Gentile Church Zipporah; flint = Christ-rock; new people circumcised

‘because the King has desired your beauty, because he himself is your Lord.’ She has been called therefore following the law, and as it were fitted-together to Moses the pedagogue, and carrying away well toward Christ’s mystery. For the law is an elementary teacher, and brings up unto beginnings of the oracles of God, and as it were seeds in us through enigmas and shadow the knowledge of the mystery according to Christ. And indeed Christ was saying to Jews, who had also rejected Moses the most holy: ‘Or do you think that I will accuse you to the Father? There is the one accusing you, Moses, in whom you have hoped. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for concerning me that one wrote.’ Zipporah therefore having been received by us into the person of the Church from the nations, the child from her will altogether be somewhere unto a type of the new people, those who have believed having received the infancy in Christ through spirit and rebirth unto God, whom also David said somewhere a people being created. Therefore the newborn child in Christ—that is, the new people also through faith—shames death by circumcision. For the flint is a symbol of the unbroken nature, whose strength and unbreakableness is signified as in a hard stone. And indeed Joshua the son of Nun, having brought those from Israel across the Jordan, circumcised them with stone knives, prefiguring the circumcision in Christ through spirit. For Christ is rock, whom as in a type the flint that circumcised Zipporah’s child also makes clear beforehand, as I said just now. When also death fled, and having honored the mystery of the circumcision in Christ the one seeking to kill departed from Moses, the deed whispering to us enigmatically that not only has death stood off from those counted worthy of the circumcision in Christ, but also the matter—I mean indeed Christ’s mystery—has cried out help to the fathers. For just as we all died in Adam, so also the grace through Christ is carried unto all. For he died for this, that he might be lord of both dead and living. Therefore in the time of the new people’s circumcision the life of the fathers was also accomplished together. For they live to God, being about to live; for holy word also said this to us. And time of the circumcision understood in spirit is Christ’s presence, as older than Moses, as God, and second and after him, inasmuch as he appeared human unto the ministry upon us. For observe that God was appointing Moses first, then joined Aaron, prefiguring in time as second the manifestation of Christ of Moses’ sending and ministry, who was in equality toward Moses through the human, and in divine and incomparable superiority through having been begotten from God Father. And it is permitted you to see this also from the holy Scriptures themselves, if you should choose. For ‘Moses and Aaron did,’ he says, ‘just as the Lord commanded them, thus they did; and Moses was of eighty years, and Aaron his brother was of eighty-three years, when they spoke to Pharaoh.’ You hear how both