Zipporah
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Zipporah or Tzipora (Hebrew: צִפּוֹרָה, Standard Ẓippora Tiberian Ṣippôrāh ; Greek: Sephora ; Arabic: Safura or Safrawa ; "bird"), mentioned in the Book of Exodus, was the wife of Moses, and the daughter of Jethro, a priest of Midian.
[edit] Biblical context
In the Book of Exodus, in the process of Moses' exile from Egypt, he begins working for Jethro as a shepherd. Consequently he meets Zipporah (meaning female/little bird), and marries her. They have two sons, Gershom, and Eliezer.
Zipporah also features in a much more curious, and much-debated, passage (Exodus 4:24-27). The passage concerning Moses and Zipporah reach an inn contains four of the most difficult sentences in Biblical text. One possible interpretation is that something (perhaps God, perhaps an agent of God) tries to kill Moses, until Zipporah carries out a circumcision. (Other interpretations suggest that it is their son, Gershom, who is attacked.) Yet another is that Moses tries to kill his own son and only after Zipporah cuts the child's foreskin, drawing blood and pain, does his anger subside.
A third reference to a wife of Moses occurs in the story of Aaron and Miriam's complaints, at Numbers 12:1, where his wife is described as a Cushite or Kushite, an African ethnic group. However the Midians themselves were a dark-skinned people often called Kushim, the Hebrew word used to describe black Africans. Modern biblical criticism has stated that they were different individuals, particularly since bigamy was legal, and practiced elsewhere by Jacob, a major patriarch. Nevertheless, a traditional Jewish and Christian view has been that they are both the same woman because Moses had only one wife. What has become known as "the Cushite reference" identifies Zipporah with the ancient inhabitants of North Sudan, i.e. the ancient Cushites (also known as Nubians- a black skinned, African people). The Genesis identifies the Cushites as decendants of Ham. Traditionally, it is held that Ham was the father of the "Blacks". He is the son of Noah who moved into Africa. His descendants spread through Africa and parts of the near East. They became the Nubians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Canaanites, Hittites, Libyans, and Phoenicians etc. Flavius Josephus refers to this wife as the wife he married before fleeing Egypt. He married her during his campaign to Ethiopia as a general for the Egyptians.

