As an infant, Moses is spared from Pharaoh’s death sentence on the firstborn of the Israelites by two courageous midwives who refuse to carry out Pharaoh’s decree (Exod. 1:15–17). Moses’ mother fashions an ark out of bulrushes and sets him adrift in the river, thus saving his life while appearing to comply with Pharaoh’s order that all male infants of the Israelites be “cast into the river” (Exod. 1:22, .2:3). His sister watches over the boat from afar to make sure that he is rescued (Exod. 2:4), and it is Pharaoh’s daughter who draws him out of the river and raises him as her adopted son (Exod. 2:5–6). Then the “shadowy women” join in an unspoken but fateful conspiracy when his sister contrives to secure a job for their mother as a wet-nurse in the household of the Egyptian princess so that Moses’ authentic Jewish mother will be able to suckle him as he grows up in the court of Pharaoh (Exod. 2:7–9).
The pantheon of the ancient Near East and the classical world is filled with goddesses who, like the women in the life of Moses, intervene on behalf of imperiled heroes; they range from Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess who was imagined to take each reigning king of Babylon as her bridegroom, to Athena and her celebrated efforts on behalf of Odysseus.29 Perhaps Zipporah, who steps between God and Moses at the moment of greatest danger, was patterned after one of these pagan goddesses by a Bible-era storyteller who knew a good yarn when he (or she) saw one. In fact, the life of Moses—and especially the tale of the Bridegroom of Blood—suggests a specific linkage to one pagan goddess-rescuer in particular, the deity of ancient Egypt known as Isis.
Isis achieved a kind of superstar status in the ancient world, and both her exploits and her image were copied in one form or another by cultures far beyond Egypt. She came to be seen as a kind of universal divine matriarch. “Mother of the Gods,” “mother of all living,” and “all-mother” are some of the names applied to Isis, and the influence of Isis-worship has been traced as far as the mater ecclesia, “Mother of the Church,” a mystical doctrine of the early Christian church that is “rooted in Syrian soil.” Indeed, ancient Syria was fertile soil for goddess worship, and the protectress who watches over Moses in the murals at Dura-Europos reminds us of Isis.
Isis found acolytes and worshippers in the nearby land of Canaan30—a fact that encourages some Bible critics to detect the traces of Isis in the sacred texts of the Israelites who lived there. Several of the crucial events in the life of Moses as told in the Hebrew Bible, and especially the baffling tale of the Bridegroom of Blood, can be understood as faint echoes of the cult of Isis as it was celebrated not only in Egyptian mythology but throughout the ancient Near East.
According to Egyptian lore, Isis is the wife and sister of the divine ruler Osiris, who is treacherously slain by his jealous brother, Seth. In one version of the Isis myth, Seth tricks Osiris into lying down inside a wooden chest, then seals the chest and casts it into the Nile—an image that evokes the baby Moses afloat in his little boat of reeds. The heartbroken Isis searches tirelessly for the chest containing the remains of her dead brother-husband-lover, but when she finds it at last, Seth manages to dismember the body and scatter the pieces. Isis tracks down the remains of Osiris and finds all but one crucial body part—his penis.
Now Isis engages in a magic ritual that is as thoroughly and weirdly erotic as the one Zipporah uses to stave off the night attack by the Almighty. Isis reassembles the pieces of her dead lover, using a wooden likeness of a male sexual organ in place of the missing one, and breathes life back into Osiris by waving her wings over the reassembled corpse. Then she engages in sexual intercourse with Osiris and succeeds in impregnating herself with a son who will be called Horus. By the traditions of ancient Egypt, the reigning pharaoh was seen as an incarnation of Horus, his immediate predecessor on the throne as Osiris, and both his mother and his wife were seen as Isis.31 “His sister was his guard,” goes an ancient ode to Isis and Osiris, and the ode continues with words that could be used to describe Zipporah and the night attack at the lodging place:
She who drives off the foes,
Who stops the deeds of the disturber
By the power of her mighty utterance.32
The decisive clue to the linkages between Isis and Zipporah, according to feminist Bible critic Ilana Pardes, is the fact that Isis is a winged goddess who is often depicted in Egyptian hieroglyphics as a hawk or a kite hovering over the sexual organ of the dead body of Osiris. “We have here a violent persecutor, a wife saving her husband, a penis undergoing treatment … and above all, wings!” argues Pardes. “Zipporah means ‘bird’ in Hebrew, and I venture to suggest that this name discloses her affiliation with Isis.”33
To see the traces of Isis or some other goddess-rescuer in the depiction of Zipporah in the Bridegroom of Blood is doubly surprising because the biblical authors are plainly ill at ease at the notion of any woman—even a kosher Israelite woman!—encountering and confronting the Almighty. The Bible depicts the matriarch Sarah laughing out loud when she overhears God’s promise to Abraham that she will bear a child in old age. God pauses to scold her for her lack of decorum, but insists on making all of his deals directly with Abraham (Gen. 18:12–15). Later, after Moses has led the Israelites out of Egypt, his sister and brother audaciously claim the right to prophesy just like their kid brother—“Hath the Lord indeed spoken only with Moses?” complain Miriam and Aaron, “hath he not spoken also with us?”—and God promptly punishes Miriam (although not Aaron!) for her impudence by afflicting her with a vile disease: “[B]ehold, Miriam was leprous, as white as snow”* (Num. 12:2, 10). But Zipporah, unlike Miriam but very much like Isis, is unafraid and unbowed when the Almighty goes on the attack, and like Isis she saves the life of her husband and son in the very teeth of divine rage and blood lust.
Only the most daring of Bible critics argue that the figure of Zipporah in the Hebrew Bible was somehow inspired by an Egyptian goddess, but no open-eyed reader will fail to notice that something strange is happening in the cracks and corners of the biblical text. Perhaps the Bridegroom of Blood is, as Pardes insists, an intriguing remnant of “a repressed pagan past” that surfaces in the biblical text despite the best efforts of the priestly censors to conceal it from our eyes.34 Certainly the incident at the lodging place calls into question some of our most familiar and cherished assumptions about God and how he was worshipped by his Chosen People. “We do not know what the faith of the Patriarchs was,” Harold Bloom points out in The Book of J after musing over the Bridegroom of Blood, “or what Moses believed.”35 The text prompts so many provocative but unanswered questions that we begin to wonder if we really know who the deity called Yahweh is, what he is capable of doing, or what he wants from us.
THE BLOOD OF A VIRGIN BRIDE
By far the most lurid interpretation of the Bridegroom of Blood—and, in fact, the single most grotesque reading of any biblical text by an otherwise sober Bible scholar—is one that claims to discern a distorted version of a long-lost tradition among the nomadic tribes of the ancient Near East, a divine droit du seigneur by which the deity enjoys the right to deflower a virgin bride on her wedding night. According to a turn-of-the-century Protestant theologian named Hugo Gressmann, the night attack described in Exodus 4:24–26 actually takes place on the wedding night of Moses and Zipporah. God seeks to kill Moses, Gressmann proposed, to prevent him from sleeping with Zipporah before the Almighty avails himself of his right to her virginal blood. So the resourceful and intrepid Zipporah works an elaborate deception on God: she hastily circumcises her husband with a handy flint stone, and she uses his bloody foreskin to smear blood on the sexual organ of the divine attacker.
“[God’s genitals] became smeared with blood, quite as if he had just had intercourse with her, and his organ had thereby become covered with her virginal blood,” suggested the good professor, bringing a touch of Grand Guignol to the churchly art of biblical exegesis. “And when the gullible deity perceived this, he believed that he had received his due, and so he withdrew and left Moses in peace
.”36
To conjure up such a remarkable scene, of course, Gressmann was forced to overlook the facts that are strongly implied or plainly reported in the biblical text itself: Moses and Zipporah are already married, according to the Bible, and their newborn son is with them at the lodging place. Still, on the strength of their own inventive reading of Exodus 4:24–26—if not much else—Gressmann and his successors in the world of biblical scholarship37 argued that circumcision of bridegrooms evolved as a ritual substitute for the offering of the bride’s virginity to the Almighty: “Surely a bridegroom of blood art thou to me” was supposedly a magical incantation addressed to God by every bride by way of her newly circumcised groom on their wedding night.
In fact, another testosterone-charged turn-of-the-century Bible scholar read the same mysterious text and reached an even more prurient conclusion of his own. “[I]t was customary among the ancient Semites for maidens to offer their virginity to the first passing stranger who to them seemed to be the embodiment of the god,” suggested one of Gressmann’s contemporaries, “and thus received his due of the virginal blood,” a custom that he claimed to discern in the biblical accounts of the encounters of Jacob, Judah, and Moses with “strange maidens” whom they will ultimately take to bed, whether as wives or lovers.38
Gressmann did not go so far as to suggest that the Israelite god we know by the name Yahweh was actually the would-be rapist of Zipporah. Rather, he theorized that Exodus 4:24–26 preserves a tale first told by the Midianites about one of their own deities or demons and later transplanted into the Hebrew Bible by some rather daring scribe who changed the names (and many of the crucial details) to protect the not-so-innocent. But there is no real evidence, scriptural or otherwise, to justify the febrile conjectures of Gressmann and his colleagues about the sexual demands of “the god or demon or whoever conceals himself behind the letters JHWH,” as one skeptical scholar put it, and their work has been dismissed by more recent (and more restrained) Bible critics as “phantastic, not to say ridiculous.” The notion that the Almighty was so addled by his own sexual impulses that he could be fooled into thinking that he had just slept with Zipporah simply because his genitals were covered with blood strikes some readers as disgusting or downright blasphemous—and others as merely imbecilic.
“He must be a very silly god who can be cheated so easily,” wrote contemporary Bible scholar Hans Kosmala. “Some logicality must be ascribed even to demons.”39
Still, the heavy-breathing and hot-eyed theologians of the last century were hardly the only ones to let their imaginations run wild while reading Exodus 4:24–26, nor were they the only ones to detect primitive and even pagan traditions buried deep inside the biblical text. Beneath the surface of the biblical text, we begin to make out the features of the shadowy figure that Zipporah faces off against on that terrible night at the lodging place, and what we see is a fearsome deity who demands not merely faith, obedience, and good works from his worshippers but the sacrifice of human flesh and blood: “[A]n uncanny, bloodthirsty demon who walks by night and shuns the light of day,” argued Sigmund Freud.40
We see, too, a tantalizing suggestion of the real meaning of the blood ritual that Zipporah conducts in her remarkable encounter with the Almighty. Perhaps, as we shall see, something is being feigned on that night, but it is something even more disturbing than sexual intercourse between God and Zipporah.
FIRSTLINGS
Another symbolic meaning, even more primal and authentic, can be detected in the rite of circumcision performed by Zipporah to stave off God’s attack, one that enables us to decode an even more shocking revelation in the otherwise baffling text of Exodus 4:24–26. For Zipporah, as for the peoples of the ancient Near East, circumcision is a kind of child sacrifice in miniature, a way of offering human flesh and human blood to appease the deity without actually taking the life of a loved one.
The Bible depicts the sacrifice of living creatures as the central and crucial feature of worship among the Israelites, but they were hardly the first people to regard sacrifice as an essential rite. Indeed, the sacrifice of plants, animals, and human beings to the gods appears to be a spontaneous and universal impulse in humankind. Among so-called primitive peoples, around the world and in every age, the bounty of nature and life itself were seen as the handiwork of the gods, something that belonged to them by right. Unless the creator was appeased in some manner, the living things that he or she had created were “taboo”—that is, forbidden to ordinary human beings. Sacrifice, then, originated as a kind of bargain with the gods, an offering of the first fruits of the harvest, the “firstlings” of the herds and flocks, even a firstborn child, so that the rest of the bounty of life could safely be used and consumed by mere mortals.
We see exactly the same impulse at work in the opening pages of the Bible, where Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve, are inspired to make “an offering unto the Lord” in the form of fruit from Cain’s harvest and a sheep from Abel’s flock. Their spontaneous ritual of sacrifice is “the very first recorded act of worship,”41 and—rather ominously—God appears to prefer flesh (Gen. 4:3–5). His appetite whetted, God later makes a formal claim on the firstlings of the Chosen People. “Sanctify unto Me all the first-born,” God commands the Israelites in the Book of Exodus, “whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast, it is Mine” (Exod. 13:2).
Since children, no less than crops and livestock, were regarded as a gift of the gods, they were not exempt from sacrifice, at least in principle, in various places around the world and throughout history. In fact, even though human sacrifice is condemned in the Holy Scriptures as an “abomination,” the Bible reports that children were the victims of ritual sacrifice in and around Canaan until relatively late in biblical history. “[E]ven their sons and their daughters do they burn in the fire to their gods,” says the biblical author known as the Deuteronomist about the Canaanites (Deut. 12:31). The biblical authors concede that some Israelites dared to engage in child sacrifice and other “enchantments” under the influence of their pagan neighbors in Canaan (2 Kings 17). At least two of the kings of Judah are said to have made their sons “pass through the fire, according to the abominations of heathen” (2 Kings 16:3, 21:6), and the biblical chronicler specifically blames the conquest and destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel on the persistence of child sacrifice among the Israelites: “And the Lord rejected all the seed of Israel, and afflicted them, and delivered them into the hands of spoilers” (2 Kings 17:20). The Bible seems to find corroboraron in recent archaeological evidence that “human sacrifice was more in vogue [in Canaan] than elsewhere” in the ancient Near East.42
In fact, the Bible appears to concede that human sacrifice, even if “abominable,” is still effective. When the king of Moab finds his walled city under siege by the armies of Israel, as recorded in Second Kings, he resorts to the desperate measure of sacrificing his eldest son “for a burnt offering” to the Moabite god called Chemosh on a parapet where the Israelites will be able to see the ritual. What happens next is rather puzzling, perhaps intentionally so: “And there came great wrath upon Israel, and they departed from him, and returned to their own land” (2 Kings 3:27). The traditional interpretation is that the pious Israelites were so sickened by the sight of human sacrifice that they withdrew in disgust, but literary scholar Northrop Frye ventured another reading: “The last sentence reads like a somewhat clumsy editorial effort,” he urged, “to conceal the fact that in the original story the maneuver worked and the Israelites were in fact driven off.”43
Still, the Israelites, like other peoples of the ancient world, came up with some ingenious ways to please a demanding god with a hunger for firstlings. God’s command to “sanctify” the firstborn as announced in Exodus, for example, was understood to mean only that a firstborn son must be dedicated to the priesthood, and a child could be redeemed from temple service by paying a bounty to the priests. More primitive peoples came up with c
ruder compromises: the hair of a newborn might be cut and burned on the sacrificial altar instead of the child himself.44 Such rituals of surrogate sacrifice were so prevalent in ancient and primitive cultures that some historians question whether human sacrifice was ever a common practice in the ancient Near East. In any case, it appears that animals had mostly replaced human beings as sacrificial offerings by the time of the biblical patriarchs.45
But the most ingenious compromise between bloodthirsty gods and the ancient clans and tribes who worshipped them was one that permitted fathers and mothers to engage in the ritual of cutting human flesh and shedding human blood as an offering to the gods without actually taking the life of the sacrificial victim. Circumcision, an act of human sacrifice in miniature, probably replaced the actual sacrifice of children in many cultures around the world at some distant and unknowable point in human history. “Here, quite manifestly,” concludes one Bible scholar with a distinctly anthropological bent of mind, “we have the origin of the rite of circumcision.”46
The notion of circumcision as a surrogate for child sacrifice begins to explain even the most bizarre and baffling details of Exodus 4:24–26. An angry and vengeful Yahweh seeks to kill the father of a firstborn son—or perhaps the child himself—because Yahweh has been denied the offering of flesh and blood to which he is entitled by divine decree. When Zipporah cuts off the foreskin of her son, her firstling, she is safely mimicking the sacrifice of the child himself—she is “sanctifying” the baby who “opened the womb of Israel” precisely as God had commanded. Only through the mock sacrifice in the form of a circumcision is God appeased, and only then does he break off his attack.
The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible Page 20