Zipporah
Remember, the midwives rebelled. Moses’ mom obeyed. Zipporah was a very different kind of woman.
Zipporah means ‘bird’ but she is anything but flighty. She is one of the seven daughters of the Priest of Midian who married Moses after he fled Egypt After the episode of the burning bush, she and Moses were headed to Egypt. Listen.
“At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met Moses and was about to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son's foreskin and touched Moses' feet with it. "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me," she said. So the LORD let him alone. (At that time she said "bridegroom of blood," referring to circumcision.) (Ex 4:24-26)
What was God thinking? He had just cajoled the very reluctant Moses into confronting Pharaoh. Like his forefather Adam, Moses didn’t want to intervene. He had been there and done that. He preferred to spend his life looking at the back sides of the sheep.
Now God is trying to kill him? What was the charge against Moses? Insubordination? Not following God for his first 80 years of life? No, God brought Moses to trial for a single sin, a minor oversight it would seem. He had not circumcised his son, Gershom.
I am sympathetic to Moses here. Who knows how extensive that was practice in Moses’ day? And it was just a sign after all. No, Moses had treated God’s name lightly. It was a metaphor—just the tip (so to speak) of his and Israel’s much larger criminal record.
This was a frightening scene. The anointed savior of Israel, Moses was dying at the hand of the God of Israel. But what is Moses to do?
At the last minute, without asking permission, Zipporah circumcises Gershom, touches Moses with the bloody foreskin – and in so doing, brings him life through a substitute. Symbolically, the son dies. His son takes Moses’ sentence upon himself.
Symbolically, the blood of the son covers Moses’ infraction—a foreshadow, of course, of Jesus work on the cross.
While Moses was dead in sin, God resurrects life out of death, and he does so through the priestly efforts of an unlikely bold woman of faith. Zipporah became the prophet of God, and she puts on the robes of the High Priest. Neither were a wife’s role in that culture. She was special.
Also, note her amazing sensitivity to God. Moses was a picture of spiritually-insensitivity. He had no idea what God wanted from him and he struggled to obey.
In contrast, Zipporah who was not at the burning bush and had no conversations with God that we know of, seemed to understand God far better than Moses. Like I said, she was special.
What does ideal womanhood look like? It looks like the midwives, like Jochabed and like Zipporah.
Women, do you want to hear more? In my weekly podcast, Gospel Rant, I am going through the Song of Songs. I call it Kisses of God. The Song of Songs is the greatest gospel presentation in the Old Testament. It is about the Dance between God and his people. It’s the good stuff. Check it out.
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Take heart, child of God.
