Exodus 4:24-26 depicts the LORD meeting Moses (or his son) and seeking to kill him, averted only when Zipporah circumcises their son and touches the severed foreskin to 'his' feet, declaring him 'a bridegroom of blood.'

Honesty requires stating plainly that this is among the most textually and interpretively obscure passages in the Pentateuch: the referent of 'him' shifts ambiguously between Moses and his son across vv. 24-25 in the Hebrew, and major critical commentaries (Brevard Childs's Exodus, William Propp's Anchor Bible Exodus) treat it as an extremely old fragment of tradition whose original cultic setting is only partly recoverable. That conceded, the coherent theological core of the episode is recoverable from its immediate context: Moses has just been commissioned (Ex 3-4) to demand that Pharaoh release God's 'firstborn son' Israel (Ex 4:22-23, using exactly that father-son/firstborn language in the verses immediately preceding this episode) — yet Moses's own son remains uncircumcised, in direct violation of the Abrahamic covenant sign instituted in Genesis 17:10-14, which explicitly threatens covenant-breaking consequences for an uncircumcised male ('that person shall be cut off from his people,' Gen 17:14). The narrative dramatizes that the covenant mediator cannot lead God's covenant people in demanding Pharaoh recognize Israel as God's covenant son while himself neglecting that very covenant sign in his own household. Zipporah's swift circumcision of the son resolves the crisis immediately, confirming this reading. 'Bridegroom of blood' (chatan damim) likely reflects an early Semitic or Midianite idiom tying blood rites to covenant-kinship-by-marriage, though the exact philology remains genuinely debated rather than settled.

Circumcision functions throughout Genesis-Exodus as the physical, generational sign of the Abrahamic covenant (Gen 17), binding household after household into God's covenant promises; Paul later develops this typologically into an internal 'circumcision of the heart' fulfilled in Christ (Rom 2:29, Col 2:11-12), showing a coherent covenant-sign logic running across the whole canon even as the physical sign gives way to its spiritual referent.