What Does Exodus 4:24 Mean?

At a lodging place on the way the LORD met him and sought to put him to death. Verse 24 is one of the most obscure and disturbing incidents in the entire Pentateuch: while Moses is on his way to Egypt to deliver God's people, God himself appears to threaten Moses with death. The subject of "him" is disputed by interpreters: is God threatening Moses or Moses' uncircumcised son? The most natural reading of verses 24-26, given that Zipporah circumcises her son in verse 25 and touches Moses' feet with the foreskin, is that the threat is against the uncircumcised son and that circumcising him averts the danger.

The theological force of the passage is clear regardless of the specific referent: the deliverer of Israel cannot lead others into covenant while his own household is not in covenant. Moses is being sent to bring a circumcised covenant people out of Egypt; his own son is uncircumcised. The covenant sign that Abraham received as the Mark of the covenant community (Genesis 17:10-14) has not been enacted in Moses' own family. Before crossing into Egypt to execute the mission, the covenant must be in order in Moses' own house. The delay is not God's cruelty but God's insistence on covenant integrity at the point of mission.

Zipporah's action in verse 25, circumcising her son and touching Moses' feet with the foreskin, is unusual in several ways: it is a woman performing the circumcision, which is not documented elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible; it is performed under emergency conditions, not at the standard eighth-day interval; and it is accompanied by a words that are interpretively debated.

The act is decisive: the crisis is averted. Whatever Zipporah understood of the theological stakes, her action was the correct one, and it was performed swiftly enough to stop the divine threat. Her decisiveness in the crisis is a form of the same covenant loyalty that characterizes the midwives in chapter 1.