Zipporah at the Inn

[Atreyu69 (imported)]

This is the part of the old testament where Moses' wife cuts off the foreskin of their young son's penis to prevent God from killing Moses on the spot. Here's a link.

Zipporah at the Inn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipporah_at_the_inn)

Can anyone make any sense of this crazy story?

[Paolo]

I'll put that on my to-do list.

Right now, I'm trying to sort out the Revelation 12 sign of the woman clothed in the sun, which happens in chapter 12, although the seven seals all breaking loose before that happens doesn't have a whole of time to get done before that.

For those who haven't heard, it's the constellation of Virgo, from which Jupiter emerges on Sept. 23.

Give me a while, it only took me 40 years to figure out why God wanted all those "-ites" wiped out of existence.

[Dave (imported)]

Zipporah at the Inn

I went and read a bunch of articles about this passage. Both Christian and Jewish.

I was bored and wanted to avoid the endless political commentary and ongoing hurricane news.

This passage is much less than what it seems.

First off, it's a foreshadow of the Exodus from Egypt.

Second, it's a confirmation of the Old Testament Covenant between Yahweh and the Jews.

The young Moses left Egypt and went into Midian. The epic movies neglect that fact.

There, Moses lived for several decades with a wife (Zipporah) and eventually two sons. The older son was left uncircumcised at the request of Zipporah's father. That was Moses' bond to the Midians that he was no longer of Egypt.

At the time this passage is describing, Moses had already seen the Burning Bush and committed to return to Egypt to free the Jews from their enslavement. During that journey to Egypt and before his confrontations with Pharaoh, an angel of the Lord appears to remind Moses of the Covenant with the Jews and the requirement that Jewish men show their commitment to the Covenant with circumcision.

That's what Zipporah responds to. Why does she do the circumcision? Because Moses has to hold the eldest son. Circumcision with that type of knife is painful and undoubtably the eldest son didn't want that pain. Why does she throw the foreskin at his feet, because she's being sarcastic. She calls him a "bridegroom of blood" -- wedded to his new god, Yahweh, as evidenced by the bloody foreskin.

What was the purpose of this?

To show Moses' commitment to Yahweh and to sever any commitment he had to Midian and his father-in-law. And remember what the tenth and final plague was -- Death of the Firstborn -- and remember how did the Angel of Death knew who would die and who wouldn't.

That's my understanding of that short passage.

[cutnbulls2ox (imported)]

Dave sounds like he knows what he s talking about.

To me it sounds like old pagan human sacrifices where the men managed to bargain and get permission from cult leaders to replace death down to castration as the sacrifice. Then men bargained down further to dick cutting using the cut off foreskin as the replacement sacrifice.

And here we are in modern times still sacrificing newborn male foreskins to satisfy old pagan ideas of death offerings. Crazy shit for a religion huh?

Why would god want men s foreskins cut off to seal a covenant? What does he need cut foreskins for n what do the females cut in their seal lol?

Cults dream up wild excuses to get their fetishes imposed on populations as religions.

[Dave (imported)]

When I was a teenager, I had a long discussion with a Rabbi about the Bible. Remember, I'm Roman Catholic. Our bibles are slightly different but in the case of the first five books of the bible, not so different. In fact, identically sourced.

His advice was to take the straightforward explanations and not the tortured, word-by-word analysis that reads modernity into the interpretations.

Of all the analysis I read, the one I related makes the most sense to the text and what was happening at the time.

Ever since that discussion, when I see or read someone interpreting a single line of text into a giant philosophical discussion, I get skeptical.