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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Met him, i.e. appeared to him in some visible shape,
and sought to kill him. Whom? Moses, spoken of and to before. He offered and endeavoured to kill him, either by inflicting some sudden and dangerous disease or stroke upon him, or by showing himself in some threatening posture, possibly as the angel did to Balaam, and afterwards to David, with a drawn sword in his hand, ready to give him a deadly blow. The reason of this severity was not Moses’s distrust of God, or delay in his journey, nor the bringing of his wife and children along with him, (which it was convenient for him to carry with him, both that his father might not think he intended to desert them, and for the greater assurance and encouragement of the Israelites, when they saw that he exposed his dearest relations to the same hazards with them all,) but the neglect of circumcising his child, which also the Lord some way or other signified to Moses and Zipporah, as plainly appears,
1. From Zipporah’s following fact upon that occasion.
2. From the Lord’s dismission of Moses upon the circumcision of the child.
3. From the threatening of death, or cutting off, for this sin, Gen_17:14, which, because there was now no magistrate to do it, God himself offers to execute it, as he sometimes saith he would do that in case. And this was a greater Sin in Moses than in another man, and at this time than it had been before, because he understood the will and law of God about it better than any man, and God had lately minded him of that covenant of his with Abraham, &c., whereof circumcision was a seal; the blessings and benefits of which covenant Moses was now going to procure for himself and for his people, whilst he remained under the guilt of grossly neglecting the condition of it. Besides, what could be more absurd than that he should come to be a lawgiver, who lived in a manifest violation of God’s law? or that he should be the chief ruler and instructer of the Israelites, whose duty it was to acquaint them with their duty of circumcising their children, and, as far as he could, to punish the wilful neglect of it, and yet at the same time be guilty of the same sin? or that he should undertake to govern the church of God, that could not well rule his own house? 1Ti_3:5. And this was not only a great sin in itself, but a great scandal to the Israelites, who might by this great example easily be led into the same miscarriage; and moreover might not without colour of probability suspect the call of such a person, and conclude that God would not honour that man who should continue in such a visible contempt of his law. And therefore it is no wonder that God was so angry at Moses for this sin.
Quest. How came Moses to neglect this evident duty?
Answ. From Zipporah’s averseness to and dread of that painful and, as she thought, dangerous ordinance of God, which she herself evidently discovers in this place; and the rather because of the experience which she had of it in her eldest son. And as she seems to have been a woman of an eager and passionate temper, so Moses was eminently meek and pliable, and in this matter too indulgent to his wife, especially in her father’s house, and therefore he put it off till a more convenient season, when he might either persuade or overrule her therein; which was a great fault, for God had obliged all the children of Abraham not only to the thing, but to the time also, to do it upon the eighth day, which season Moses had grossly, and for some considerable time, slipped, and so had preferred the pleasing of his wife before his obedience to God.