Zipporah circumstances 1 son?

[Claire]

Why does she only circumcise one son?
Also, I don't remember that the LORD "sought to kill him." Is this Moses or the son?

[Tom Tighe]

I looked at a lot of translations of this (Gen 4:24) on the Bible gateway app. One version inferred that Moses got sick and didn't recover until after the circumcision. I don't really see that anywhere else and think it may be a dramatic interpretation. Another version I read said Zipporah circumcised his (and her) young son. From that I can speculate that the older son was already circumcised and Zipporah understood the covenant but they had neglected the younger child. I'm still fuzzy on the kid's age. Moses was about 80 here. Jewish oral tradition (I think Stephen talks about it in Acts) has Moses going to Midian about age 40. That makes me think the boys would be grown. Exodus does say Moses put Zipporah and his sons on a donkey. If it was only 1 donkey for the 3 of them, the boys must have been young. Either way it was a good thing that Zipporah understood that the cause of God's anger was the uncircumcised child. That certainly isn't clear to me, but what don't know details of God's communication with Moses or Zipporah that night. I find it odd that Zipporah had to touch Moses' feet with the foreskin to save him

[Tom Tighe]

As I was thinking about it, Perhaps God was angry because Moses had just been hired to be God's spokesman and therefore a role model for the Jews, and yet Moses had not kept up his part of the covenant with Abraham. At this point there were very few rules to follow to be a Jew in good legal standing and Moses was in violation. How could Moses be the one to hand down the 10 commandments and all the Levitical laws if he couldn't follow the one simple and verifiable rule he had been given?

[Waylonf15]

Interesting that Zipporah was a Midianite.
We just read that Balak wanted to use Balaam to curse the Israelites, and it seems that Midian sent people to cause a "plague" into the tribes of the Jews.

The Israelites just killed everything in Midian and lost not a single soldier. However the spoils of the war was taken (numbers 30) and then all the males were killed and all the women who were not virgins were slaughtered.

A lot of questions from me about this.
- Was the idea to ensure that no sexually transmitted infections would make it to the Jews?
- Was the "plague" a sexually transmitted issue?
- Why take the young virgins as a spoil?
- Why give these young virgins and spread them throughout the camps as tribute?
- I thought we were to steal?
- I thought we were not to kill?

Was Zipporah, Jethro and Moses own kids killed in this raid?

Our God is one to be feared for certain, and loved deeply.

How does all this killing point to Jesus?

Very disturbing reading.

Tom, what is your take on this please?

[Waylonf15]

Tactically, I know that this is a preemptive strike on the enemy ... Balak was going to kill them, but WOW!

[Tom Tighe]

It is an interesting idea that the plague from the Midianites was an STD. I see no evidence to support or refute that, but I don't usually think of STDs as lethal. 24,000 Israelites died in this plague. The plague was put upon the Israelites for Baal worship which was common among the peoples in the region of Canaan. I have read that Baal was seen as a father of gods and Asherah was kind of a mother earth figure. A common ritual would be for a priestess to have ceremonial public sex as kind of a porno warm up to entice Baal to impregnate Asherah making the earth fertile for crops. The children born of this ceremony were often bricked into the wall of a new building alive as a good luck charm (for the building, not the child). These kinds of things really, really upset God (to the best of my understanding), which is why he wanted all traces of these cultures destroyed. Perhaps the young girls were not seen as influential enough to bring these horrifying pagan ideas to the Israelites.

Not all the Midianites were wiped out, just these 5 cities near Moab that interacted with the Israelites at this time in Numbers. I don't think all Midianites were pagan, either. Obviously, Moses wife and father-in-law were not pagans and I don't think they were involved in this battle. Stay tuned, more Midianites will be back to bother God's people again in a hundred years or so.

Again we see evidence that the line of Ham was pagan since about when Noah cursed him. In particular the line from Ham's son Canaan often combined that paganism (strike 1) with sexual impropriety (strike 2) and sometimes child sacrifice (strike 3, you're out!).

I think one of the reasons it is important for God to wipe out these cultures (its really the ideas, not the people) is to protect His chosen race. Imagine after growing up eating only manna and raising goats, you are suddenly told to start farming the land given to you. If fresh out of ideas, you turn to someone who used to farm there and ask how to start, the answer would have probably involved paganism before plowing. God didn't want food production to be credited to anyone besides Him, especially after just training them with 40 yrs of manna.