Exodus wk 5 - Sermon
The Return of Moses / The Blessings of Obedience
The firstborn son in the ancient world was the one specially favored with inheritance, the one who would represent the father in many ways as he came into maturity and the father gave him more and more responsibility.
You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
. When she said “you are a blood relative to me” (our translation), she presumably was speaking to Gershom, not to Moses.
“Through this bloodshed you are now marriage-related to me.” If this is not possible or desirable, the translator will have to choose Moses or the son as the one to whom Zipporah speaks. If we choose the son, we may say “Through this bloodshed you are now my circumcised child”; but if it is Moses, one may say “I have shed this blood, so now you [Moses] are related through marriage to me.”
It may well be that the language she used here is the sort that she would naturally have used about any male relative, since ḥăṭan simply means “relative.”
h. The expression “relative of blood” is not negative but positive, an endearing reference to a husband’s and wife’s joining to become one flesh/blood and thus producing offspring that are their own flesh and blood so that Gershom was clearly Zipporah’s “blood relative.”
j. The consequence of failure to be circumcised is “to be cut off” from the holy people (Gen 17:14). This is just what God threatened to make happen in Gershom’s case according to v. 24. Fortunately, Zipporah saved her son from such a fate by saying and doing the right thing, as best she knew how.
By way of summarizing our view of the pericope: Exod 4:24–26 is a story showing how Zipporah, by performing as officially as she could a circumcision on her son—whom his father had failed so far to conform to the covenant requirements of Gen 17:10–14—saved him from the punishment required by the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision. Nothing can thwart God’s plan of redemption. Since Moses had not yet done his part in regard to Gershom’s circumcision, God accepted Zipporah’s decisive and pious actions in circumcising her son as an appropriate substitute so that God’s chosen, yet reluctant and headstrong, prophet could continue his assignment to lead the Israelites out of bondage. God often relents if people repent. Right words and actions, if they show the true intent of the heart, demonstrate right repentance. Moses might have lost his own firstborn son, just as Pharaoh would later lose his (predicted immediately prior to the present passage, in 4:23). Zipporah’s intervention prevented that from happening.