Teaching Literary Analysis, Scripture, & The Very Odd Case of Exodus 4:24-26

Botticelli’s “Trials of Moses”: Zipporah, presumably not one of the trials, looking fetchingly northern and western.As part of a homeschooling community, I bump up against a lot of interesting and cool people, some of whom are fundamentalists and / or evangelicals.  In one such encounter recently we were discussing how to teach literary analysis, and why it matters.  A parent said, very sensibly, that she found it dull and unhelpful to discuss, for example, the use of colors in The Lord of the Rings.

Literary analysis can be as pointless as math problems. They don’t necessarily “solve any problems” or bring any particular light to one’s life.

But they work out the critical muscles that are necessary for those issues.

For instance, in Exodus 4, God commissions Moses to deliver his people, and sends him on his way. Then, suddenly, out of no-fucking-place, “On the way, YHWH met him and tried to kill him.”

WTF?

Literary analysis (the ability to understand the parts of the story, particularly imagery and theme, and connect them to the whole) make sense out of this.

Ditto the weird little story of Moses in his basket and killing the Egyptian, and why you have a burning bush as a central image in the story.

Without some skills at wondering “Why this, and not that?” you’re stuck with a certain amount of bewilderment from which your best escape is historical fundamentalism: “Oh, it just happened that way.” Which is both false and lazy.

So doing silly little exercises like, “Why does Tolkien use green and brown so much for some characters and black for others and what does it tell you about what is good in the book?” can put a student on notice: something’s going on, but you have to think about it.

Turning to Exodus 4:24-26, we find this odd little story:

At a lodging place on the way, YHWH met {Moses}  and was about to kill him. ²⁵ 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. ²⁶ So YHWH let him alone. (At that time she said “bridegroom of blood,” referring to circumcision.)

It’s dropped into the text in a singularly difficult spot: YHWH has just commissioned Moses, Moses has accepted the commission (with some hemming and hawing) and is now on his way to fulfill it.

At first blush, several major questions erupt at the placement of this short interlude:

1. Why Yahweh is trying to kill Moses?
2. If Yahweh were so angry, why didn’t he say something to Moses in the first place?
3. Does Zipporah “fool” Yahweh with a fake foreskin?
4. WTF?

Fundamentalist responses I’ve read have argued that Moses was not circumcised, and therefore disobedient.  But this inserts into the text the idea that Moses isn’t circumcised and, most importantly, casts into confusion the whole conversation that YHWH has had with Moses up to that point: nowhere in it does he ask to see Moses’ credentials, or to verify circumcision, or command it.  Arguably the god of Exodus is not omniscient, and that might be an answer, but one must read into the text to get to the spot where YHWH discovers that Moses isn’t circumcised.

Literary analysis can be a little more helpful, I think: instead of looking for a modern consistency (that is, judging what values the text must have in order to be “a good text” and then arguing against the evidence that they are there), analysis wonders what the author might be up to and investigates the possibility of finding out on his own terms. 

It tries to comprehend the parts of a story, though, and to relate it to the whole.  As we will see, the answer will not be modern (or satisfying to moderns), but it will be “complete.”  We will find that the author very much satisfies an ancient literary ethic, though not necessarily a modern one.

So first thing’s first.  Let’s make a list of images.  That is, let’s look at the parts of the interlude.

(1) We have Yahweh out to kill someone.

(2)  We have blood and circumcision.

(3)  We have Yahweh relenting.

Exodus is a very tightly structured narrative, at least for the first twenty-five chapters or so.  The life of Moses is a sort of micro-version of the Israelites’ story, almost a table of contents that presents the major themes in miniature.  From his “drawing out” of the Nile (his name means “drawn out,” and the Nile of course symbolizes the power of EgGoodall’s “Finding of Moses”: Yes, She’s Vaguely Venusypt), to his flight into the desert at the death of an Egyptian, the book likes very much to present themes in large and small form.

This is not a terribly modern trait.  We would probably consider it repetitious, and so we fall back on the old familiar imposition of our will on the text: “It really happened that way.”

No.  It didn’t.

It’s art.

And it still tells a profound truth, in its writer’s mind, that is quite distinct from biography or national history.

The writer hardly tucks in a detail unless it’s intentional, so I’m going to dismiss any idea that the story snuck in as a redaction problem.

Right away we can start to attach these three basic images or themes or plot devices to other places in the text: earlier there is Pharaoh’s thwarted killing of Hebrew male babies, a sort of pattern for interrupted murder (Exodus 1:15-21).  There is, later, Yahweh’s own assault on first born males (Exodus 12:12-13), which is more successful but also short-circuited by blood apparently intended to convey a circumcision covenant.  The “blood on the post” (Exodus 12:7) is a raw metaphor, but it seems to be what’s functioning in Exodus: the creation of a new kingdom “married” to Yahweh.

Just a little background: circumcision seems to have initially been a marriage ritual with covenantal associations that tied a man to his wife and “created” a house of his own.  In Genesis 17:9-14, Yahweh commands Abram to circumcise himself and his family evidently as a “marriage” between the man and his god.  (This marriage imagery will inspire the Hebrew prophets, who will see idolatry as a form of adultery.)Gimme Some Skin: Egyptian Art Depicting Circumcision of Young Men

In Genesis 17, notice that the covenant explicitly “creates” the community: “Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

For this reason, the “blood” of the lamb in Exodus appears to be symbolic of circumcision blood that deflects Yahweh’s killing intent and preserves the people.  The instructions for the Passover include a mandate to eat the lamb (thereby declaring one is part of the covenant community) in one “house” (Exodus 12:46) symbolizing a community that is whole, and immediately prohibition is put on the uncircumcised (those unmarried to Yahweh; Exodus 12:48).

Putting it all very simply, the whole structure of Passover is symbolic of the community of Israel, created through a shared marriage to Yahweh.  They are an open community, but the price of admittance is circumcision / covenant, in exchange for which one is protected.  Thus, the blood on the doorposts, symbolizing the blood on the penis.

Second, let’s notice that above the name “Moses” never appears in the story except in brackets.  The Hebrew text reads “he” where a helpful (?) editor / translator has supplied “Moses” to help clarify things.

Not terribly helpful, as it turns out.

The “he” might not be Moses.

In the previous few verses, Yahweh is explaining his “logic” to Pharaoh:

YHWH said to Moses, “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go. ²² Then say to Pharaoh, ‘This is what YHWH says: Israel is my firstborn son, ²³ and I told you, “Let my son go, so he may worship me.” But you refused to let him go; so I will kill your firstborn son.’ “

When you read those verses immediately before our “problem verses,” and when you remember the “Moses” is editorial in the problem verses, things change a little bit.

There are several questions this raises.  Moses and Yahweh are speaking of (1) Pharaoh; (2) Pharaoh’s firstborn; (3) Yahweh’s firstborn, Israel; and (4) firstborns generally.

Could the “firstborn” be a carry-over from the conversation in verses 21-23?  Could Moses’ god be killing Pharaoh’s firstborn?  Could Zipporah be saving the life of Pharaoh’s son?  Doubtful, but possible.

I think all things considered, there are only two reasonable explanations, and both of them depend on a very un-modern literary assumption.  The assumption is that when there is an image the author wants to amplify, he does it by retelling the story a couple of ways, each time emphasizing the image he wants to amplify.  It’s narrative parallelism.

In this case, he wants to emphasize the idea that slaying the firstborn male is a means of exercising power and control, and that this can be / is deterred by placing oneself under the protection of a marriage covenant with the god.

There is the major theme of Exodus, in a nutshell.

Putting it another way, it makes no narrative sense.  But it makes a great deal of thematic sense.Zipporah. “The Prince of Egypt” Lacked This Scene

Zipporah takes a flint knife, circumcises the boy, and places the blood on the child’s “feet,” a common euphemism for the genitals, as an amplification of the major theme of the whole book.

To read the story theologically either leaves God lacking in omniscience (which I’m fine with but think most Christians will not be fine with); or random as hell.  It leaves the Faithful groping vainly for some explanation that doesn’t create more questions than it answers.

But if you simply let the writer play by his own rules, and not the rules that demand the God of Exodus 4 conform to our needs and desires for him, we’re in decent shape, and thinking a lot more like Hebrews and a lot less like the rational, unpoetical creatures we tend to be.