Unscrolled: The God of Nighttime

It is as close to the horror genre as we find in the Torah. Moses—with his wife Tziporah and their children—stop at an unassuming inn to rest on their way to Egypt.

Moses has just received his divine commission to lead the Israelites to freedom and here, at the inn along the way, God again confronts him. This time, however, God seeks “to kill him” (Exodus 4:24).

If you are confused, this is because it is confusing. The text offers no explanation, no apologetic or rationale. Tziporah, however, seems to know exactly what is happening here and why. She springs into action.

“Tziporah 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!’” (4:25). Whatever she has done, it has worked. God relents and retreats.

The story is disturbing. Gone is the magisterial God of the universe who remembers His covenant with Israel. Here instead is a demonic God, a night-banshee ready to kill. How can our faith, and that of Moses, not be shaken?

Here instead is a demonic God, a night-banshee ready to kill. How can our faith, and that of Moses, not be shaken?

According to the 19th-century commentator Cassuto, however, this nighttime attack has just the opposite effect, bonding God and Moses more deeply. The attack, Cassuto writes, “was a kind of warning, coming to remind Moses that from now on, he needs to be dedicated completely to the fulfilment of his mission, with all of his soul and all of his powers,” even to death if need be.

And yet it is the blood of the son, not the blood of the father, that signifies this total commitment. Alas, in Torah, this is always the case. The commitment of parents, of Moses, of Abraham, of Hannah, is always measured by the extent that they are willing to return the gift of the son to its Source.

That said, we cannot solely understand this event as a commentary on the relationship of Jewish parents to their children. It is also a betrothal scene. The blood baptism is also a blood wedding.

Cassuto further explicates Tziporah’s words. “Behold, you (Moses) are—through this—like a groom to me for the second time, and this time a groom of blood, a groom acquired in blood.”

According to the Mishna, a man acquires a wife with money, which in our days has been formalized as a wedding ring, accompanied by a verbal declaration: “Behold you are consecrated to me, behold you are betrothed to me, behold you are mine as a wife.” The marriage is made official through these twin acts of giving and saying, and the Talmud stresses that it is the man who must be the one to both give and say.

Here, however, at the inn, it is the woman, Tziporah, who both gives and says. She gives renewed life to her husband through the circumcision of their son and declares Moses betrothed to her in blood.

Later, the rabbis of the Talmud will insist that she did none of this. The story troubled them because it contradicted their own religious convictions, namely that a woman could not perform the mitzvah of circumcision.

Too often, this is what the mouthpieces of religion do, dragging the night-encounter into the light of day and forcing it to comply with their preconceived notions, prejudices and wishful visions of how things should be.

Despite those efforts, however, the original story retains its primal nocturnal force. It shakes us from theological complacency. It reminds us that God is indeed, as Isaiah said, creator of all, creator of light, creator of evil.

There are those who don’t like this story and never will. We live in a society that barely believes in God, but to the extent that it does, believes that God ought to be nice.

Perhaps this is because we are too sheltered, spending too much time indoors. The jagged and gargantuan architecture of mountains implies nothing particularly gentle about their architect. The vast and terrifying expanse of the night sky does not make one feel overly precious about the God whose presence fills that infinite space.

Tucked indoors, we are protected from such realizations. With white noise coming at us from our screens, we don’t hear God’s still, small voice, let alone His booming call. We are not addressed, and so we are not consumed.

We are protected from the dark night of the soul, yes, and we may find that comforting. But it comes at the expense of revelation—at the expense of the chance to give ourselves fully and be taken.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.