Zipporah, Wife of Moses by Marek Halter

Author:Marek Halter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307238474
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2005-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Firstborn

Jethro had told them to take their time, and it was a strange time that now began. For more than a year, Zipporah and Moses alternated between quarrels and lulls.

At first, they carefully avoided each other for days on end. Then, one night when the moon was full, the earth shook again. Jethro’s household was in a panic. Everyone rushed out into the darkness, eyes and ears alert. There was rumbling, but it was weak, almost gentle. The summit of the mountain was surrounded by a huge halo of pinkish light. Everyone feared that the times of wrath had returned, and the men remained watchful. Moses was also standing outside his tent, beneath the sycamore. He did not see Zipporah until she was quite close.

Neither said a word, but stood there with their faces lifted toward the mountain.

“Listen!” Zipporah said at last, in a low voice. “Listen! Horeb is speaking to you.”

Moses laughed deep in his throat and turned to her. They were both trembling with desire. Moses stroked the line of Zipporah’s lips. “It’s your mouth that’s speaking to me. That’s what I want to hear. Its silence consumes my nights.”

Moses moved his fingers down from her lips to her neck, then to the hollow of her throat. Zipporah seized his wrist as if to push him away, but all she could do was cling to him and receive his kiss like the breath of life.

Before long, their caresses impelled them inside the tent, bodies entwined, heedless of anything that was not their love.

In the morning, when Sefoba, who guessed that Moses and Zipporah had been overcome with passion, reproached her, Zipporah answered with a laugh that it was perhaps that very passion that had appeased Horeb. Moses had, in fact, awoken at dawn and, finding himself alone in the tent, had rushed out, calling Zipporah’s name, scattering the birds out of the sycamore, to find that the sky was a limpid blue as far as the eye could see. A few wisps of smoke hovered over the summit of the mountain. Horeb had stopped rumbling. Never had Midian seemed more peaceful.

Before nightfall, Moses went to see Jethro and asked him the question he had asked Hobab on the day the ash had fallen: “Why do you sacrifice to Horeb rather than the God of Abraham, if you are his sons?”

Jethro nodded, paused a moment for reflection, and replied with another question: “What do you know of the God of Abraham and Noah?”

“Only what I heard from the Hebrews in Egypt—that he had abandoned them.”

Jethro sighed. “He abandoned us because we were no longer worthy of his trust. A long time ago, a very long time ago, he offered his covenant to Abraham. ‘Go,’ he told him, ‘I will make you a great nation, I will uphold my covenant between me and you and your children and all their children. . . .’ Abraham obeyed and gave birth to sons and nations. There was a time when everywhere,

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