Taste of Torah
A Bima-Ready D'var Torah
15 Tevet 5785 / January 15, 2025

Parashat Sh'mot
Zipporah, The Wife of Moses
Torah Portion: Exodus 1:1-6:1
Haftarah Portion [Ashkenazim]: Isaiah 27:6-28:13, 29:22-23
Haftarah Portion [Sephardim]: Jeremiah 1:1-2:3

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Shalom!

This week we begin the Book of Exodus and the story of our people’s journey from oppression to freedom. The central character in these events is, of course, Moses, whose birth, youth, and early adulthood are all detailed in this week’s portion, Sh’mot.

Moses’s early life is quite literally saved by several remarkable women, including Shifra and Puah, the midwives who defy Pharaoh’s orders to kill Hebrew baby boys (Exodus 1:15); Miriam, his sister, who keeps watch as he floats down the Nile (Exodus 2:4); Pharaoh’s daughter, who rescues the infant from his river reed basket (Exodus 2:10); and his own mother, Yocheved, who places him in the river to save him, and then later serves as his wet-nurse (Exodus 2:8-9). 

As extraordinary as these women and the events they facilitate are, none is as striking as Moses’s wife, Zipporah. 

Zipporah is the daughter of Jethro, the priest of Midian, where Moses flees after killing an Egyptian overseer in a fit of rage. Her name means “bird” in Hebrew, but her actions on behalf of Moses belie any connotation of a slight or songful flitter. After Moses’s encounter with God at the burning bush, a strange episode occurs on Moses’s way back from Midian to Egypt. In this moment, it is not Moses but Zipporah who takes swift and decisive action in this odd encounter. We learn, in three of the most mysterious verses in Torah:

At a night encampment on the way, God encountered him [Moses] and sought to kill him. So Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying, “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” And when [God] let him alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.” (Exodus 4:24-26)

The text is riddled with uncertainty, even at the most basic comprehension level. The pronouns – all the appearances of “him” and “his” – have unclear antecedents. The translations make various choices to assign meaning, but most have some version of the footnote that precedes verse 25 in the JPS Gender-Sensitive Edition: “Meaning of verses uncertain.”[i] And the questions only grow from there: Why does God try to kill Moses? Why hadn’t Moses previously circumcised his son? How does Zipporah know that circumcision will avert the attempt on his life? What on earth is a “bridegroom of blood”?!?

While most of those issues are beyond the scope of this brief exploration of the text,[ii] what is important to note is both that Zipporah is following a clearly established pattern of women acting bravely and decisively to preserve Moses’s life and that her actions are in clear contrast to those of Moses himself.

At the burning bush, Moses famously objects to his calling. He offers excuses, asks questions, and generally tries to beg off his assigned mission to be the agent of God and save the Israelite people from slavery. His obfuscation may be well justified – but it is also his privilege. The women in Moses’s life don’t have the luxury of an extended dialectic with God about their decisions.
As one critic (perhaps harshly) puts it: “Although Zipporah is an obscure figure in the Bible, she is depicted favorably, while Moses is ‘hapless, a total shirker, full of arguments about why he shouldn't be the one to go to Israel and lead his people out of slavery …’ Zipporah, on the other hand, is heroic, ‘decisive, fearless, strong, the competent person in an emergency.’”[iii]

Each year, we accompany Moses on his journey from pampered Egyptian elite to beleaguered prophet and savior of our people. We are encouraged to emulate his leadership. This Shabbat, may we be inspired by the skill of the women who saved him, raised him, and enabled him to do all that he did—including his wife Zipporah, the enigmatic daughter of a pagan priest.

Shabbat shalom!
​Rabbi Salem Pearce

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[i] The JPS Tanakh: Gender-Sensitive Edition, accessed at https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.4.25?lang=bi&with=Translations&lang2=en. 

[ii] For a good overview of the rich midrashic tradition around Zipporah, see the Jewish Women’s Archive excellent article, “Zipporah: Midrash and Aggadah,” accessed at https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/zipporah-midrash-and-aggadah. 

[iii] Beth Brophy, “Zipporah May be Obscure, but the Wife of Moses Mattered,” in U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 25, 2008, accessed at https://www.usnews.com/news/religion/articles/2008/01/25/zipporah-may-be-obscure-but-the-wife-of-moses-mattered. 

See y'all in 2025 for more Torah time together over Zoom!

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