remarkable. Either way, it is depicting Moses as questioning what God has just told him. When God Himself tells a human, “They’ll listen to you,” we do not normally expect the human to say, But what if they don’t?” Again YHWH does not answer the question but instead responds directly to the problem at hand. That is, instead of telling Moses what to do if they do not listen, God gives Moses three miraculous signs, which will guarantee that they will listen.
RA: What is that in your hand? The Shepherd’s staff is his familiar possession and constant practical tool. Its sudden metamorphosis into a reptile is thus a dramatic demonstration to Moses of God’s power to intervene in the order of nature that will be repeatedly manifested in the Plagues narrative. The staff itself will be wielded by Moses as a magician’s wand, and Moses’s mission to Egypt, an international capital of the technology of magic, will be implemented through the exercise of divinely enabled magic. In verse 20, the staff will be called “God’s staff,” not because it is a staff belonging to God that was given to Moses, as some scholars have contended, but because from this moment of the Horeb epiphany, the simple shepherd’s staff has been transmuted into both the theater and the conduit of divine power.
RA: Fling it to the ground. There is an odd semantic “rhyming” in the recycling for the staff of the violent verb that Pharaoh used for the Hebrew male infants (1:22).
it became a snake and Moses fled. The trusty support turns into something dangerous and alien triggering a primal fear in Moses–the very fear that is figured in the primordial reptile of the Garden story (Genesis 3:15). Although this particular transformation has the look of a conjuror’s trick (and Pharaoh’s soothsayers will replicate it), it is an intimation of the awesome power to unleash the zoological and meteorological realms that God will manifest in Egypt.
grasp its tail. As has often been noted, this is the most dangerous place to seize a venomous snake, and thus requires Moses to trust implicitly that God will keep him from harm.
EF: had tzaraat: Trad. “was leprous,” but tzaraat is now understood as a kind of skin disease, not as serious as true leprosy. In the Bible, it was, however, often taken as a sign from God of wrongdoing on the part of the victim.
RA: his hand was blanched like snow. The Hebrew metsora’at, here represented as “blanched,” is rendered as “leprous” in many older translations but the modern scholarly consensus is that what is involved is some disfiguring skin disease other than leprosy. The comparison with snow would not refer to flaking, as some have claimed, because “like snow” is a known biblical simile for total whiteness–in the case of skin, loss of all pigmentation A skin disease will figure among the plagues with which God will strike the Egyptians and so is the second of the two metamorphic “signs” here. God appropriately is both a sudden bringer of disease and a healer.
EF: voice: Meaning “message” as in Ugaritic usage. sign: These were often required or used by prophets in the Bible.
RA: heed the voice of the first sign. Signs don’t have voices, but the formulation is determined by the momentum of the idiom “heed the voice.” It is a case, as Abraham ibn Ezra observes, when “Torah speaks like the language of humankind.”
EF: blood: Since the Nile was regarded as divine by the Egyptians, not only would such a plague be miraculous and devastating but it would also be a direct swipe at the Egyptian religion.
RA: the water that you take from the Nile will become blood. Thus, the enactment of this third sign coincides with the implementation of the first plague. If the metamorphoses of Moses’s own staff and hand do not convince the Hebrews, the spectacular transformation of the Nile–an Egyptian deity, as Rashi notes, and the very source of life in Egypt–will eliminate any lingering skepticism. The predominance of blood in this entire narrative should be observed. Moses has already spilled Egyptian blood (the phrase is not used, but it is a fixed biblical idiom for both manslaughter and murder). The Ten Plagues will begin with a plague of blood and end with one in which blood is heavily involved. On the way to Egypt (verses 24-26), Moses’s life will be saved by a rite carried out through blood. The story of liberation from Egyptian bondage is consistently imagined as a process of violent oppression to be broken only by violent counterstrokes. The portent here seems to be to turn the Nile water into blood when it is scooped up and scattered on dry land. In the event, a more cataclysmic turning of the water of the river in its channel into blood will take place. “Dry land” and “water” prefigure the Sea of Reeds miracle.
REF: two signs. The two signs are that the staff becomes a snake and his hand becomes leprous as snow. Why these two things? They foreshadow coming events: the snake on a pole (Num 21:5-9) and Miriam’s being leprous as snow (Num 12:10).
EF: no man of words am I: Yet this is exactly the quality that Moshe’s mission requires (Greenberg 1969). Similarly, Jeremiah (1:6) seeks to evade the call, although his refusal is based more on inexperience than on lack of eloquence. yesterday . . . the ay before: A Hebrew idiom for “the past.” heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue: The nature of Moshe’s speech impediment i not clear. Curiously, write Buber (1988), it is the stammerer whose task it is to bring down God’s word to the human world.
RA: heavy-mouthed and heavy-tongued. It seems futile to speculate, as so many commentators have, whether Moses suffered from an actual speech impediment or merely was unaccustomed to public speaking. The point is that he invokes these Hebrew idioms for impeded speech–whether as hyperbole or as physiological fact scarcely matters—to express his feeling of incapacity for the mission, which is his new reason for refusal now that God has settled the question of the skepticism of the Israelites. In the subsequent narrative, Moses actually appears to be capable of considerable eloquence.
REF: I’m not a man of words. These words, Moses’ fourth response, will reverberate at the beginning of Moses’ last speech. (See the comment on Deut. 1:1.)
heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue. This is frequently taken to mean some sort of speech defect. It is frequently translated as “slow of speech”; and a famous midrash goes so far as to recount the origin of Moses’ speech impediment in a story that pictures him burning his tongue in his infancy in the Egyptian palace. More cautiously, we are best advised to seek the meaning of a biblical idiom by, first of all, observing where else it occurs in Scripture. “Heavy of tongue” occurs in one other place Ezek 3:5-7. There YHWH tells Ezekiel that he is not being sent to peoples who are “deep of lip and heavy of tongue,”whose words Ezekiel cannot understand. YHWH says, ironically, that such peoples would listen, but the house of Israel will not listen! In that context, “heavy of tongue” refers to nations who speak foreign languages. It has therefore been suggested that Moses’ protest here in Exodus is that he does not speak Egyptian. This is difficult to defend, though given the explicit report in Exodus 2 that Moses has been raised in the Egyptian court. Still, the meaning of “heavy of tongue” as referring to speaking a foreign language fits our context in Exodus 4, I believe, because YHWH has told Moses to gather and speak to the elders of Israel. Moses’ protest may perhaps be best understood, then, as being on the grounds that he does not yet speak Hebrew! God’s response in fact confirms that the problem for Moses is speaking “to the people,” not to the Egyptians (4:16). And the final confirmation is that in the first meeting with the people’s elders “Aaron spoke all the words that YHWH had spoken to Moses” (4:30); but in the first meeting with Pharaoh, both Moses and Aaron speak (5:1,3).
nor since you spoke to your servant. Another understanding of “I’m not a man of words” and “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” is that Moses is saying that he is not eloquent. And this is a wonderful irony, because his humble wording here is in fact an eloquent formulation (“Neither yesterday nor the day before–nor since you spoke to your servant!”) Moses, as it were, undermines his own denial.
Whether “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” means a speech defect, a foreign language, or a lack of eloquence, a question remains: why choose a man who has a speaking problem for a task that requires speaking?! The lesson may be (as with Jacob) that God can work through anyone. Or it may be that it takes divine insight to comprehend what would make someone the best person for a task. Perhaps it is precisely Moses’ heaviness of mouth that makes his acts most impressive in Egypt, rather than their being performed by a person who heralds each of the miraculous plagues with a grand speech. And perhaps such a greater speaker would shift the focus too much from God to the human himself. Also, one can learn from the divine choice that one should not judge a person’s ability to do a task too hastily or by the most obvious characteristics. Even an individual who has a disadvantage may be the best suited to be successful.
RA: I Myself will be with your mouth. This rather unusual idiom is a way of focusing in on God’s initial promise that He will be with Moses. Since Moses has now made an issue of his mouth and tongue, God assures him that the promised divine sustaining aid will be specifically palpable in the organ of speech.
REF: I’ll be. Hebrew ‘HYH. Note the significance of the first recurrence of the word here. It also came in 3:12, before the revelation of the divine name. It will come again in 4:15. So the answer to Moses’ first, second, third, and fourth responses is, in essence, the same: ‘HYH. I Am. I’ll Be with you.
EF: pray send by whose hand you will send: That is, find someone else!
RA: send, pray, by the hand of him You would send. The implication, of course, is: but not me. Moses resorts to this vague and slightly cryptic phrase because he doesn’t dare to say in so many words that he is still unwilling. But God immediately recognizes this as a refusal–hence the flare-up of anger in His immediate response.
REF: send by the hand you’ll send. There are two opposite meanings that this strange clause may have. It may mean: send whoever—which is to say, anyone but me. Or it may mean that Moses now acquiesces to the divine will, in the sense of “Very well, then, send the one you want.” The fact that God is angry at Moses in the next verse fits more naturally with the former meaning. In either case, the one common element of the two meanings is: they both denote that Moses is out of excuses. God has nullified each of his four attempts to avoid this task. He can only acquiesce or beg off. He cannot raise problems or objections. This is also further evidence that fear of the task is what has motivated Moses all along. He is forced now to the essential point. It is not “Who am I” or “What shall I tell them?” or “They won’t believe me.” It is Moses’ reluctance about the hand whom God has chosen to send.
Through all five responses, Moses’ reluctance stands out and perhaps comes as a surprise to many who find it difficult to imagine someone’s receiving a prophetic commission directly from God and trying to avoid it. Yet this image of the reluctant prophet recurs in several other places in the Bible (Elijah, Jonah, Jeremiah). It does not appear to me to be simply a recurring literary motif in the way that some understand, for example, the “wise courtier” theme. It seems rather to reflect a shared conviction, by a number of the biblical authors, that it is not necessarily an honor or a joy to be a prophet. It is a burden, almost beyond human endurance. Here, in the book that introduces the role of the prophet as the individual who brings a revelation to a community, we learn from the beginning that this is not attractive. To hear the voice of God is frightening. To experience the divine power is terrifying. To deliver a divine message to the community is thankless, frustrating, and occasionally even dangerous.
EF: flared up: Literally, burned, the normal biblical metaphor for anger. Aharon: Trad. English “Aaron.” This is the first mention of the brother whom we later find out was the firstborn. the Levite: Why this designation here? Some theorize that it means “joiner” while others see it as a tracing of Levite roots as spokespeople in Israel. The phrase could also be translated as “Is not your brother Aharon the Levite?”
RA: Is there not Aaron the Levite, your brother? The innocent reader might be impelled to ask, “Is there?”, since no previous report of Aaron’s existence had been made. The account of Moses’s conception and birth in 2:2 is elliptic because it is made to sound as though they directly followed the marriage of his parents, whereas Moses is actually the youngest of three siblings, Miriam being the oldest.
his heart will rejoice. Are we to infer that the brothers had secret contact and hence an established fraternal bond during the years that Moses was growing up as the Egyptian princess’s adopted son? The narrative data provided in chapter 2 at least allow the possibility that Moses’s family could have found ways to stay in touch with him, and this in turn would explain why he felt a sense of identification with his Hebrew “brothers” when he witnessed the beating of the Hebrew slave by the Egyptian taskmaster. In any case,, Aaron’s joy at the brothers’ reunion after Moses’s years as a fugitive suggests that the two will work together in fraternal unison.
REF: your Levite brother. This means a fellow Levite. The text does not yet identify Aaron as Moses’ actual brother. That is not stated explicitly until Exod. 6:20. After that, Aaron is referred to as “your brother” (&:1,2) and never again as “your Levite brother.”
I knew that he will speak! This has usually been taken to mean only that God is aware that Aaron is a capable speaker. But the tenses and context possibly indicate that it is much stronger: that God is informing Moses that He knew all along that Aaron would have to do the talking for Moses. This would only be a case of divine foreknowledge (knowing something in advance), not of God preordaining or manipulating human affairs. This in turn opens the question of why God would be angry at Moses’ protest. The ambiguity here is tied to the complexity of Hebrew verb tenses (which are not simply past, present and future, as they are often taught), and so the meaning of this verse remains uncertain.
EF: you shall put . . .: Moshe is to Aharon as God is to a prophet; the latter is to serve principally as a mouthpiece.
EF: a god: Others, “an oracle.”
RA: you will be for him like a god. Moses will convey “oracular” messages to Aaron who will transmit them as official spokesman to the people. This rather audacious way of stating the communications relay is enabled by the fact that ‘elohim, which was the primary meaning of “god,” extends to merely angelic divine beings and even to human eminences.
REF: you will become a god for him. No matter how figuratively we take this image, it is extraordinary. To speak of a human, Moses, in terms of the divine is awesome, and it will recur later when God tells Moses, “Ive made you a god to Pharaoh!” (7:1). The idea that Moses will in any way be godlike in other humans’ perceptions sets up a theme that will continue after the exodus: Moses must repeatedly insist to the people that their complaints are against God and not against him. This in turn recalls Joseph’s insistence to the wine steward, the baker, and Pharaoh that “Not I. God will answer. . .” (Gen 41:16).
EF: Yitro: Here his name appears as Yeter in Hebrew. Pray let me go: B-R: “Now I will go.” my brothers: This concern has not been heard from Moshe during his years in Midyan, nor has he mentioned his past at all. whether they are still alive: “Reminiscent of Yosef’s cry in Gen. 45:3 “Is my father still alive?” Note that Moshe says nothing to Yitro about what happened to him on the mountain.
RA: Jether. This is a variant form of Jethro, which is more often used in the narrative.
return to my brothers who are in Egypt that I may see whether they still live. Moses does not mention that he had fled Egypt for having committed a capital crime, and perhaps one may infer that he never divulged that part of his Egyptian past to his father-in-law. In the very next verse, God will give Moses assurance that he no longer is in danger of execution for the act of manslaughter. The last clause here is a pointed allusion to Joseph’s anxious question to his brothers (Genesis 45:3) about whether his father is still alive: the familial bond that induced Joseph to bring his father and brothers down to Egypt will ow be manifested in Moses’s actions as he sets out to reverse the process, bringing his “brothers” up out of Egypt and back to Canaan. His wondering whether his brothers still live is more than a way of saying that he wants to find out how they are faring because he is aware that they have been the target of a genocidal plan.
REF: Jether. His name is Jethro. The change to yeter here may be part of a wordplay to come later.
EF: all the men: Moshe need no longer fear for his life at Pharaoh’s hands, but he will shortly be threatened by God himself (see vv. 24-26).
EF: mounted them upon a donkey: A stereotyped biblical way of describing setting out on a journey. staff of God: In standard hero stories, one would expect to hear a good deal more about this object which would normally possess magical powers. Here, as usual, such a motif has been suppressed. It surfaces later in Jewish legend, in full mythical garb. The staff is mentioned in this verse, possibly to provide a dramatic conclusion to the entire revelation account: Moshe sets out for Egypt armed, as it were, with a token from God. This was the missing piece in his activity in Egypt.
RA: his sons. Only one son was previously mentioned, and only one son figures in verses 24-26. Some textual critics, noting an ambiguity in early Hebrew orthography propose “his son” as the original reading.
EF: portents: Signs, wonders. send . . . free: Others, “let . . . go.”
RA: But I on My part shall toughen his heart. This phrase, which with two synonymous variants punctuates the Plagues narrative, has been the source of endless theological debate over whether Pharaoh is exercising free will or whether God is playing him as a puppet and then punishing him for his puppet’s performance. The latter alternative surely states matters too crudely. The heart in biblical idiom is the seat of understanding, feeling, and intention. The verb rendered here as “toughen” (King James Version, “harden”) has the primary meaning of “strengthen,” and the most frequent synonym of this idiom as it occurs later in the story means literally “to make heavy.” God needs Pharaoh’s recalcitrance in order that He may deploy the plagues, one after another, thus humiliating the great imperial power of Egypt—the burden of the triumphalist narrative we have already noted–and demonstrating the impotence of all the gods of Egypt. But Pharaoh is presumably manifesting his own character: callousness, resistance to instruction, and arrogance would all be implied by the toughening of the heart. God is not so much pulling a marionette’s strings as allowing, or perhaps encouraging, the oppressor-king to persist in his habitual harsh willfulness and presumption..
EF: Thus says YHWH: A formula often used by the prophets to open their pronouncements. The context is similar as well: the prophets stand frequently against the kings of Israel and Judah, arguing for an end to oppression. my firstborn: The use of this image is a statement of emotional force, not actual primacy of birth or antiquity, as Israel was a comparative latecomer in the ancient Near East.
RA: My son, my firstborn son is Israel. Framing the relationship in these terms lays the ground in measure-for-measure justice for the lethal tenth plague predicted at the end of the next verse, since Pharaoh has sought to destroy Israel.
REF: My child, my firstborn is Israel. God tells Moses to say this to Pharaoh, but Moses is never reported as saying it. He is also never reported as saying the rest of this message: “Should you refuse to let it go, here: I’m killing your child, your firstborn!” Why does he not say this to Pharaoh? It is apparently because his first words to Pharaoh do not work. Moses begins by speaking strongly to Pharaoh: “YHWH said, ‘Let my people go.'” But Pharaoh unmoved, replies, “I don’t know YHWH, and I won’t let Israel go.” Moses then changes his approach dramatically. He starts over and this time does not use the commanding wording (the imperative), but rather the polite particle of request (Hebrew na’) and the gentler form: “please that we might go” (the cohortative). Moses has backed off somewhat and taken a more conciliatory approach rather than taking the even tougher approach of threatening Pharaoh with the death of his own son. This conciliatory wording is given to Moses at the burning bush as well (3:18), so it appears that God is giving Moses both the tough and the gentle options. In any negotiation–in law, business, or anhy human relationship, including marriage–one must use wisdom to know when to exercise each approach.
RA: to kill your son, your firstborn. This dire threat, to be fulfilled in the tenth plague, also inducts us to the narrative episode that follows in the next three verses, in which the LORD seeks to kill Moses, and the blood of the firstborn intercedes.
EF: to make him die: To kill him, the means is not specified, but one could surmise that illness is meant.
RA: on the way at the night camp that the LORD . . . sought to put him to death. 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 synedoche 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 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 the 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 eath, 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.
REF: he asked to kill him. No one knows what the episode at the lodging place means. The explanation that accounts for more of the connections than any other is that of my colleague William Propp: The reason that God seeks to put Moses to death is because Moses still bears the bloodguilt for having killed an Egyptian. The blood of the circumcision serves to expiate the guilt, making it possible for Moses to live and return to Egypt. The word for “blood” in this story is the plural damim, which is associated with bloodguilt. The word for “bridegroom” also means “circumcision” in Arabic (and in some cultures circumcision is performed just before marriage). Propp suggests that the original bridegroom/circumcision connection had been lost by the time this story was composed, and so it was created to explain an old expression: hatan damim, “bridegroom of blood. Also, this use of blood to avert death is a foreshadowing of the tenth plague in Egypt.
Still, like all explanations I have seen, this leaves the question of why God would choose Moses make a miraculous appearance to him, insist on his going to Egypt despite his five attempts to avoid it, and then seek to kill him. I therefore understand the confused use of the pronoun “he” in this story in a different way. All commentators recognize that it is unclear when it refers to God, to Moses, or to Moses’ son. But they all take the first “he” to refer to God: He (God) sought to kill Moses. I am raising the possibility (reflected in my translation: “he asked to kill him”) that it means that Moses is asking God to take his life (rather than send him to Egypt). This is consistent with another time in Moses’ life when he will ask God to kill him (Num. 11:15, where he says emphatically: “Kill me!”). And it fits with a model of prophets who ask God to take their lives–Elijah (1 Kings 19:4) and Jonah (4:4)—or say that they prefer death to being prophets—Jeremiah (20:14-18). (Note that these are the same three prophets who, like Moses are famous for being reluctant).
If Moses is seeking his own death here, then Zipporah’s action might be understood as her passionate response to her husband’s wish to die: You have a wife! You have a son, who should live to marry and be a part of the covenant!
EF: his: Whose? Presumably those of Moshe, who is then “released” by God.
EF: released him: Or “relaxed (his hold upon) him.” circumcision-cuttings: Others, “on account of the circumcision,” “because of the circumcision,” “referring to the circumcision.”
REF: And he held back from him. Meaning that Moses stopped asking God to kill him.
RA: And the LORD said to Aaron. We return to the welcome sphere of a God Who speaks, and directs men to act through speech. After the reunion of the brothers, they will promptly implement God’s instructions as Moses imparts the words to Aaron and Aaron then speaks the words to the people.
EF: The people trusted . . .: For the first time in the Torah, Israel responds to God’s promises in a positive manner, something which will rarely happen again. The vocabulary and attitude form an inclusio (a bracket) with the end of the Liberation Narrative, 14:30-31 (the verbs “trust” and “see”).
RA: And the people believed and heeded. In the event the two signs of the staff and the hand are sufficient to win their trust (“believe” does not have any doctrinal sense here) and the third sign, of water turned to blood, can be reserved for the first plague.