They Were Not White, Part 1: Zipporah and Moses

The people of the Bible are the ancestors of people of color. No one in the Bible looked like the white people who live in North America, Canada, Britain, Europe, Australia, New Zealand or anywhere else. (And here’s an argument that Jewish people are not white).

I’d like to take a closer look at dark-skinned women in the Bible, in a series of articles. Readers often do not take time to try to imagine skin color or ethnicity. “White” is the default image, at least for white Christians. It’s way past time to change up our images of POB (People of the Bible).

The first woman we can begin to imagine more fully is Zipporah, who artists have rendered as a black woman. Scholars disagree about whether the Midianite Zipporah is also the dark-skinned Cushite that Miriam and Aaron complained about Moses marrying in Numbers 12:1.

However, we can be sure of this: Zipporah was not white. In the background is her husband, Moses, who I believe had a life story based on the quest for ethnic identity and inclusion. I’d like to look more closely at Zipporah and Moses in this post.

The Importance of Zipporah

I imagine Zipporah’s full biography would have added some punch to Exodus, had it been included. However, this is what we know from Scripture: Zipporah met Moses when he fled to Midian after killing an Egyptian taskmaster. His own adoptive grandfather (the Pharaoh of Egypt) sought to have him put to death for this crime (Ex. 2:15).

So, with his only plan being to escape Egypt, Moses finds himself observing yet another act of injustice in which he must get involved. Zipporah and her sisters are watering their flocks of sheep when some men come and drive them away. Moses intervenes, and this leads to the grateful young women bringing Moses home to their father. Then Zipporah’s father, Jethro, priest of Midian, decides that she and Moses make a good match (Exodus 2:11-22).

Though it may be easy to believe that Moses married “under” him, the enslaved Hebrews were actually the social underdogs, say the authors of Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. They write, “Remember that although Westerners may have once considered Africans a slave race, in the Nile River of ancient Egypt, the Hebrews were the slave race.”

Perhaps due to Moses’ Egyptian mannerisms or Coptic accent, it never even occurred to Zipporah and her sisters that Moses might be Hebrew. They told their father, “An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds” (Ex. 2:19). And did Moses tell them right away that they were wrong? The text doesn’t say, but the women’s first impression of his ethnicity might have helped Moses out.

Royal Egyptian families tended to marry family members. But given that Moses was not of royal Egyptian blood even though an adopted son, he had to make a match for himself. Moses decided he should try to find a mate right where he was, in Midian. They likely saw him as a bit odd, in Egypt, due to his single status, since marriage after puberty was the norm.

Importantly, Zipporah gives Moses status and belonging–as someone who has married up, and someone who has finally married.

And Then Things Get Weird

Even stranger things, other than being single for so long, would happen to Moses in his long life. But the next mention of Zipporah is in a story that tops them all for weirdness. As the account goes, Yahweh suddenly tries to kill Moses when the family is staying at an inn, headed back to Zipporah’s parents’ home. Zipporah saves Moses’ life by an emergency circumcision of one of her sons (Exodus 4:24, 26).

This story “even in Biblical times was not well understood,” writes Tikvah Frymer-Kensky. She concludes, “But within the enigma, the figure of Zipporah is decisive and clear. She knows what is happening, knows what to do, averts the doom, and rescues Moses.”

Zipporah tells Moses afterwards, “You have become a bridegroom of blood to me.” That’s another cryptic part of this story. This final comment “indicates both his need for protection by the family and his need for expiating blood,” says The IVP Bible Background Commentary.

But Zipporah is also indicating a change in her relationship with or view of Moses. Could Zipporah ever feel the same about Moses again, after having put her son through such suffering to save Moses’ life? And did this presage the eventual parting of Moses and Zipporah much later in the wilderness (Exodus 18:2-5)?

Saving Moses

Some scholars say this story anticipates other ones where blood has salvific effect, such as the first Passover. Susan Ackerman notes that Zipporah took the role of priest in enacting the circumcision, which may parallel the giving of sacrifice as well. She believes that women may have filled a priestly role on other occasions. Drorah Setel agrees, quoted by Alice Ogden Bellis, “Although the specific meaning of Zipporah’s action may remain a mystery, the elements of which it is composed clearly suggest ritual sacrificial significance.”

If we were to hear Zipporah’s autobiography, I think she’d talk about her father-the-priest, and the things she overheard about the circumcisions he performed (as circumcision was performed throughout the Middle East and Africa). In any case, she knew exactly what to do in an emergency such as this, and did it swiftly.

As scholar Nyasha Junior notes, “once again, a woman saves Moses life.” The midwives Shiprah and Puah refrained from killing the Hebrew babies; his mother hid him; Pharaoh’s daughter took him as her own son; and his sister Miriam reunited him with his mother to be nursed. And now Zipporah saves the future leader of the Israelites with their son’s own blood.

It’s easy to forget that Moses grew up in an Egyptian household with Egyptian gods and goddesses. Perhaps he wasn’t circumcised. Michael Heiser observes, “Had the boy been marked by Hebrew circumcision, his life would likely have been in danger in Pharaoh’s household.” Maybe Moses even felt some revulsion about it. (In Egypt, “there is no extant evidence that circumcision was required for all males; likewise, there is no evidence that circumcision was governed by one’s social class or status,” says scholar John Nunn.)

What Moses needed in this crisis was Zipporah, who knew what to do.

Zipporah’s True Mission

Yet, the climax of Zipporah’s unsung story may be that she as a non-Israelite introduced or re-introduced Moses to Yahweh. Scholar Karen Van Der Hoorn writes that some of the Midianites held to the worship of Yahweh before the Hebrew people had embraced this faith.

And, the Encylopedia Brittanica says definitively, “Jethro…and his daughter Zipporah, a wife of Moses, influenced early Hebrew thought: it was Yahweh, the lord of the Midianites, who was revealed to Moses as the God of the Hebrews” (my emphasis).

In fact, it is after his marriage to Zipporah that Moses meets Yahweh in the burning bush in Exodus 3. This is what Yahweh says to Moses: “‘I am the god of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.'” Yahweh identifies first as being the god of Moses’ father, the Levite. Yet, Moses’ father is nearly absent from the story. Moses likely missed knowing both his Hebrew father, and Yahweh as well. Yet, Yahweh is also the God of his father-in-law, where Moses finds true family and home.

So, Yahweh dramatically reveals Moses’ place of belonging, within the faith of Zipporah and her family. Moses’ identity and faith begin to solidify, thanks to Zipporah.

Dark-Skinned Zipporah

The Midianites descended from Abraham and Keturah, Abraham’s second wife after Sarah’s death (Gen. 25:1-4). Some scholars believe that Keturah may actually be Hagar, the dark-skinned Egyptian concubine. Strengthening this hypothesis, in Gen. 37:28, the Midianites are also referred to as Ishmaelites. If so, that might explain why Aaron and Miriam refer to Moses’ Midianite wife as “the Cushite” in Exodus 12:1 when she criticized Moses’ marriage: “Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite.” She had skin like a Cushite even if she wasn’t one, and so was referred to among the Hebrews as a Cushite.

Perhaps this also explains why Moses sent Zipporah and her sons back to Jethro in Midian in Ex. 18:2. Were they rejected by Miriam and a portion (at least) of the Hebrew people, on the basis of their differences? Did Moses send his wife and sons away in order to protect them from prejudiced behavior?

Wilda C. Gafney, in Womanist Midrash, reminds us that race and color weren’t categories of oppression the way they are today, though ethnic identity was. Randolph Richards and Brandon O’Brien point out that Miriam’s repetition of “the Cushite” makes it clear this was the issue–her ethnicity. However, they clarify, “The Cushites were not demeaned as a slave race in the ancient world; they were respected as highly skilled soldiers.” So, Miriam and Aaron may have seen Moses as being uppity by choosing a woman from Cush as his (possibly) second wife, instead of a woman from the more status-starved Hebrew nation.

And it may be, in the end, that we will discover reasons to conclude that Zipporah the Midianite and “the Cushite” are actually the same woman. Peter T. Nash in Reading Race, Reading the Bible says that scholar Maricel Mena Lopez “has presented evidence that Ethiopia was the suzerain on both shores of the Red Sea during this period. Mena understands Zipporah and the Ethiopian to be one and the same” (my emphasis).

Whatever the reason for Miriam’s criticism of Moses marrying a Cushite woman, Miriam had a week outside the camp suffering with leprosy, to re-think it (Numbers 12). That racially based criticism hit a tender spot for both Moses and Yahweh.

Moses’ Need to Belong

Maybe Yahweh’s unusual reaction to the criticism of Moses’ Cushite wife was because Moses’ life had been both marred and shaped by the need for ethnic identity and belonging.

After Moses makes it through his first day as an infant, he becomes a survivor of the genocide by Pharaoh of Hebrew male babies. Then he amazingly lands in the Egyptian Pharaoh’s own home, thanks to the king’s daughter–compassionate, bold, and perhaps just a wee-bit-angry. (She deserves her own post, doesn’t she!).

Moses eventually becomes a lone Hebrew male growing up in an Egyptian royal household. He does not even have a single male Hebrew peer his age, as they would have been murdered as infants. Identifying with his own people, the oppressed and hated Hebrews, he has to play out his ambivalent role of living between two worlds, the victimizers and the victims.

When he one day sees a fellow Hebrew being abused by an Egyptian, his long-suppressed anger erupts into murder. But he is being watched by the other Hebrews, and not in an approving way.

The very next day he sees two Hebrews fighting, and confronts the one who had started it. The man replies, “Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?” (Ex. 2:14). This experience so terrifies Moses that he flees Egypt altogether.

Moses will not be received as having royal authority as a Hebrew. He has also been labeled as a murderer in front of other Israelites, and the royal family also perceives him as a criminal.

He wants to identify with the Hebrew nation. But he can’t figure out how to do it as a man who has grown up in a house full of powerful, oppressive leaders who are willing to use and abuse his own people in order to solve problems.

An Identified Minority

So, he becomes an ethnic minority again, this time in the land of Midian. He will stay there for forty years as an outsider, at least some of the years with a Midianite woman, Zipporah, and their bi-ethnic children. He even names his firstborn Gershom, saying, “I have become a foreigner in a foreign land” (Ex. 2:22).

The second mention of Zipporah is in Exodus 4:18, 19 when Moses returns to Midian to tell Zipporah’s father that he would like to return to Egypt to see if his family is still alive. Moses has just finished arguing with God about his own lack of qualifications for the job of leading the Hebrews out of Egypt.

He tells God it’s his poor speaking ability that is the problem (Ex. 4:30), but Moses is a man-on-the-margins and he knows it. In Midian for forty years, separated from his family and his people in his wealthy royal household, and then plagued by his bad reputation, he finds it obvious that he cannot lead his people. Perhaps the words of the Hebrew man, “Who made you ruler and judge over us?” echoed through his mind.

The debate about ethnic identity and Moses usually centers on whether or not Zipporah was the black Cushite wife of Moses mentioned in Numbers. However, Moses’ whole upbringing and early adulthood prior to meeting his future wife were defined by the boundaries of ethnicity, a man who remained a foreigner in a foreign land wherever he went.

Yet Moses finally found the comfort of belonging–with Zipporah and her father, with Yahweh, and eventually with his own people in the wilderness.