Why was God going to kill Moses in Exodus 4:24-26?

The most likely reason God was going to kill Moses in Exodus 4:24-26 is that Moses had failed to circumcise his son, neglecting the covenant sign God commanded for every male in an Israelite household. On his way to confront Pharaoh as God's chosen deliverer, Moses had left undone the very mark of belonging to the covenant people he was sent to rescue. His wife, Zipporah, resolved the crisis by performing the circumcision herself, and the threat lifted.

Few passages in Scripture feel as abrupt or unsettling as this one. God has just commissioned Moses with patience and signs, and then, almost without warning, "the Lord confronted him and was about to kill him" (Ex 4:24). It reads like a thunderclap on a clear day. But the strangeness is part of the point, and the answer, when we follow the text closely, is more coherent than it first appears.

What the text actually says

The scene is sparse. Moses, his wife, and his sons are traveling toward Egypt and stop for the night. There the Lord meets Moses with deadly intent. Zipporah, reading the danger instantly, "took a flint knife and circumcised her son" and touched Moses' feet with the foreskin, declaring, "Now you are a bridegroom of blood to me" (Ex 4:25). The narrator then explains she spoke this "referring to the circumcision," and "after that, the Lord left him alone" (Ex 4:26).

Notice the cause and effect the text draws. The threat begins, a circumcision is performed, and the threat ends. The narrator does not spell out the offense in a sentence, but he points to it through Zipporah's action. The deadly encounter is bracketed on both sides by circumcision. That literary frame is the strongest interpretive clue we have.

Why circumcision mattered so much

To us, the stakes feel wildly out of proportion. A missed ritual, and God moves to kill? But circumcision was no minor custom. In Gen 17, God told Abraham that every male in his line "must be circumcised" as "a sign of the covenant between me and you" (Gen 17:10-11). The warning attached to it was severe: any uncircumcised male "will be cut off from the covenant family for breaking the covenant" (Gen 17:14). The Hebrew idiom "cut off" (karat) carries the weight of being removed, even by death, from the people of God.

Now place Moses in that light. He is being sent to tell Pharaoh, "Israel is my firstborn son... let my son go" (Ex 4:22-23), and the chapter ends with God warning that He will strike down Pharaoh's firstborn. Moses carries a message about a son under threat while his own son bears no covenant mark. The leader of the covenant people cannot stand outside the covenant himself. Before God deals with Egypt's disobedience, He addresses Moses' own.

There may be a reason the neglect happened. Zipporah was a Midianite, and the practice of infant circumcision was distinctly Israelite. Some scholars suggest a quiet tension in the home, a wife reluctant, a husband who let it slide. Her words, "a bridegroom of blood," spoken with the foreskin in hand, carry the tone of someone who has done a hard, even repugnant thing under pressure. The text leaves room for that human texture.

What about the difficulties in the passage?

Honesty requires admitting this is one of the more obscure passages in the Torah. Three real puzzles remain, and faithful interpreters have wrestled with each.

First, whom did God threaten, Moses or the son? The Hebrew uses the pronoun "him" without naming the target, and a few readers have argued the son was in danger. But the larger context, Moses' commission and his responsibility as covenant head, makes Moses the natural referent. Most translations, including the one quoted here, render it so.

Second, what does "bridegroom of blood" mean? The phrase is genuinely opaque in Hebrew. It may be Zipporah's startled cry as she symbolically applies the blood to Moses, binding him afresh to herself and to the covenant through this bloody act. The narrator's own gloss tells us only that the words "referred to the circumcision," and we do well not to claim more certainty than the text grants.

Third, why such severity toward God's own chosen servant? This is the heart of the discomfort. But Scripture is consistent here: those who lead God's people are held to account, not exempted. "When someone has been given much, much will be required in return" (Luke 12:48). God's holiness is not suspended for the useful. If anything, the closer one stands to His work, the more His holiness presses near.

The thread that runs to Christ

Step back, and a pattern emerges that the whole Bible will trace. A man stands under a death sentence he cannot escape on his own. Then blood is applied, a sign of the covenant, and the lethal threat passes over. The verb is almost prophetic. In just a few chapters, blood will be smeared on Israel's doorframes, and the Lord will "pass over" the houses so marked (Ex 12:13). What happens to Moses at this lonely campsite is a miniature of what happens to all Israel on Passover night, and a shadow of something larger still.

For circumcision was always pointing beyond itself. The prophets longed for a deeper work, a "circumcised heart" (Deut 30:6) that no flint knife could perform. Paul names the fulfillment plainly: in Christ we receive "a spiritual circumcision, the cutting away of your sinful nature" (Col 2:11), accomplished not by our blood but by His. The mark we could never adequately bear, He bore in His own flesh.

So this jarring little episode is not a glitch in the story of grace. It is grace in stern outline, a reminder that no one, not even Moses, approaches the holy God on his own terms, and that from the very beginning the way through judgment has always run through blood that God Himself provides.