Zipporah

Zipporah or Tzipora (Hebrew: צִפּוֹרָה, Modern Ẓippora Tiberian Ṣippôrāh ; Greek: Σεπφώρα - Sephora; Arabic: Safura‎ or Safrawa صفورة صوانة ; "bird"), is mentioned in the Book of Exodus as the wife of Moses, and the daughter of Jethro, a priest of Midian.

Biblical references

In the Book of Exodus, Moses escapes from Egypt, and begins working for Jethro as a shepherd. Subsequently, he meets and marries Zipporah. They have two sons, Gershom and Eliezer.

Zipporah also features in a much more curious, and much-debated, passage (Exodus 4:24-27). The passage concerning Moses and Zipporah reach an inn contains four of the most difficult sentences in Biblical text. One possible interpretation is that something (perhaps God, perhaps an agent of God) tries to kill Moses, until Zipporah carries out a circumcision. (Other interpretations suggest that it is their son, Gershom, who is attacked.) Yet another is that Moses tries to kill his own son and only after Zipporah cuts the child's foreskin, drawing blood and pain, does his anger subside.

A third reference to a wife of Moses occurs in the story of Aaron and Miriam's complaints, at Numbers 12:1, where his wife is described as a Cushite or Kushite, an African ethnic group. However the Midianites themselves were a dark-skinned people often called Kushim, the Hebrew word used to describe dark skinned Africans. Modern biblical criticism has posited that Zipporah and this Cushite wife were different individuals^{[citation needed]}, particularly since bigamy was legal, and practiced by Jacob, a major patriarch.^[1] Traditional Jewish sources debated throughout Mishnaic and Medieval times, whether Zipporah was indead the Cushite woman. What has become known as "the Cushite reference" identifies Zipporah with the ancient inhabitants of North Sudan, i.e. the ancient Cushites (also known as Nubians- a dark skinned, African people).

The book of Genesis identifies the Cushites as descendants of Ham. Traditionally, it is held that Ham was the father of dark skinned peoples. He is the son of Noah who moved into Africa. His descendants spread through Africa and parts of the near East. They became the Nubians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Canaanites, Hittites, Libyans, and Phoenicians etc. Flavius Josephus refers to this wife as the wife he married before fleeing Egypt. He married her during his campaign to Ethiopia as a general for the Egyptians.

See also

• Moses in rabbinic literature

References

External links

• Exodus 2:11-23
• Exodus 4:18-31
• Exodus 18
• Numbers 12:1

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