Daily Lesson for January 31, 2020

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Exodus chapter 4 verses 24 through 26:

24 On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met him and tried to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’ feet with it, and said, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” 26 So he let him alone. It was then she said, “A bridegroom of blood by circumcision.”

This morning’s Lesson is mysterious and bizarre and I hesitate to use it as the Lesson because it is so peculiar. Yet it is stories like this which often trip people up in reading the Bible, and so having some guidance is helpful.

First off, it should be said outright that the story is so veiled that we don’t even know for sure who it’s about. The pronouns in the Hebrew are unclear, so we can’t really determine who it is that is in danger here in the encounter — Moses or his son Gershom.

A case can be made for either.  Gershom has not been circumcised; and there is thought that perhaps Moses himself had not been circumcised either, as it would have been a dead give away that he was a Hebrew child in hiding amidst Pharaoh’s genocide. In either case, Moses is now returning to his people — he and his kindred — and therefore he and his whole household will be subject to God’s commands. The flint-stone “cutting” of the first-born child is therefore likened as a circumcision; its blood binding the father to the son in redemptive fashion just as the blood of the lamb will later redeem all the firstborn children of Israel.

Even more, the story echoes the earlier Genesis story of Jacob, who himself also had a mysterious and little-understood encounter with the divine in the middle of the night when he was returning to his own homeland following a long sojourn. In that sense the story is archetypal. Moses, like Jacob before him, is coming back home to face his nemesis, and more importantly, his own fears. So as with Jacob, there is wrestling in the night.  The task before him will not be easy. And neither is the moment. There is pain.  There is blood, sweat, and tears.

And, there is the letting loose. For Moses has contended with God now; and so old Pharaoh will be nothing . . .

NOTE: We’re reading the whole Bible together this year. Monday’s Lesson will come from Exodus chapters 7 through 15.