Thursday, August 27, 2015

Exodus chapter 4 part 2

*Now the story turns weird, in case you didn't already think so. When Moses and his family stopped at some place on the way to Egypt, yahweh met Moses and was about to kill him. To prevent that, Moses's wife whips out a knife and cuts off her son's foreskin! Then, she touches Moses's feet with it and declares," you are a bridegroom of blood to me, " which is a phrase referring to circumcision, according to my study bible. This saved Moses's life.

*There all sorts of things to say about this passage. First of all, my study bible says " feet" here is a euphamism for genitals. The weirdness continues. Was Moses himself ever circumcised? Why did God want to kill him after he gave him a job to do? Some people seem to think Zipporah acted in anger, even though the text does not say that. Maybe she knew that's what God wanted. Why does circumcising a child and touching his father's genitals, or feet, with the cut off piece of skin save Moses's life? Also, according to verse 20, there is more than one son. As usual, there are dozens of traditional and speculative answers to these questions, none of them in the text. By modern standards, this is crazy stuff.

*Yahweh tells Aaron to go to the desert to meet Moses. They meet at "the mountain of God" and Moses tells Aaron about everything. They go together and tell the elders of the Israelites and show them the magic tricks. They all believed and worshipped Yahweh when Moses told them God was concerned about them.

*What I notice about this story: the Israelites are collectively called Yahweh's "first born son" implying that they are the first worshippers of that God. If the mountain of God was such an important place why is there no way to know for sure where it actually was?

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