The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (29 page)

The fact that
two
firstlings are mentioned in God’s threat to Pharaoh—the firstborn of the Lord and the firstborn of Egypt—provides an intriguing clue to the night attack on Moses at the lodging place, which takes place
before
the tenth plague is visited upon Egypt. “The destroyer who will strike the first born of Egypt is already on his way,” one Bible critic has proposed by way of explaining the night attack at the lodging place, “and he is endangering the first born son of Moses himself!”
⁵⁰
In other words, God is sometimes so impulsive in his moments of rage, so wild and unpredictable, that he is capable of striking anyone who gets in his way; once God starts killing, he cannot stop. The same horrific notion can be found in the Talmud itself: “[O]nce the destroyer has been given permission to destroy,” the rabbis warn, “he no longer distinguishes between the righteous and wicked.”
⁵¹

Even though he survives the night attack at the lodging place, Moses (along with the rest of the Israelites) finds himself at risk of
death once again on the fateful night when God descends on Egypt to carry out the tenth and final plague, the slaying of the firstborn of Egypt. At midnight, the Bible tells us, God himself (and
not
an angel of death, as advertised in sermons and Sunday school stories) rampages through Egypt and slays every firstborn child, “from the first-born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the first-born of the maid-servant that is behind the mill” (Exod. 11:5). Yet God seems to know himself well enough to realize that he is not likely to distinguish between the Egyptians and the Chosen People once he has begun to kill. So the Almighty decrees that a lamb must be sacrificed by every Israelite household at dusk, and its blood must be smeared on the doorposts and lintels of every Israelite house, as a sign to him: “[A]nd when I see the blood,” God agrees, “I will pass over you, and there shall no plague be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt” (Exod. 12:13).

So the night attack at the lodging place seems to prefigure the midnight plague on the firstborn of Egypt, and the bloody foreskin that Zipporah uses to stave off the divine assault on Moses is seen again in the lamb’s blood that is smeared on the lintels of the Israelite houses in Egypt.
*
Intriguingly, the Midrash suggests a direct link between the rite of circumcision and the blood ritual that stays the hand of God when he seeks to kill: “two bloods” were used to mark the doorposts of the Israelites, the Midrash suggests, the blood of the sacrificial lamb and the blood of circumcision. “[A]nd when the Holy One passed over to plague the Egyptians, He saw the blood of the circumcision-covenant on the lintels of their houses mingle with the blood of the paschal lamb, and He was filled with compassion for Israel.”
⁵²

The rabbis, as we have already noted, preserved one pious fairy tale in which it was Satan rather than the Almighty who stalked and sought to kill Moses at the lodging place, a convenient if implausible way of shifting the culpability for the night attack from God to the same dark angel on whom Jews and Christians have long heaped the blame for the
evil that we do to each other. How else to explain what one scholar characterizes as God’s “un-Israelite behavior” at the lodging place?
⁵³
But Satan—who does not appear in the Bible until the Book of Job, and even then only as a friendly servitor of God—was falsely accused. Despite the long and ardent efforts of pious censors, the Bible plainly states that God himself, not Satan or even an angelic destroyer, is capable of killing even the innocent and faithful among humankind.

“The early stage of Israelite religion knows no Satan,” wrote Martin Buber, one of the towering moral philosophers of the twentieth century, in his musings on Exodus 4:24–26. “[I]f a power attacks a man and threatens him, it is proper to recognize YHVH in it or behind it, no matter how nocturnally dread and cruel it may be….”
⁵⁴

And then Buber added one more crucial observation: “…
and it is proper to withstand Him
….”
⁵⁵

Here we find what may be the real and urgent lesson of the Bridegroom of Blood: Zipporah stood up to God and faced him off and thereby saved the life of her husband and her child. Moses and his son are fortunate indeed that she did not follow Abraham’s example of silence and compliance; as we shall soon see, God does not
always
intervene to prevent a child sacrifice, even when he is given plenty of opportunity to do so. So the exploits of Zipporah in the face of divine wrath, so troubling and so mysterious, allow us to glimpse the innermost meaning of Exodus 4:24–26: Perhaps it is Abraham who failed the test of faith after all, and Zipporah who passed it.

T
he young woman put aside her needle and glanced at her father as he worked a sharpening stone up and down the length of his battle sword and then tested the sharpness of the blade with a thickly cal’ loused thumb.

She had seen her father at the same work many times before—honing the blade of his long sword, oiling his leathern scabbard and leather-bound wooden shield, sharpening a spearhead and fitting it to a freshly cut length of oak. As she grew up, she came to understand that the sight of the long sword signaled the fact that her father had hired himself out yet again as mercenary in the service of some wealthy lord who was willing to pay a price to rid himself of bandits or nomads or soldiers of fortune who fought for some rival chieftain. Weeks or even months would pass before her father returned with the coins and the occasional booty that provided a livelihood for the two of them.

If, that is, he returned at all. At least a few of the men who served with her father would be left behind in a shallow grave somewhere in the distant lands where they went to fight—one or two if the fighting went well, many more if it went badly. So far, her father had been
spared such a fate, but she realized that God might not always watch over him with such care.

Now the young woman turned back to her own handiwork, deftly working the needle along the collar piece of a long blue gown and leaving behind a pattern of entwined doves and branches in white thread. But she continued to ponder what her father had told her about the campaign on which he would embark at first light. This time he would fight as a general rather than a mercenary, and he would lead an army of his own—the army of Israel—into battle against the king of Ammon.

“As God is my judge,” he had told his daughter in a voice that sang out in pride, “if I return at all, I will return as a chieftain—and you will live out your life as befits the daughter of a chieftain.”

The man’s name was Jephthah, and the young woman is remembered as Seila. She was still young, but not too young to understand what burned in her father’s heart as he told her of the battle to come—the bitter hurt, the anger and defiance, the banked embers of vengeance that were ready to burst into flames. Seila had been raised by her father in that little house in the dusty border town of Mizpah, and the memories he shared with her were almost like fairy tales, except that they were peopled with his own flesh and blood.

Jephthah’s father had been a rich and powerful lord with a grand house in the district of Gilead. But Jephthah never knew his mother. He saw her only once from a distance as the great man’s entourage passed through the poorer streets of Gilead one fresh morning. Jephthah’s father pointed out the gaunt woman with greasy hair and a gaudily painted face who stood lazily at a crossroads, calling out now and then to passersby. Jephthah was too far away to make out her
features or the words that she spoke. But his father’s voice was clear enough: “That pitiful wretch is your mother,” said Jephthah’s father. “So count yourself lucky that you ended up in my house and not hers.”

But Seila knew that her father did not count himself lucky at all. His father had a wife, a plump and proper woman from a highborn family, who had given him an assortment of sleek young sons. As Jephthah grew older, his father was content to let his stepmother take charge of him along with the rest of the children—and she saw no good reason to keep Jephthah around the house when the very sight of him disgusted her. She contrived to move him to a room in one of the out’ buildings where the stable hands and the house servants bedded down; she made sure that he was otherwise occupied when guests arrived for a banquet; she dressed him in plain clothes even as she ordered up richly embroidered garb for her own sons; she found tasks that took him away from the estate at mealtimes. If Jephthah’s father noticed how his wife had banished his firstborn son, he said nothing; if he cared one way or the other, he gave no sign of it.

By the time he was sixteen, Jephthah had learned to content himself with the companionship of the stable boys, who taught him skills that would turn out to be useful and even profitable for a young man who grew up poor in a rich man’s household. Once Jephthah learned to ride a horse, to fashion a weapon out of iron, to wield his weapon in a fight, he no longer cast yearnful glances at his father, no longer spoke sweetly to his stepmother in the vain hope that she would regard him as a son rather than a bastard. Then, one day, he rode into the courtyard of the great house and saw his half brothers sitting on low stools, their clothing rent and ashes on their head. Jephthah wondered for a moment who had died, and when he realized that it was his father, he was unmoved.

Still, Jephthah understood all too well what his father’s death would mean for him. When the thirty days of mourning had passed, Jephthah boldly presented himself at the door of the house and demanded his share of the rich estate his father had left behind. Jephthah was turned away like a whining beggar by his arrogant half brothers, who taunted Jephthah with the fact that
his
mother was not their father’s wife. “You will inherit nothing of our father’s estate,” one of them declared, “because you are the son of that
other
woman.”

Afire with anger and indignation, Jephthah took his complaint to the elders of Gilead, who finally agreed to consider the rival claims of the rich man’s sons. One day, Jephthah, his half brothers, and the gray-bearded elders of Gilead gathered in the house of the dead man, and Jephthah poured his bile into words of great passion. The elders stroked their beards and nodded their heads and even smiled now and then at Jephthah’s plea for justice—the
other
woman’s son had a surprising gift for the well-chosen and well-spoken word—and then, as if Jephthah had not spoken at all, the elders of Gilead pronounced judgment wholly in favor of his half brothers and briskly ordered him not to bother them again. Then they rose, bestowed one final patronizing smile on Jephthah, and rushed out of the house as if afraid that the eloquent young man might let his dagger speak for him.