Zipporah at the inn

Moses and his family have been tasked to travel from Midian to announce the plagues to the Pharaoh, but are interrupted by the Lord: Leningrad Codex text: King James Version translation: New Revised Standard Version translation: The standard interpretation of the passage is that God wanted to kill Moses for neglecting the rite of circumcision of his son.

Zipporah averts disaster by reacting quickly and hastily performing the rite, thus saving her husband from God's anger.

[2][3] The ambiguous or fragmentary nature of the verses leaves much room for exegesistical extrapolation, and rabbinical scholarship has provided numerous explanations.

"[6] The question of how Moses, of all people, could have neglected to have his son circumcised and thus incurred the wrath of Hashem (God) was debated in classical Jewish scholarship.

Rabbi El'azar ha-Moda'i argues that Jethro had placed an additional condition on the marriage between his daughter and Moses—that their firstborn son would be given over to idolatry and thus explaining why Moses was viewed negatively by Hashem.

According to the Samaritan version of this episode, Zipporah realized that God was angry at Moses for bringing her and their two sons along on the divine mission to free the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, and cut herself to demonstrate her repentance and prove herself worthy of joining her husband.

[2] Moses saw Zipporah's act of self-mutilation as a remnant of his wife's idolatrous upbringing, and a demonstration that God's displeasure at her presence was indeed well-founded.

James Kugel (1998) suggests that the point of the episode is the explanation of the expression "bridegroom of blood" (חתן דמים), apparently current in biblical times.

[11] German orientalist Walter Beltz thought that the original myth behind this story was about the right of Yahweh, as an ancient fertility god, to receive in sacrifice the first born son.

Originally, young boys were sacrificed to the pantheistic Cretan and Phoenician goddesses only after the priestesses had consummated ritual intercourse, the sacred marriage, with them.

[12][full citation needed] Meanwhile, William H. Propp argues that, assuming that this episode derives from the Jahwist ("J") source, links God's attack with Moses's killing of the Egyptian taskmaster (Ex.

"Angel" (ἄγγελος) is the translation throughout the Septuagint of the Hebrew "mal'ak", the term for the manifestation of Yahweh[citation needed] to humanity.