1.1 Mission from God

One day, as Moses led his flock to Mount Horeb, he saw a bush burning without being consumed. When he turned aside to look more closely at the marvel, God spoke to him from the bush revealing his name, YHVH, to Moses.

In the time of Emperor Constantine, Mount Horeb was identified with Mount Sinai near the monastery of St. Catherine, but most scholars, especially E. Anati think it was located much farther North.

God also commissioned him to return to Egypt and deliver his brethren from their bondage. He then returned to Egypt (Exodus 4:1-9, 20). Moses was met on his arrival in Egypt by his elder brother, Aaron, and gained a hearing with his oppressed brethren (Exodus 4:27-31). It was a more difficult matter, however, to persuade Pharaoh to let the Hebrews depart. This was not accomplished until God sent ten plagues upon the Egyptians. These plagues culminated in the slaying of the Egyptian first-born (Exodus 12:29), whereupon such terror seized the Egyptians that they ordered the Hebrews to leave.

1.2 In the wilderness

The children of Israel started toward the eastern border at the southern part of the Isthmus of Suez. The long procession moved slowly, and found it necessary to encamp three times before passing the Egyptian frontier, some believe at the Bitter Lakes while others propose as far south as the northern tip of the Red Sea. Meanwhile Pharaoh had a change of heart and was in pursuit of them with a large army (Exodus 14:5-9). Shut in between this army and the Red Sea, the Israelites despaired, but God divided the waters of the sea so that they passed safely across on dry ground. When the Egyptians attempted to follow, God permitted the waters to return upon them and drown them (Exodus 14:10-31).

Moses led the Hebrews to Sinai, or Horeb, where Jethro celebrated their coming by a great sacrifice in the presence of Moses, Aaron, and the elders of Israel (Exodus 18). At Horeb, or Sinai, God welcomed Moses upon the sacred mountain and talked with him face to face (Exodus 19). God gave him two tablets upon which was written the “ Ten Commandments”.

Moses and the Israelites sojourned at Sinai about a year (cf. Numbers 10:11), and Moses had frequent communications from God. As a result of these the Tabernacle, according to the last chapters of Exodus, was constructed, the priestly law ordained, the plan of encampment arranged both for the Levites and the non-priestly tribes (cf. Numbers 1:50 - 2:34), and the Tabernacle consecrated.

While at Sinai Joshua had become general of the armies of Israel and the special minister, or assistant, of Moses (Exodus 17:9). From Sinai, Moses led the people to Kadesh, whence the spies were sent to Canaan. Upon the return of the spies the people were so discouraged by their report that they refused to go forward, and were condemned to remain in the wilderness until that generation had passed away.

After the lapse of thirty-eight years, Moses led the people eastward. Having been denied permission to pass through the territory of the Edomites, descendants of Esau (Numbers 20:14 - 21), and through the land of Moab (Numbers 21:4), they detoured around those two kingdoms. But being unable to detour around the kingdom of Sihon, king of the Amorites, whose capital was at Heshbon, who also refused permission to travel through his land, Israel conquered him and allotted his territory to the tribes of Reuben and Gad. Og, King of Bashan, was similarly overthrown, and his territory assigned to the half-tribe of Manasseh.

1.3 The Death of Moses

After all this was accomplished Moses was warned that he would not be permitted to lead Israel across the Jordan, but would die on the eastern side (Numbers 20:12). He assembled the tribes and delivered to them a parting address. When this was finished, and he had pronounced a blessing upon the people, he went up Mount Nebo to the top of Pisgah, looked over the country spread out before him, and died, at the age of one hundred and twenty. God Himself buried him in an unknown grave (Deuteronomy 34).

2 Moses in Jewish thought

There is a wealth of stories and additional information about Moses in the Jewish genre of rabbinical exegesis known as Midrash, as well as in the primary works of the Jewish oral law, the Mishna and the Talmud.

3 Moses in Christian thought

For Christians, Moses -- mentioned more often in the New Testament than any other Old Testament figure -- is often a symbol of the contrast between traditional Judaism and the teachings of Jesus. New Testament writers often made comparison of Jesus' words and deeds with Moses' in order to explain Jesus' mission. In the book of Acts, for example, the rejection of Moses by the Jews when they worshipped the golden calf is likened to the rejection of Jesus, also by the Jews.

Moses also figures into several of Jesus' messages. When he met the Pharisee Nicodemus at night in the third chapter of John, he compares Moses' lifting up of the bronze serpent in the wilderness, which any Israelite could look upon and be healed, to his own lifting up (by his death and resurrection) for the people to look upon and be healed. In the sixth chapter, Jesus responds to the people's claim that Moses provided them manna in the wilderness by saying that it was not Moses, but God, who provided. Calling himself the "bread of life", Jesus states that he is now provided to feed God's people.

Moses is also regarded as a symbol of the law, and so he is presented in all three Gospel accounts of the Transfiguration in Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9, respectively.

4 Moses in Islamic thought

The story of Moses is retold and embellished in the Quran, the holy book of Islam. In the Quran Moses is known as Musa; a separate entry exists on the Islamic teachings about Musa. See Musa (prophet)

5 Textual origin of the Torah

It has been traditionally assumed that Moses wrote all, or almost all, of the Torah, and this is still the view of much of Christianity and most of Orthodox Judaism. However, advances in higher criticism have convinced Bible scholars and historians that this work, in the form we know it today, was edited together from several earlier sources. This idea is discussed in the entry on the documentary hypothesis.

6 Moses in history

The school of skeptics called Biblical minimalism , whose views are commonplace among academics, suggest Moses never actually existed as a historical figure, and the events of Exodus, uncorroborated, are the products of pure myth. There is no extra-biblical evidence that Moses existed as a historical person. See the article on The Bible and history.

On the other hand, historical records are so fragmentory that extrabiblical records of Moses may have been long lost. For example, if the Exodus occurred during the end of the Hyksos era in Egypt, as some scholars believe, then those Hyksos records of Moses would have been deliberately destroyed by victorious Egyptians as they drove the Hyksos out of Egypt. The only known historical record that survives mentioning Moses is the Bible.

If Moses is accepted as a historical figure, various aspects of the Biblical tale can be re-interpreted. It is quite likely, for example, that Moses was an Egyptian nobleman or prince influenced by the religion of Aten (see below), since Moses is an Egyptian name meaning "son" and was often used in pharaohs' names. The Hebrews might have fabricated the "bulrushes" story along the lines of the tales of Sargon of Agade ( Mesopotamian) or Oedipus (Greek) to legitimize his position. On the other hand, infants were often abandoned by the lower classes in ancient times, and "Moshe" is a Hebrew word.

Dating the Exodus has also proved challenging. Three views include:

• it occurred around the end of the Hyksos era, as expressed above;
• it occurred about 1420 BCE, since records exist of "Habiru" invasions of Canaan forty years later;
• or it occurred during the 13th century BCE, as the pharaoh during most of that time, Ramesses II, is commonly considered the pharaoh Moses squabbled with.

Finally, there is the challenge of interpreting the many miracles in the Moses story. Most of them are simply dismissed by scholars as legends, but some can be explained. For example, some of the plagues strongly resemble exaggerated versions of actual pestilences common in the ancient world (see The Ten Plagues), the famous Red Sea crossing may have been a marsh (the "Reed Sea") through which the Egyptian chariots could not penetrate, the manna which God bestowed on the hungry Israelites may have been the secretion of the hammada shrub, and the swallowing of Korah (Numbers 16) could have been an earthquake.

There is also a psychoanalytical interpretation of Moses' life, put forward by Sigmund Freud in his last book, " Moses and Monotheism ," in 1937. Freud postulated that Moses was an Egyptian nobleman who adhered to the monotheism of Akhenaton. Freud also believed that Moses was murdered in the wilderness, producing a collective sense of patricidal guilt which has been at the heart of Judaism ever since. "Judaism had been a religion of the father, Christianity became a religion of the son," he wrote.

Several professors of archeology claim that many stories in the Old Testament, including important chronicles about Moses, Solomon, and others, were actually made up for the first time by scribes hired by King Josiah (7th century BCE) in order to rationalize monotheistc belief in Yahweh. Evidently, the neighboring countries that kept many written records, such as Egypt, Assyria, etc., have no writings about the stories of the Bible or its main characters before 650 BCE. Such claims are detailed in "Who Were the Early Israelites?" by William G. Dever, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI (2003). Another such book by Neil A. Silberman and colleagues is "The Bible Unearthed," Simon and Schuster, New York (2001).

7 Ethical dilemmas

If the Bible is literally describing an accurate description of Moses' views, then by "modern standards" some of his commands might amount to calls for murder, war crimes or slavery. For instance, according to Numbers 31:15-18, he called for the enslavelment of young Midianite female children to Israelite veterans of the Midian war. ("but all the... women children... keep alive for yourselves"). It is important to note, however, that such ethical dilemnas can be cited with very little examination into historical context for the purpose of dismissing the reliability of a text. Religion's proponents can use assumptions to discourage exploration. But religion's opponents can also discourage further exploration by making debatable assumptions about a text, classifying the intent of the text as immoral, and thereby dismissing the text as unreliable. In the above example some readers may infer an implied equality between slavery under Mosaic law and "slavery" as understood in the New World. An apparent ethical contradiction should not be casually dismissed, but neither should it be casually assumed.

For both Jews and Christians, the five books of Moses are holy books revealed by God, and the message within them is eternal. For Unitarian-Universalists, it is regarded as a sacred text, but not as a divinely revealed work. Adherents of all these faiths understand the serious ethical dilemmas that arise when reading certain parts of the Bible. As such, Jews and Christians have developed a number of responses to understanding such texts. There are two basic positions that one can assume when approaching such texts, both of which offer a variety of responses.

One using the traditional approach was originally called a fundamentalist. The fundamentalist term has evolved to reflect other meanings however, including that of "a person with an unthinking devotion to an agenda without regard to reason." The traditional approach assumes that Biblical characters, the situations described, and the words said took place as the Bible says. The Bible is believed to be divinely revealed truth, unique among historical texts. This view does not exempt humans from a carefully reasoned examination of the scriptures, however, and in fact requires it. Translation, historical context and assumptions, and the definition and applicability of terms used in the original text not only affect what the Bible "says," they define it.

A fundamentalist may believe there is one valid source (organization, person, etc.) for the interpretation of the "truths" of the Bible. The traditional Christian view implies however that a "literal interpretation of the Bible" is an oxymoron. The important characteristic of the traditional Christian view comes from the Bible itself--that scripture is useful in the context of personal applicability (1 Timothy 3:16-17). Thus, blind adherence to an organization's or one's own static interpretation is rejected in this view, as devotion to the "living" God prohibits devotion to a static ideology. The traditional Christian view implies that the Bible is unique among texts in its truthful nature (lack of falsehood), while simultaneously implying that truth is meaningful only in living application through a personal relationship to God - attempting to adhere to a static set of moral laws is believed to lead to death (see, ie, Romans 7). The traditional Christian believes one arrives at this view by "answering the call of God," who speaks to all mankind through revelation, where revelation is never contradictory and consists of both the Bible and experience gained through life. When faced with an ethical dilemna in Moses's writings, a traditional Christian might employ critical examination of available historical context, critical examination of how the writing should be translated, and critical examination of his or her understanding of God's nature to determine what the passage means, all the while believing the Bible contains no falsehood. For an example of this process applied to the Midian war, see this exploration of Moses's writing from a traditional Christian point of view: Moses and the Midianites. Moses, in the traditional Christian view, was considered a good man not because of his ethics, but because of his trust in God. In this view, only Jesus was a good man for what he did, the rest of mankind (including Moses and his contemporaries) can only become good by believing and trusting God. Traditional Christianity believes that one who honestly looks for God will find God, as this is stated in the Bible, and that honest, rational exploration yields the Bible as the most rational explanation for human experience.

An alternative, liberal religious approach rejects this view. Both views hold that the texts of the Bible were edited together from a number of sources over a long period of time, and within all views the authorship and timing of the Torah is debated. However in this view, the situations described in the Bible do not necessarily represent divinely inspired truth, but instead represent the views of the editors of the Bible. (more to come)

Unitarian Universalists, and liberal Christian denominations and congregations generally, adopt a non-traditional approach: "We do not, however, hold the Bible-or any other account of human experience-to be either an infallible guide or the exclusive source of truth. Much biblical material is mythical or legendary. Not that it should be discarded for that reason! Rather, it should be treasured for what it is. We believe that we should read the Bible as we read other books (or the newspaper) - with imagination and a critical eye. We also respect the sacred literature of other religions. Contemporary works of science, art, and social commentary are valued as well. We hold, in the words of an old liberal formulation, that "revelation is not sealed." Unitarian Universalists aspire to truth as wide as the world-we look to find truth anywhere, universally." (Our Unitarian Universalist Faith: Frequently Asked Questions)

8 See also

• Aaron
• Biblical figures
• List of founders of major religions
• Passage of Red Sea

9 External links

• Teaching Troubling Texts: Study Session of Textual Reasoning at the annual meeting of the AAR 1999
• "Difficult Texts" by Bonna Devora Haberman. How do we study difficult Jewish texts without apologizing for, justifying, or historicizing them?
• Unitarian Universalist approach to reading the Bible
• Prof. E.Anati: Archaeological discoveries at Har Karkom

Christian prophets Islamic prophets Torah people Bible stories

Preceded by: —

Leader of the Children of Israel

Succeeded by: Joshua

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