Exodus 2:16-22
The well at Midian
One of the seven daughters driven off by shepherds until a stranger stands up for them. She is given to him, and their son is named for being a stranger in a foreign land.
People of the Bible
Zipporah
Took a flint knife at a lodging place on the road and did what her husband had not.
Zipporah is one of seven sisters at a well, given to Moses by her father, and the mother of Gershom, whose name means a stranger there. She appears three times and one of them is among the strangest passages in Exodus. On the road back to Egypt, at a place they stop for the night, the LORD meets Moses and seeks to kill him. Zipporah takes a flint, circumcises her son, touches it to Moses’ feet, and says you are a bridegroom of blood to me. Then it lets him go.
Scroll down to the story
The movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Zipporah
- 01
- 02
Exodus 4:24-26
The flint at the lodging place
On the road to Egypt something meets Moses and seeks his life. She acts without being asked, with a stone knife, and names what she has done in words nobody has fully explained since.
- 03
Exodus 18:1-6
Sent back, and brought out
At some point Moses sent her home to her father. Jethro brings her and the two boys out to the mountain, and sends word ahead so that Moses comes out to meet them.
Why it matters
Three verses that commentators have argued about for two thousand years, and the plain shape of them is this: a man is sent to demand that a nation keep covenant, and the sign of the covenant has not been kept in his own house, and his foreign wife is the one who acts. She is Midianite, not Israelite, and she is the one who understands what is required. The narrative gives her no explanation and no praise, only the act and the words.
6 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
