Zipporah, Wife of Moses

by Marek Halter

  Zipporah remained impassive.

  Jethro was silent for a while. “What do you think of that, daughter?” he asked her at last, tilting his head.

  Zipporah turned to face Moses. She seemed as determined as ever, but there was a touch of tenderness in her look now. “There are always many reasons not to do what we fear. Often they seem like wise reasons. But anything bred by fear is always evil. Lift your eyes to the summit of the mountain, Moses, and see in which direction Horeb is sending the clouds of his wrath.”

  “Horeb isn’t my god!” Moses said, irritably.

  “That’s true,” Jethro said, having nodded his head at each of Zipporah’s sentences. “Horeb isn’t your god. He’s our god, the god of the sons of Abraham and those who suffer Pharaoh’s whip.”

  Moses flushed and lowered his head.

  Zipporah took his hand. “Moses, I had a dream, and for moons I searched for its meaning. When you arrived, I finally understood it. Horeb rumbled to greet your arrival among us. He is speaking to you.”

  “Is that so?” Moses mocked. “Who am I listening to now? Jethro’s wise daughter or a superstitious old housewife?”

  Zipporah rose to her full height, her lips quivering. “Listen to this, then: As long as I live, no man other than you will touch me or be my husband. But you will only be Jethro’s son-in-law the day you set off on the road to Egypt.”

  “You know very well it cannot be!” he cried.

  Jethro quickly took both of them by the hand. “Hush now, hush . . . Why assert today what may prove false tomorrow? Life is made of time, and so is love.”

  The Firstborn

  Jethro had told them to take their time, and it was a strange time that now began. For more than a year, Zipporah and Moses alternated between quarrels and lulls.

  At first, they carefully avoided each other for days on end. Then, one night when the moon was full, the earth shook again. Jethro’s household was in a panic. Everyone rushed out into the darkness, eyes and ears alert. There was rumbling, but it was weak, almost gentle. The summit of the mountain was surrounded by a huge halo of pinkish light. Everyone feared that the times of wrath had returned, and the men remained watchful. Moses was also standing outside his tent, beneath the sycamore. He did not see Zipporah until she was quite close.

  Neither said a word, but stood there with their faces lifted toward the mountain.

  “Listen!” Zipporah said at last, in a low voice. “Listen! Horeb is speaking to you.”

  Moses laughed deep in his throat and turned to her. They were both trembling with desire. Moses stroked the line of Zipporah’s lips. “It’s your mouth that’s speaking to me. That’s what I want to hear. Its silence consumes my nights.”

  Moses moved his fingers down from her lips to her neck, then to the hollow of her throat. Zipporah seized his wrist as if to push him away, but all she could do was cling to him and receive his kiss like the breath of life.

  Before long, their caresses impelled them inside the tent, bodies entwined, heedless of anything that was not their love.

  In the morning, when Sefoba, who guessed that Moses and Zipporah had been overcome with passion, reproached her, Zipporah answered with a laugh that it was perhaps that very passion that had appeased Horeb. Moses had, in fact, awoken at dawn and, finding himself alone in the tent, had rushed out, calling Zipporah’s name, scattering the birds out of the sycamore, to find that the sky was a limpid blue as far as the eye could see. A few wisps of smoke hovered over the summit of the mountain. Horeb had stopped rumbling. Never had Midian seemed more peaceful.

  Before nightfall, Moses went to see Jethro and asked him the question he had asked Hobab on the day the ash had fallen: “Why do you sacrifice to Horeb rather than the God of Abraham, if you are his sons?”

  Jethro nodded, paused a moment for reflection, and replied with another question: “What do you know of the God of Abraham and Noah?”

  “Only what I heard from the Hebrews in Egypt—that he had abandoned them.”

  Jethro sighed. “He abandoned us because we were no longer worthy of his trust. A long time ago, a very long time ago, he offered his covenant to Abraham. ‘Go,’ he told him, ‘I will make you a great nation, I will uphold my covenant between me and you and your children and all their children. . . .’ Abraham obeyed and gave birth to sons and nations. There was a time when everywhere, from horizon to horizon, men and women were protected by the God of Abraham, whom they called the Everlasting. But generations passed and men became men and gave rise to as much hate and wickedness as there are nations, sons, and brothers. In return for his covenant, they offered the God of Abraham only sand. So the Everlasting withdrew, full of wrath. That is all we have left of him now. This wrath that rumbles over our heads, this wrath we call Horeb.”

  Jethro paused, closed his eyes, raised his hands, palms open, then clapped them together and nodded vigorously.

  “That is the truth, my boy. All we have left of our ancestors’ great covenant with the Everlasting, who brought them out of nothingness, is darkness and wrath. With every day that passes, Horeb’s wrath feeds on our sins. He demands justice and righteousness. He watches us, impatiently. He knows our past, but he also knows the future that awaits us. He sees that we are advancing into darkness. In his impatience, he rumbles to shake us out of our torpor. But all he obtains in return is fear, even though what he wants is a little courage and dignity!”

  Jethro had become so impassioned that Moses felt afraid as he listened to him. In the words of the sage of Midian he heard an echo of Zipporah’s words. Moses could no longer be in any doubt that father and daughter thought as one.

  AT the end of spring, Zipporah announced that she was with child. Jethro was the only one to take the news in his stride. The others, including Sefoba and Hobab, all urged her to accept Moses as a husband in order not to bring a child into the world alone.

  “Alone?” Zipporah would reply. “My mother was much more alone than I when she put me in the boat that brought us to Midian. I have all of you. I have my father Jethro.”

  “Moses has been entrusted with a great task,” she would continue when they objected. “Who knows if he’ll be able to fulfill it? It is a heavy task, a terrible one. But my promise remains: The day he sets out for Egypt, I will be his wife.”

  They would respond with grimaces and assertions that Moses would never have the courage.

  “You mustn’t think he’s a coward!” she would retort. “The only reason he refuses to return to Egypt is that he doesn’t yet know who he is. Perhaps he’ll finally know when he sees his child.”

  Meanwhile, Moses fretted and fumed. Despite the desire that set his body aflame, he did not dare approach Zipporah for fear of her reproaches. He was told that she was in good health, and that her belly was starting to swell. Then he would hear of things she had said about him that sent him flying into a rage, and he would set off with his flock and be away for days on end. But he would always end up missing Zipporah. He would come back and lurk near Jethro’s domain in the hope of seeing her, then, once he had, would retreat to his tent, tense with desire, his beloved’s new silhouette imprinted on his brain: still standing straight and tall, but with a round belly. He would spend all night thinking about the face he had glimpsed, her skin bronze in the evening sun, her almond eyes, the delicacy of her nostrils. He would clench his fists and moan like a caged beast, desperate for her heavy breasts and the curve of her back.

  Whenever Hobab and Sicheved, with whom he often shared his meals, plied him with questions, he would reply: “I’m becoming skillful as a shepherd. Is there anything wrong in that? Do the women of Midian despise shepherds? What more could a mother expect for her child than a good shepherd to watch over them?”

  They would laugh and joke about what women, wives, and mothers wanted and didn’t want. Sicheved would mock Sefoba, who was always waking him in the middle of the night to make sure he was still devoted to her.

  But these moments of gaiety
did not last long, and Moses would soon resume his grim mood. “There is no man alive,” he would mutter darkly, “who could rise up against Pharaoh and defeat him. Of course I could take the road to the west with my beautiful Cushite wife. We’d be captured before we even reached the banks of the River Iterou. Much good that would do the Hebrews! Is that my great destiny—to lead my wife into the lions’ den?”

  One dawn, at the end of his tether, before anyone had risen, he went and knelt by the side of Zipporah’s bed. She woke up and saw him. His beard had grown again, and was now thicker than ever and cut in the Midianite fashion. He looked quite different now from the man who had possessed her in the cave.

  She smiled and, without a word, took his hand and placed it on her soft, taut skin, beneath which life throbbed. Moses savored the caresses he had so long awaited. It was a moment of pure joy. But the caresses ceased, and they looked at each other in embarrassment.

  Zipporah smiled again. “Whenever you want to see my belly,” she whispered, “there’s no need to roam the pastures with your flock. Just come to me.”

  Moses blushed. “But we are in sin. I don’t even dare share a meal with your father. He’s always saying that nobody acts justly these days, nobody behaves the way his ancestors did . . .”

  Zipporah could not help laughing. “Oh, if you’re talking about sins like that, Jethro’s ancestors committed lots of them. Even worse ones!”

  She told him the story of how Abraham had persuaded Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister.

  “He, too, was afraid of Pharaoh. And Pharaoh was so attracted to Sarah that he didn’t want any other woman, even though he had spent only one night with her.”

  “And what did he do when he learned the truth?”

  “He expelled Abraham and Sarah from Egypt, cursing them for his lost happiness. But Abraham was never punished by his God for that sin, even though it’s one of the worst anyone can commit.”

  Moses was so astonished that he asked Zipporah to tell him everything she knew about Abraham. And so it was that they often came together early in the morning or at twilight, before and after the daily chores. Moses would stroke Zipporah’s belly while she told him what Jethro had taught her about the Hebrews. Moses could hardly believe what he heard. Sometimes, he doubted Zipporah’s words, thinking she was either embellishing the stories or making them darker to provoke him, and he would run to Jethro.

  “Is it true,” he would ask, “that Noah and his household were the only people left alive on earth? Really the only ones? Is that possible?”

  Jethro would laugh and nod his head. “Listen to my daughter!” he would reply. “Listen to my daughter!”

  But Moses would return with other questions. “Zipporah says that Lot had sons from his daughters? Is that true?”

  Or else it was Abraham’s anger at his father, Terah, that he found hard to accept. Or the jealousy of Joseph’s brothers. The fact that Joseph, after being sold to Potiphar, had become almost a brother to Pharaoh and had saved the country from famine, was what shook him most.

  To each of his questions, Jethro would laugh and give the same reply: “Listen to my daughter! Listen to my daughter!”

  Zipporah was pleased that Moses was so interested in these stories. To her father, though, she would express her impatience. “He listens, but does nothing. His child is about to be born, and he still hasn’t decided to be what he must be.”

  “You must be patient,” Jethro would say to calm her. “He’s listening and learning. Time is doing its work in his head as it is in your womb.”

  One day, Zipporah broke off in the middle of her story. Her eyes were wide, her body shook, and she was having difficulty breathing. At the very moment she cried out in pain, Moses leaped to his feet. Zipporah regained her breath and mustered enough strength to smile, seeing him looking so pale and lost.

  “Call Sefoba. Call the handmaids!”

  Soon, the old woman who acted as a midwife was growling orders in the courtyard. Sefoba and the handmaids held Zipporah over the bricks of labor until the sun was more than halfway across the sky.

  Moses, Hobab, Sicheved, and a few others took their places around Jethro and were served beer and wine. They could hear Zipporah’s moans through the walls. Moses’ brow glistened with sweat. With each cry, he swallowed a mouthful of wine. By the time Zipporah’s cries were joined by a baby’s, he was in a drunken sleep and did not hear anything.

  THE boy was resting, tiny and pink, between Zipporah’s breasts. He had her broad face, but Moses’ skin.

  “That’s good,” Zipporah said, in a husky voice. “The more he resembles Moses, the better.”

  She fell asleep without difficulty. In the morning, Jethro came to see her. He seized her hands, his eyes bright with joy.

  “It is you,” she said to him, “who will choose the name of my son and will cut his foreskin according to the tradition of Midian.”

  “The name is easy,” Jethro replied, lifting the child. “We’ll call him Gershom—’the Stranger.’”

  When Moses learned that his son would have to lose a piece of his tiny member on Horeb’s altar, he protested. “Do you want to kill him when he’s just opened his eyes? Do you want to make him impotent?”

  “They did it to me when I was born,” Jethro replied, without taking offense. “As you can see, I’m still alive and I’ve had seven girls and a boy.”

  Moses was not appeased. Jethro explained that the God of Abraham had demanded that his covenant be inscribed in the skin of all his sons. “We still do it here in Midian, because it’s the last link we have with our ancestors.”

  “That doesn’t apply to my son! I’m not from Midian—Zipporah even less so.”

  He went to see Zipporah. “It isn’t possible,” he told her. “You can’t do that to my son.”

  “Who are you to speak in the name of your son?” Zipporah replied, angrily. “Do you think that just because you took your pleasure between my thighs, you can decide his fate? Until you are my husband, my father Jethro will be a father to the child of my womb.”

  Moses felt so ashamed that for a hundred days he stayed away from Jethro’s domain and did not see Gershom again.

  With tears in his eyes, he watched the circumcision from a distance and heard Jethro cry the name of his firstborn before the altar of Horeb: “Stranger! Stranger!”

  Each time he echoed the voice of the sage of the kings of Midian, repeating Gershom’s name as if hugging his son to his chest.

  The Bride of Blood

  Zipporah learned how to be a mother. Gershom filled her nights with cries and tears she soon calmed, and her days with adorable grimaces that gradually turned into smiles. She learned to fasten her tunic in such a way as to carry her child with her at all times, to guess when he was hungry or thirsty simply through the touch of his skin, to think of him every moment of the day, to share his joys and fears. The women were always with her, giving her endless advice, sometimes mildly reproaching her.

  All this female hustle and bustle kept Moses at a distance. Zipporah never asked for him to be allowed to approach her or their child. For several moons, they seemed to completely ignore each other. Sefoba, just once, remarked, with a touch of sharpness in her voice, that Gershom’s name suited him all too well.

  “Stranger! He’s certainly a stranger to his father! It’s almost as if he’d been born through the good graces of one of Horeb’s angels.”

  The handmaids chuckled. Her eyes blacker than her skin, Zipporah silenced them. After that, Sefoba had to do all her grumbling at night to her husband. Sicheved would advise her to be as patient as Jethro and her sister.

  “They know what they’re doing. Moses is the best of men. Things will change, you’ll see. Even Hobab makes a joke of it. ‘According to Moses,’ he says, ‘there’s no man alive who can rise up against Pharaoh. What he doesn’t know is that there’s also no man alive who can go against the will of my father and Zipporah!’”

  But if any found fault with
the unusual conditions in which Gershom was being raised, they did so far from the ears of Jethro and his daughter.

  Winter came. It was once again time to trade. Moses set off with the other men to Edom, Moab, and Canaan. Ewi-Tsour, the head of the armorers, joined the caravan, his carts so heavily laden with bone-handled knives, curved daggers, and long hammers that each cart required four mules to pull it.

  When their return was announced, Zipporah climbed onto a silo to see the dust raised by their caravan in the distance. Like all the wives in the household, she hurried to make herself beautiful. She put on a bright yellow tunic, embroidered with a red-and-blue woolen design in the shape of a bird’s wings. She adorned herself with necklaces and bracelets and, for once, used kohl to make her eyes sparkle. Sefoba, herself splendid beneath her long veil, brought her a piece of amber. Zipporah rubbed her wrist with it, breathed in its heavy, spicy odor, and put it away in a linen pouch.

  “Why not scent yourself straight away?” Sefoba protested.

  Zipporah laughed tenderly. “Moses isn’t here yet and I don’t know what he has in mind. But, if need be, my hips and thighs will smell of amber for him.”

  FOR three days, Jethro’s domain came alive with banquets, dances, and games. The air smelled of bindweed, coriander, and dill. Chirruping like flights of curlews, the young handmaids filled the big jars with bitter milk and beer, and mixed the wine with rosemary and date juice. The older handmaids took the gazelles that had been killed in the desert, stuffed them with almonds, pomegranates, and grapes, and skewered them on long pikes that were left to turn over low fires for a whole day. Ten more fires were lit to make honey cakes in leek and fennel mince, pies filled with dates, barley, and lambs’ entrails, kippu broths, and crusty biscuits baked in sheep fat until golden.

  Hobab, Sicheved, and the armorers were proud of how much they had sold. In Canaan and Edom, on the other side of the great deserts of the Negev and Shour, there was much fear of further raids by Pharaoh’s soldiers, and the rich and powerful masters of the cities of Boçra, Kir, and Tamar had stocked up with arms and animals without quibbling over prices. Even Moses, who had set out with his meager flock, did not return empty-handed.