At a lodging place on the way the Lord met him and sought to put him to death. Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it and said, “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” So he let him alone. It was then that she said, “A bridegroom of blood,” because of the circumcision.
– Exodus 4:24-26

At one point in my regular Bible reading, I found myself completely puzzled by these three verses inserted near the end of Exodus 4. The chapter seems to make more sense without them: God commissions Moses to leave Midian, Aaron meets him to help. But in between—God tries to kill Moses? What is going on?

“This episode,” writes Jeffrey Tigay, “is extraordinarily puzzling because the motive for God’s attack is unclear, the pronouns are equivocal, and Zipporah’s remarks are enigmatic.” Indeed. Take the pronouns: it’s unclear who is being referred to in the first sentence (most think Moses, others suggest Pharaoh’s firstborn from the preceding verse), which son is referred to in the second sentence (Moses had more than one son by that point, including Gershom, his firstborn), or even whose feet it is (in Hebrew Moses is not identified; it simply says “his”). No one agrees on what Zipporah’s strange comment means; some feel it expresses her disgust or revulsion, others that is a ceremonial utterance related to Midianite rites (I find the KJV translation humorous: “a bloody husband thou art”). No one agrees on what the deadly attack was; some feel it was a theophany of some kind, or an angel, others an incapacitating illness. While most feel God’s intent here was to enforce the law of circumcision that Moses had neglected in his own family prior to his stepping out in leadership, others read it in allegory, as a spiritual landmark along the journey from desert to pagan city. 

The temptation with obscure sections of Biblical text is to either skim over them entirely, or get so caught up in them we lose the big picture. But, granted that we have a good foundation in the vast majority of clearer passages, the more confusing ones can invite us to dig deeper, to have greater humility and patience in our approach to the Word. 

St. Augustine writes about Biblical interpretation in On Christian Doctrine: “Some of the expressions are so obscure as to shroud the meaning in the thickest darkness. And I do not doubt that all this was divinely arranged for the purpose of subduing pride by toil, and of preventing a feeling of satiety in the intellect, which generally holds in small esteem what is discovered without difficulty . . . Accordingly the Holy Spirit has, with admirable wisdom and care for our welfare, so arranged the Holy Scriptures as by the plainer passages to satisfy our hunger, and by the more obscure to stimulate our appetite.”

Well, these verses do stimulate my intellectual appetite: because they were included here for a reason, whether or not I can make one out. One thing I find fascinating: the word for “touched” here, Hebrew naga, is next used in Exodus 12:22: “Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch [naga] the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin.” Just before Moses enters Egypt, blood touches flint to thwart divine wrath. As Moses exits Egypt, blood touches hyssop and lintel, again to escape death. The blood touching flint came from a son; the blood touching hyssop came from a lamb, but points to a Son. The exodus is framed with the touch of blood and the threat of death to say: your deliverance from slavery only happens this way. One day it will come from the true Bridegroom of blood. Is that not who Jesus is to us? I think of the first time John sees Jesus in heaven: “a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain” (Revelation 4:6). In other words, bloody. And all the creatures and elders sang, “and by your blood you ransomed people for God.” Our Bridegroom of blood.