#Exodus 4:24-26

The Bridegroom of Blood

It’s like the title of a B horror movie, and honestly it’s just as incoherent. One of the most confounding episodes in the entire Pentateuch. Almost everything about it is either obscure or just plain weird.

At least one thing is secure: whatever the hell is going on here, it’s J. Zipporah and Moses’s son have been introduced only in J, and we just heard that they had packed their stuff and hit the road. And the small obscure story is pretty J-like too. (Gen 6:1-4, anyone?)

I’m not going to pretend to know the answers to everything going on in here. (I hate it when scholars are like “I figured out the thing that no one has figured out in 2000 years, with the help of my extra-large brain!”) That ain’t always the point.

Here are some of the open questions, at least: Why does YHWH try to kill Moses in the first place? Why wasn’t the kid already circumcised? Does leg mean leg? Whose leg? Why do that? Wait was Moses not circumcised? If not, why not? What the hell does bridegroom of blood mean?

Why does what Zipporah does seem to work? What does her last statement mean? Why say bridegroom of blood twice? Is that a thing? Who is she talking to? (It’s always felt to me like she’s breaking the fourth wall there.)

Perhaps the broadest question is why YHWH should try to kill Moses just after he’s commissioned him to go rescue Israel from Egypt. And this one, at least, has a partial solution, one that helps, if doesn’t quite fully mitigate, some of the others.

This is an idea that was developed originally I think by Benjamin W. Bacon back in the late 19th century. Bacon was a great Pentateuch AND Gospels source critic, among the earliest Q fans in NT, taught at Yale and is buried in the Grove St. cemetery in New Haven.

Anyway, the theory - and I fully believe at this point, after years of resisting - is that the entirety of 4:19-26, from YHWH telling Moses that the Pharaoh has died to the bridegroom of blood episode, has been displaced in the process of compilation.

It all originally belonged right after 2:23a, where the king of Egypt died. If so, then you’d have Pharaoh’s death, YHWH announcing it to Moses in Midian so that he heads back - without a mission - YHWH encountering Moses on the way and trying to kill him...

Moses “passing the test,” with Zipporah’s help, and YHWH then appearing to Moses in a burning bush to give him his actual instructions. This makes a whole bunch of the narrative much more fluid and sensible.

The connection between 2:23a and 4:19 is so obvious that the LXX actually repeats 2:23 right before 4:19 - as if they knew that this was an original connection and wanted to restore it. (This is also why some scholars want to take out most of Ex 3-4 as late, which is...bad.)

The bridegroom of blood episode is now not an inexplicable reversal of YHWH’s decision to send Moses, but a sort of rite of passage in the liminal space and time between Midian and Egypt, between regular dude and prophet of YHWH’s salvation.

It’s akin to Jacob’s wrestling match at the Jabbok, another weird unexplained threatening divine encounter at a liminal spot on the way back home involving a change of status. Is it some remnant of traveler mythology, demon encounters like trolls in fairy tales? *shrug emoji*

Point is, it’s the passing of this test, or the survival of it, that verifies Moses as the right guy to take on the job. And the moment he’s passed it, the next thing we know is that YHWH is appearing to him in the bush and calling him to his task.

And now, by the way, we know where the bush encounter happens: not in Midian, as the beginning of Ex 3 suggests, at least canonically, but in the wilderness between Midian and Egypt. You know, the area we call...Sinai. Now the bush actually makes sense as an etiology.

The question everyone should be asking is why. Why would anyone move this stuff from where it rightly belonged to here where it’s so relatively insensible? And to this I have an answer: E has some inescapable details that made this necessary.

The key for compilation was that the J and E call narratives, the bush and the mountain, were one and the same event. It didn’t happen twice. Once that decision was made, the compiler was stuck: because E clearly has the call happen while Moses is still with his father in law.

It says it at the beginning, in 3:1, and it repeats it at the end, in 4:18, where Moses asks permission of Jethro to leave. 3:1-4:17 is, in the compiled text, one continuous dialogue between Moses and God. If Moses is still with Jethro in 4:18, he can’t have left yet.

But J had Moses leaving before the call. One compiled event, but two different times. And E couldn’t be changed, because it’s bookended by Jethro references. This was the only solution: keep Moses from leaving in J until he left in E.

This explains too why we have the weird seam between 4:18, where Moses asks Jethro to leave, and 4:19, where YHWH tells Moses to leave. 4:18 belongs with what precedes; 4:19 has been moved here out of necessity. No wonder the transition is so awkward.

I resisted this for a long time because it seemed so radical. But we’ve seen displacement of multiple verses elsewhere (Gen 35:23-26, e.g.). And it both solves an array of problems and has a reasonable redactional rationale. What more could one ask for?

Best of all: it doesn’t solve all the interpretive problems of this crazy passage. Plenty still to be worried about, articles and (god help us) books still to be written trying to explain it. But at least the “why now?” question might be set aside.

Phew!