Thursday, May 3, 2007
Moses
So I was reading Exodus 4 and came across this part I don't remember reading about before. The story is of Moses agreeing to God's plan for him to go to the Israelites and tell them that he is going to lead them out of Egypt. On his way to them, Moses stops at a lodging place with his wife and son. Verse 24 says that the Lord met Moses there and was about to kill him. But Zipporah, Moses' wife, takes a flint knife and cuts off her son's foreskin and touches Moses' feet with it. She says "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me". And then the passage states that the Lord let him alone after that. My concordence says that Moses' son has to be circumsised before Moses can serve as Israel's deliverer. But what I don't get is that the Lord came to kill him. And if Zipporah hadn't intervened, the picture I get is that God would've killed him. That doesn't make sense to me. Why wouldn't God just tell Moses "Oh, and make sure you circumsise Gershom", rather than coming to kill him for it without any warning? Also, what's the whole thing about the bridegroom of blood? Any insite?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Much of the behavior attributed to God in the Old Testament doesn't make sense to me. This is one of those instances.
If I had to come up with an explanation, it would be that God's desire to kill Moses was meant to be a picture -- to show/remind Moses of the seriousness of God's covenant. If Moses was going to deliver Israel and write them into God's covenant, he couldn't very well do so without showing himself and his family as children of that same covenant.
From Scofield's notes: "On the eve of delivering Israel [Moses] was thus reminded that without circumcision an Israelite was cut off from the covenant (Joshua 5:3-9)."
I've no thoughts on the "bridegroom of blood," other than it is a Hebrew idiom we don't really understand in a contemporary Western context.
Thanks Andrew. Yeah, a lot of it doesn't make sense to me either. But what you spoke of makes more sense to me than what I was thinking previously. I wonder if the bridegroom of blood comment has anything to do with Zipporah's commitment to the Hebrew God - even though she herself was not Hebrew...
Post a Comment