This strange little story has baffled scholars for centuries. Having just told Moses to go to Egypt, Jehovah meets him on the way with the intent of killing him. Why? The standard explanation is that Moses had not circumcised his son, as Jehovah had ordered for all descendants of Abraham. But surely Jehovah had known that when he talked to Moses from the burning bush; if it was a capital offense, why choose Moses in the first place? And why not remind him then? The Hebrews had, after all, been slaves for 400 years, and had so forgotten their religious roots that they did not even know Jehovah’s name. Can Moses really be held to blame? Besides that, how did Zipporah know what to do? She wasn’t even a Hebrew!

Those and other questions have caused many to write the passage off as fragmentary, a leftover piece of some more complete story. Understood spiritually, however, it’s clear that it illustrates an important moment in the formation of the Israelitish Church.

The Lord’s second great church, the Ancient Church, had fallen prey to human pride. At its height, it had possessed a vast knowledge of the correspondences between the natural world and the spiritual world, and had understood how things in the natural world served as forms and containers for spiritual things. As it fell, though, that knowledge turned into idolatry and magic, and even human sacrifice. The Lord needed to form a church that would preserve the proper natural forms so that when He later came to earth as the human Jesus, He could start filling in those forms with their true spiritual meaning again.

The Lord’s intent was to form that church among the descendents of Jacob. That group, however, was as hard-hearted and external in its thinking as any of the people around it – which is represented by Moses staying in a lodging-place. It was so hard-hearted, in fact, that it reacted with hostility to the leading of the Lord, represented by Jehovah’s intent to kill Moses.

Zipporah, however – who represents a remnant of the Ancient Church which still worshipped the Lord – used teachings from the Lord (the flint) to remove the most external loves of self and the world (the foreskin) and expose the people’s internal loves to the Lord. Those loves were as hellish as the external ones – represented when Zipporah called Moses her “bridegroom of blood” – but having them exposed allowed the Lord to control their external worship so that they could represent spiritual things.

That is pretty deep stuff and somewhat abstract, but as with all things in the Bible it also represents a stage we all go through in life. In many ways the “Children of Israel” represent all of us as children. Once past the innocence of infancy and the wide-eyed absorptive stage of toddler-hood, children – much as we love them – are relatively external in their interests and self-absorbed in their desires. At that age we force rules and structure on them, generally against their will, with the idea that they will eventually grow to see and embrace the deeper purposes behind the rules – which is very much what the Lord did with the Children of Israel.

This story, then, to some extent represents the foundation we lay with our children, the basic idea that we are in charge and they must obey, that they cannot control us and enforce their will. Their belief that they are and should be in control of their own lives has to be cut away for further rules to have any effect.

(References: Arcana Coelestia 7040)

4825. 'And yet again she bore a son' means idolatry. This is clear from the meaning of 'a son' in this case as idolatry; for those born before him meant falsity and evil, 4821, 4823. From this it follows that the third son means idolatry, for these two - falsity and evil - lead to idolatry and are contained within it. Of the three born to Judah by the Canaanite this son was the only one to survive, a third of the Jewish nation being descended from him. The meaning in the internal sense at this point is that this nation sprang from idolatry. Its very strong inclination to idolatrous practice is clear from the historical and the prophetical parts - from the sense of the letter - of the Word; and from its internal sense it is evident that this nation was constantly an idolatrous one. For idolatry consists not only in the worship of idols and graven images, and also the worship of other gods, but even in the worship of external things devoid of internal ones. This kind of idolatrous practice existed constantly among that nation, for they revered external things alone and cast internal ones completely aside, and did not even wish to know about them. They indeed had holy things - such as the Tent of Meeting containing the Ark and the Mercy seat on this, the tables with the loaves on them, the lampstand, and incenses; and outside the Tent there was the altar on which they presented burnt offerings and sacrifices. All these things were called holy, while the inmost part there was called the Holy of Holies, as well as the Sanctuary. Also, there were the vestments they had which were worn by Aaron and their high priests, which were referred to as holy vestments, for these included the ephod and the breastplate where the Urim and Thummin were, besides much else. But these things were not inherently holy; they were holy because they were representative of holy things, that is to say, they were representative of the Divine celestial and spiritual things of the Lord's kingdom, and representative of the Lord Himself. Still less was the holiness of those things due to the people among whom they existed, for those people had no affection at all for the internal things that were represented, only for external ones; and having an affection for external things alone is idolatry. This involves the worship of wood and stone, and also of gold and silver covering these, from a delusion that those objects are inherently holy. This is what the nation was like then and is also like at the present day.

[2] Yet a representative of the Church was nevertheless able to exist among such people because in that which is representative no attention is paid to the person who represents, only to whatever is represented, see 665, 1097 (end), 3670, 4208, 4281, 4288. Consequently their worship did not lead them to blessing and happiness in the next life, but merely to worldly prosperity, provided they adhered to those representatives and did not turn aside to the idols of the gentiles, and in so doing did not become openly idolatrous. For if they did it was no longer possible for that nation to represent anything at all of the Church. This then is what the idolatry, meant by Judah's third son by his Canaanite wife, is describing. This idolatry among that nation had its origin in internal idolatry, for more than all others this nation was governed by self-love and love of the world, 4459 (end), 4570. Among those governed by self-love and love of the world internal idolatry exists, for they worship themselves and they worship the world. They pay attention to holy things for the sake of personal adoration and gain; that is, they have a selfish end in view, and do not have the Lord's Church and kingdom, and so the Lord Himself, in view.