The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (24 page)

Zipporah glanced at her husband as he slept, one arm curled around the slumbering infant” He was a kind man, but a strangely quiet one who seemed to hold a great many secrets in his heart.

He had the bearing of a prince, although his rough hands and his muscled arms and legs clearly belonged to a shepherd whose flock grazed on the steepest and rockiest of mountainsides. He spoke in the refined language of a prince, but he did not speak very often because it took so much effort to suppress his stammer. His name sounded faintly like a name from far-off Egypt, but he insisted that he was not an Egyptian. Yet, plainly enough, he was a stranger among the Midianites, and when their first son was born, he insisted on naming the infant Gershom, a word that meant “a stranger there” in her husband’s native tongue.

She recalled the day when she first encountered her husband, a day that seemed very far off to her now. Zipporah and her sisters had driven their father’s flock to a well, some distance from their father’s compound, where they customarily drew water for the sheep and filled the water jars for the household. They began to fill the watering troughs. When the troughs were full, two boisterous young shepherds appeared over the rise of the hill, driving their flocks before them, and one of them pushed Jethro’s seven daughters aside.

“We’ll water ourselves and our beasts first,” said the bolder of the two shepherds to Zipporah with a laugh and a leer. “But don’t run away—we’ll have some pleasure with
you
when we’re done.”

Zipporah and her sisters had seen them before—the tall, gangly, pimple-faced one who never spoke, and the short, thick, pig-nosed one who taunted them and touched them in insulting ways. And, as before, Jethro’s daughters began to move away from the well in order to put some distance between themselves and their tormentors. Sometimes they were forced to wait all day in the cleft of some nearby wadi, out of sight of the shepherds, listening to the sounds of the short one’s braying laughter, until the young men tired of their game and moved off.

But on that memorable day, as Zipporah summoned her sisters away from the well, a stranger’s voice was suddenly heard from a shady spot under an outcropping of rock, and a man bearing a stout wooden staff stepped out of the shadows.

“Stand back,” the man shouted at the two shepherds without a trace of the stammer that Zipporah would later hear in quieter moments, “and let the maidens finish watering their flocks.”

All of them—Jethro’s daughters
and
the bullying shepherds—looked up in surprise.

What they saw was a young man whose tattered and dusty clothing did not conceal his strength, a man who stood as proud and erect as a prince of Egypt even if it was quite obvious that he had been traveling alone through rough country like a fugitive on the run. He drove off the shepherds with a single threatening gesture of his staff raised high in a clenched fist. Then, as the flock watered at the troughs, he drew more water from the well, pulling up one bucketful after another with his strong arms. When Jethro’s daughters returned to their father’s house, they were giggling to each other about the stranger who had rescued them from their old tormentors.

“How is it,” Jethro asked, “that you have come back so soon today?”

“An Egyptian chased away the shepherds who always bother us at the well,” said the youngest of Jethro’s daughters.

“He even drew water for us—” said another.

“And watered the flock,” a third one interrupted.

Jethro nodded, pulled at his long beard, and then looked sharply at Zipporah, his eldest daughter.

“Where is he then?” asked Jethro. “Why did you leave the man? Ask him in to break bread.”

So it was that the stranger came to Jethro’s house, broke bread with the priest and his seven daughters, and accepted Jethro’s offer to stay with them and tend his flocks. The man had few words for any of the young women, but he accompanied Jethro on long walks into the countryside, and Jethro learned a great deal about him: how he had been born the son of an Israelite slave in Egypt but raised in the court of Pharaoh himself, how he had witnessed the beating of a slave by one of Pharaoh’s taskmasters, how he had struck down the taskmaster and then fled to the wilderness of Midian to escape the wrath of Pharaoh and the certain punishment that would be inflicted upon him.

Jethro offered the stranger a safe refuge in the land of Midian and, not much later, the hand of his eldest daughter in marriage. Only then did Zipporah learn the name of the stranger, the man who would be her husband and the father of her children. He was called Moses.

A sudden noise from just outside the tent, a hiss and a rattle like a serpent arching to strike, interrupted Zipporah’s thoughts and sent a chill through her body. She sat up with a start, her heart racing.

“Moses!” she whispered, but her husband did not stir, and the baby only snuffled and then fell silent again.

She heard the rustle of flesh against cloth as someone or something moved against the fabric of the tent, and she imagined that she saw an odd bulge that moved slowly but steadily toward the tent opening. A wheezing noise reached her ears—the sound of labored breathing—but it came from neither her husband nor her baby. A stench that reminded her of the greasy smoke that poured from the altar when her father sacrificed a bloody hunk of flesh to the gods wafted into the tent.

“Husband!” she said again, and again he did not stir.

Now she recalled the strange tale that her husband had told her when he first announced that he must return to Egypt and asked her to accompany him. Moses had been tending Jethro’s flocks on a mountainside in the wilderness when he saw a strange sight, a bush that burned with fire but did not burn up. Then he heard a voice that seemed to come out of the bush, a voice that announced itself as “the God of your fathers,” a god whose name was Yahweh, a god who demanded that Moses go back to the place where his own people were enslaved, the place where he had killed the Egyptian taskmaster, the place where Pharaoh sought his life.

“Come, I will send you to Pharaoh,” the voice said from within the burning bush, “and you shall free My people, the Israelites, from Egypt.”

Zipporah would have laughed at her husband’s tale if he had not told it to her in such a plainspoken and quiet voice. She noticed that his stammer disappeared and she marked the urgency in his voice when he asked her to return with him to Egypt. Without allowing herself to think much about the implications of her husband’s tale—Was Moses truly called by the God of Israel? Was he jesting? Was he mad?—she agreed to undertake the long, difficult, and perilous journey from the sheltered wilderness of Midian to the land of the Egyptians and the mighty, Pharaoh.

Now she could no longer drive the mounting terror from her breast. The spirits and demons of her own people were so familiar to Zipporah that they had lost the power to frighten her, but her husband was a
stranger whose curious ways seemed grotesque and dangerous, too. Among her own people, for example, a man was circumcised when he reached his thirteenth year, when he was old enough to take a bride and strong enough to endure the circumciser’s knife. But Moses insisted that a son must be circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, when the child was still frail and vulnerable to every sort of peril. “This is what the God of my fathers demands,” he told Zipporah’s father on one of their long walks, and Jethro later complained to Zipporah: “What a bar-baric people to circumcise so young!”

And there the whole matter had been left by her father and her husband, but now Zipporah found herself seized with anxiety at the thought that her infant son lay beside her with his foreskin intact on that tiny bit of flesh between his fat little thighs. Perhaps she had been wrong to allow her father to argue with Moses over the matter of the circumcision; perhaps she had placed all of them in terrible danger by allowing her son to remain uncircumcised. After all, what might the strange and demanding god of the Israelites do to them if they defied his commandments?

A sound that Zipporah could not recognize now reached her ears, a sound that might have been water running over stones or the night wind in the branches of a palm. Her eyes were drawn to the opening of the tent, and there she saw a silvery mist reaching into the tent, moving over the ground like a morning fog except that it glowed with a light that resembled the glare of the full moon. Pouring into the tent, swelling like a freshening stream, the mist surrounded the bedding on which Zipporah, Moses, and Gershom lay as if on an island of clouds in a quicksilver lake.

“How pretty,” Zipporah thought to herself, suddenly calm and even enchanted by the sight and sound. She wanted to wake her husband, not out of fear but to show him what she beheld, but the mist filled her throat and prevented her from speaking.

Now a figure seemed to rise up out of the swirling mist, and Zipporah beheld the shape of a man, or something like a man, and yet not a man at all. The figure began to swell up like a corpse that had been in water too long—and then she saw its mouth open wide to reveal two rows of yellowed and twisted donkey teeth in which she saw bits of flesh and bone, eyeballs, fingertips, fragments that could be recognized as bloody pieces of lung and scalp and kidney. Zipporah watched in silent
terror as the mouth slowly closed around her sleeping husband, drawing into that vast maw his head and his feet, his arms and his legs, his chest and his thighs, until only a single organ of his body was still visible, the organ with which Moses had first implanted a seed in her womb.

Zipporah awoke from the nightmare with a start. Her eyes burned, her head ached. She shuddered as she remembered the enormous jaws that had closed around her husband’s body—and then, to her immense relief, she looked around the tent and saw that her husband was still asleep next to her, and her baby was still safely nested in the crook of his arm. Perhaps I do have a fever, Zipporah thought to herself, and she snuggled comfortably under a fold of the bedding.

Then Zipporah heard a snigger from someone standing inside the tent, someone standing so near to her that she could hear his breathing, and she knew that she was no longer dreaming.

His laughter reminded Zipporah of the pig-nosed shepherd who had tormented her and her sisters when they watered their flock at the well, and the mad thought occurred to her that it was the young bully who was in the tent with them now.

“Who are you?” she said, choking out the words. “What do you want?”

The intruder did not speak. Zipporah glanced around the tent to see if she might find something to use as a weapon—her husbands new walking staff, perhaps, or a spare tent stake, but neither was within sight or reach. On the tent floor were the supplies she had used to prepare their evening meal—a water jug, a pouch of milled flour, a tiny jar of oil, a little bundle of kindling, a flint stone that she had used to strike a spark and start the cooking fire.

Then, suddenly, something moved quickly through the still air in the tent. Zipporah felt the slightest breeze but still saw only a shadow. But now Moses awoke with a start, sat up awkwardly, and raised his arms as if to defend himself against a blow. The baby tumbled out of his arm and rolled to the ground, crying out in surprise and indignation. Zipporah sensed rather than saw the attack on her husband—somehow, without quite knowing why, she realized that the intruder, whoever or whatever it was, had come to kill him.

At that moment, Zipporah dived to the floor where the cooking
supplies were neatly arranged and snatched the flint stone in her right hand. She felt the jagged edge of the stone with one finger—was it sharp enough, she wondered, to cut the attacker? Would a blow or even a knife-cut be enough to stop him? Or would something else be needed, some more potent magic, to stave off the ghostly figure in the shadows? She wished she had something longer or sharper at hand—a long-bladed knife like the one Jethro used to slit the throats of the bleating sheep that were led to the sacrificial altar, or even the short, sharp blade that was used to circumcise a young Midianite man before his marriage to a virgin bride. But the flint stone was all she had now, and she would inflict as much damage on the attacker, draw as much blood, as the jagged edge would allow.

As Zipporah raised the stone and looked around for the attacker, she heard two anguishing noises: her husband’s strangled cry, as if the attacker were already on top of him, and the sharper cry of their infant son, who lay helplessly on his back, arms and legs flailing, shrieking in panic. A strange image from her fever dream suddenly formed in Zipporah’s mind at the sound of her baby’s desperate cry—the image of her husband swallowed up in the mouth of the demon, the whole of his body captured between ravening jaws except one crucial limb—and then she recalled the angry words that her husband and her father had exchanged over the circumcision of Zipporah’s newborn son.

Now Zipporah burned with the urgent knowledge that Moses and not her father must have been right. The god that Moses worshipped, the god that had summoned Moses and sent him on the road to Egypt, demanded the flesh and blood of the firstborn sons of his Chosen People—and yet their own child was alive and intact! The intruder in the tent—angel or devil or perhaps God himself—was bent on punishing Zipporah’s husband and son for disregarding what Moses had always insisted was a holy ritual. Zipporah did not understand
why
the tiny foreskin of an infant boy, a bit of flesh not bigger than the tip of her little finger, was so important to the deity that Moses called all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-seeing, but she realized that it no longer mattered why. All that mattered now, Zipporah told herself in that moment, was to confront the attacker and turn him away.