Zipporah is mentioned in the Book of Exodus as the wife of Moses, and the daughter of Jethro, the priest and prince of Midian.[*
]
She is the mother of Moses' two sons: Eliezer and Gershom.
In the Book of Chronicles, two of her grandsons are mentioned: Shebuel, son of Gershom; and Rehabiah, son of Eliezer.
Biblical narrative
Background
In the Book of Exodus, Zipporah was one of the seven daughters of Jethro, a
Kenite shepherd who was a priest of
Midian.
[Harris, Stephen L., Understanding the Bible. Palo Alto, California: Mayfield. 1985.] In , Jethro is also referred to as Reuel, and in the Book of Judges () as Hobab.
Hobab is also the name of Jethro's son in .
Moses marries Zipporah
While the
Israelites/
Hebrews were captives in Egypt, Moses killed an Egyptian who was striking a Hebrew, for which offense
Pharaoh sought to kill Moses. Moses therefore fled from Egypt and arrived in Midian. One day while he sat by a well, Jethro's daughters came to water their father's flocks. Other shepherds arrived and drove the girls away, so that they could water their own flocks first. Moses defended the girls and watered their flocks. Upon their return home, their father asked them, "How is it that you have come home so early today?" The girls answered, "An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds; he even drew water for us and watered the flock." "Where is he then?", Jethro asked them. "Why did you leave the man? Invite him for supper to break bread." Jethro then gave Moses Zipporah as his wife ().
Incident at the inn
After God commanded Moses to return to Egypt to free the Israelites, Moses took his wife and sons and started his journey. On the road, they stayed at an inn, where God came to kill Moses. Zipporah quickly circumcised her son with a sharp stone and touched Moses' feet with the foreskin, saying "Surely you are a husband of blood to me!" God then left Moses alone (). The details of the passage are unclear and subject to debate.
The Exodus
After Moses succeeded in leading the Israelites out of Egypt, and won a battle against
Amalek, Jethro came to the Hebrew camp in the wilderness of Sinai, bringing with him Zipporah and their two sons, Gershom and Eliezer. The Bible does not say when Zipporah and her sons rejoined Jethro, only that after he heard of what God did for the Israelites, he brought Moses' family to him. The most common translation is that Moses sent her away, but another grammatically permissible translation is that she sent things or persons, perhaps the announcement of the victory over Amalek.
[See e.g. Ibn Ezra on Exodus 18:2 – ור׳ ישועה אמר: ששלוחיה הוא דורון ומנחה, כמו: שלוחים לבתו (מלכים א ט׳:ט״ז). והטעם: אחר שיגרה דרונה וזה קרוב אלי.] The word that makes this difficult is
shelucheiha, the sendings away of her ().
Numbers 12
Moses' wife is referred to as a "
woman" in . Interpretations differ on whether this was one and the same as Zipporah, or another woman, and whether he was married to them simultaneously, or successively.
In the story,
Aaron and
Miriam criticize Moses' marriage to a Cushite woman. This
Leshon ha-Ra displeases God, who punishes Miriam with
tzaraath (often glossed as leprosy). Cushites were of the ancestry of either Kush (
Nubia) in northeast
Africa, or
Arabians. The sons of Ham, mentioned within the Book of Genesis, have been identified with nations in Africa (Ethiopia, Egypt, Libya), the Levant (Canaan), and Arabia. The Midianites themselves were later depicted at times in non-Biblical sources as dark-skinned and called
Cushi, a Hebrew word used for dark-skinned Africans.
[David M. Goldenberg. The curse of Ham: race and slavery in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, chapter 8. p. 124.] One interpretation is that the wife is Zipporah, and that she was referred to as a Cushite though she was a Midianite, because of her beauty.
The text of Numbers preserves only consonants. Jewish reading traditions pronounce the description of Moses's wife as "kushit" meaning "the Cushite woman". However, the oral reading tradition of the Samaritan Pentateuch pronounces the description of Moses's wife as "kaashet," which translates to "the beautiful woman."[Tsedaka, Benyamim, and Sharon Sullivan, eds. The Israelite Samaritan Version of the Torah: First English Translation Compared with the Masoretic Version. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2013. .]
"Cushite woman" becomes Αἰθιόπισσα in the Greek Septuagint (3rd century BCE)
In the Druze religion
In the
Druze religion, Zipporah's father Jethro is revered as the spiritual founder, chief prophet, and ancestor of all Druze.
Moses was allowed to wed Zipporah after helping save Jethro's daughters and their flock from competing herdsmen.
It has been expressed by prominent Druze such as Amal Nasser el-Din
and Salman Tarif, who was a prominent Druze shaykh, that this makes the Druze related to the Jews through marriage.
This view has been used to represent an element of the special relationship between Israeli Jews and Druze.
In literature and the arts
Like many other prominent biblical characters, Zipporah is depicted in several works of art.
In Marcel Proust's story (1913), Swann is struck by the resemblance of his eventual wife Odette to Sandro Botticelli’s painting of Zipporah in a Sistine Chapel fresco, and this recognition is the catalyst for his obsession with her.
Zipporah is often included in Exodus-related drama. Examples include the films The Ten Commandments (1956),
See also
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on Hebrew Wikipedia
-
Sephora, cosmetics store named after Zipporah
-
Tharbis – according to Josephus, a Cushite princess who married Moses prior to his marriage to Zipporah as told in the Book of Exodus
Notes
Further reading
