Zipporah Meaning in the Bible

Zipporah (Hebrew צִפֹּרָה, Tsipporah) is the feminine of tsippor, the common Hebrew word for a bird — the same word used in Psalm 84:3 for the sparrow that finds a house at the altar. It is a plain nature name, and it belongs to a Midianite woman, not an Israelite one.

She is one of the seven daughters of Reuel, also called Jethro, priest of Midian. Moses meets her at a well after fleeing Egypt, defends the sisters from shepherds who drive them off, and is given Zipporah in marriage (Exodus 2:16-21). She bears him Gershom and Eliezer.

Her decisive moment is one of the strangest passages in the Pentateuch. On the road back to Egypt, 'the LORD met him, and sought to kill him.' Zipporah 'took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me' (Exodus 4:25). Moses, about to demand that Pharaoh release the covenant people, had not applied the covenant sign to his own son. His wife — the foreign woman — is the one who acts.

That is what the name actually carries: not delicacy, despite 'bird,' but decisiveness. Zipporah is rare as a modern given name and reads as deliberately Hebrew, with Zippy and Zip as the natural short forms. The variant spelling Tzipporah is closer to the Hebrew and common in Jewish families.