Moses

• 1. Introduction

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  Moses is the Hebrew prophet credited with leading an entire people out of slavery, receiving the foundational laws of three world religions, and dying at the age of 120 within sight of a land he never entered. His story begins with a basket hidden in the bulrushes along the Nile, placed there by a mother named Jochebed to save her son from a royal decree ordering the death of all newborn Hebrew boys. The infant was found by Pharaoh's daughter, raised inside the Egyptian royal court, and would grow up to confront that same court on behalf of the people he had been born among. How one man could straddle two worlds so completely, and whether any of it actually happened, are questions scholars, theologians, and historians have debated for centuries. What drew Sigmund Freud to write his last book about Moses? Why does Moses appear more times in the Quran than any other individual? And how did a bronze serpent lifted in the desert become a symbol of salvation that Jesus of Nazareth applied to himself? The answers reach from the thirteenth century BCE to the present day.

• 2. A Name with Two Homelands

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  The very name Moses sits at the center of a centuries-old argument about who he really was. The Egyptian root mose, meaning "child of," appears in royal names like Thutmose, meaning "born of Thoth," and Ramose, meaning "born of Ra." The suffix was common enough that many ordinary Egyptians bore the name Mose without any divine prefix, including a middle-class scribe of the temple of Ptah at Memphis who became famous for a long family lawsuit during the reign of Ramesses II. Linguist Kenneth Kitchen argues the sounds do not match: Egyptian "s" routinely maps to Hebrew samekh, but the sibilants in Moses' name behave differently, pointing away from a straightforward Egyptian borrowing. The biblical account offers its own explanation. The Pharaoh's daughter is said to have declared, "I drew him out of the water," linking the name to the Semitic root meaning "to draw out." An eleventh-century scholar named Isaac b. Asher haLevi noticed something striking in that phrasing: the princess chose the active form of the verb, "drawer-out," rather than the passive "drawn-out," as if she was unknowingly predicting his future role. Ancient writers Philo and Josephus both recognized the Egyptian character of the name. Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews, proposed that the second element meant "those who are saved." Linguist Abraham Yahuda argued from the Tanakh's spelling that the name combined words for water and an expanse of water, yielding "child of the Nile." The princess who gave Moses the name is not named in the Book of Exodus, though Josephus called her Thermutis.

• 3. Lawgiver and Covenant-Maker

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  On Mount Horeb, God revealed his name to Moses as YHWH, almost certainly pronounced Yahweh, and commanded him to return to Egypt. Moses objected that he could not speak eloquently, so his elder brother Aaron, three years his senior, was designated as his spokesperson. After ten plagues broke Pharaoh's resistance, Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, and to Mount Sinai, where the covenant at the core of Jewish identity was forged. The first body of law Moses delivered is called the Covenant Code, which embeds the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20:1-17, alongside the Book of the Covenant running from Exodus 20:22 through 23:19. The entire Book of Leviticus constitutes a second distinct body of law. The Book of Numbers opens with yet another set, and Deuteronomy contains another complete collection. Moses instituted the priesthood under his brother Aaron's sons, destroyed those who fell away from worship, and in his final act at Sinai received instructions for the Tabernacle, the portable shrine intended to travel with Israel. The tablets of the Ten Commandments were broken and then rewritten after the episode of the golden calf, when people who feared Moses had died on the mountain fashioned an idol and were subsequently killed. From Sinai, Moses sent twelve spies into Canaan as described in Numbers 13-14. When they returned warning of giants, the people's fear led Moses to declare that the generation who refused to enter the land would wander the wilderness for forty years. Korah led a revolt against Moses and was punished for it. The Kirtland Temple in Ohio was the site where, according to Latter-day Saint belief, Moses appeared to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery on the 3rd of April 1836, granting them authority over the gathering of Israel.

• 4. What Scholars Actually Know

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  William G. Dever, speaking for much of the modern academic field, describes the biblical Moses as largely mythical while leaving open the possibility that "a Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in the southern Transjordan" in the mid-to-late thirteenth century BCE. No Egyptian sources mention Moses prior to the fourth century BCE, long after he is believed to have lived. No archaeological evidence from Egypt or the Sinai wilderness corroborates the Exodus narrative in which he is the central figure. Jan Assmann concludes that it simply cannot be known whether Moses ever lived, because he left no traces outside tradition. Rudolf Smend identifies two details most likely to have a historical basis: the Egyptian character of his name, and his marriage to a Midianite woman named Zipporah. Those details, Smend argues, are too unlikely to have been invented by the Israelites. The story of an infant abandoned to a river and raised by royalty follows a pattern found elsewhere in ancient Near Eastern tradition. The account of Sargon of Akkad, from the twenty-third century BCE, follows a similar arc. Cornelis Tiele proposed in 1872 that Yahweh was originally a Midianite deity introduced to the Israelites by Moses, whose father-in-law Jethro was a Midianite priest. Scholars have also proposed that the Egyptian historical figure Osarseph, described by the historian Manetho in a summary preserved by Josephus, maps onto the Moses story. In Manetho's account, Osarseph was a Heliopolitan priest who led lepers into the former Hyksos capital of Avaris, ruled for thirteen years alongside invading forces, and eventually changed his name to Moses before being expelled. Israel Knohl has proposed identifying Moses with Irsu, a Shasu figure who, according to Papyrus Harris I and the Elephantine Stele, took power in Egypt with Levantine support before being defeated and expelled by the new Pharaoh Setnakhte, abandoning large quantities of gold and silver stolen from Egyptian temples.

• 5. Moses Through Greek and Roman Eyes

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  Hecataeus of Abdera, writing in the fourth century BCE, produced the earliest reference to Moses in Greek literature. What survives through Diodorus Siculus describes Moses as a wise and courageous leader who left Egypt and colonized Judaea, founding cities, establishing a temple, and issuing laws. The Jewish historian Artapanus of Alexandria, writing in the second century BCE, went further, portraying Moses as a cultural hero who divided Egypt into thirty-six districts, each with its own liturgy, and who the Egyptian temples of Isis remembered by keeping a rod in his honor. Artapanus described Moses as eighty years old and physically striking: "tall and ruddy, with long white hair, and dignified." He also identified Moses with the Greek figure Musaeus, whom he called "the teacher of Orpheus." Strabo, writing his Geographica around 24 CE, considered Moses an Egyptian who deplored conditions in his homeland, gathered followers through a monotheistic conception of the deity as an entity encompassing all land and sea, and whose "positive and unequivocal appreciation" the Egyptologist Jan Assmann calls the closest any ancient writer came to recognizing Moses' religion as a genuine monotheism. The Roman historian Tacitus, born around 56 CE and dying around 120 CE, described the Jewish religion as monotheistic in his Histories. His version of events has Pharaoh Bocchoris, afflicted by plague, expelling the Jews at the urging of the oracle of Zeus-Amun. In that telling, Moses and the Jews crossed the desert in only six days, taking the holy land on the seventh. The author of On the Sublime, traditionally attributed to Longinus and commonly assigned to the late first century CE, quoted Genesis in admiring terms, calling Moses not by name but as "the Lawgiver" of the Jews, a title placing him alongside Lycurgus and Minos, and describing him "with far more admiration" than even Hecataeus or Strabo managed.

• 6. Moses Across the Abrahamic World

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  Judaism identifies Moses as the greatest prophet who ever lived, while insisting firmly that he was a human being not to be worshipped. Orthodox tradition calls him Moshe Rabbenu, meaning "Our Leader Moshe," and also Avi haNeviim, "Father of all the Prophets." His death at 120 with undiminished eyesight and strength, as Deuteronomy 34:7 records, generated the Jewish blessing "may you live to 120," now a common greeting. The Midrash, the genre of rabbinic commentary produced roughly between 200 and 1200 CE, records that Moses bore at least seven other names: Jekuthiel by his mother, Heber by his father, Jered by Miriam, and others assigned by Aaron, Kohath, his wet-nurse, and by the people of Israel. Christianity treats Moses as the primary symbol of God's law as later interpreted by Jesus. The New Testament mentions Moses more than any other figure from the Hebrew Bible. In the Gospel of John chapter 3, Jesus drew a parallel between Moses lifting the bronze serpent in the wilderness, which healed any Israelite who looked at it, and his own death as a source of healing for believers. Moses appears alongside the prophet Elijah in the account of the Transfiguration, described in Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9. Several churches commemorate him as a saint: the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Lutheran calendars all mark September 4 as the feast of the Holy Prophet Moses, specifically on Mount Nebo. In Islam, Moses is mentioned in the Quran more than any other individual, and he appears both as prophet, nabi, and messenger, rasul, the latter term indicating that he brought a book and law to his people. One hadith describes a meeting between Moses and Muhammad in heaven that resulted in Muslims observing five daily prayers daily. The Bahai Faith designates Moses a Manifestation of God and gives him the epithet "One Who Conversed with God," while the Druze faith counts him among seven prophets who appeared across different periods of history.

• 7. A Face Carved in Stone and Stone

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  Michelangelo's marble statue of Moses, completed between 1513 and 1515 and still standing in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, is among the most recognized sculptures in the world. Its most startling feature, the horns on Moses' head, traces to a mistranslation. Jerome's Latin Vulgate Bible rendered the Hebrew word keren, which means either horn or ray of light, as "horned" when describing Moses descending from Sinai. Experts at the Archaeological Institute of America note that the term referred to the radiance Moses' face reflected after encountering divine glory; in early Jewish art, Moses was often shown with rays emanating from his head instead. The Pope's private chapel, the Sistine Chapel, displays a sequence of six frescos on the life of Moses along its southern wall, painted in 1481-82 by a group including Sandro Botticelli and Pietro Perugino. In the United States Capitol, Moses is one of twenty-three lawgivers depicted in marble bas-reliefs in the chamber of the House of Representatives. The plaque describes him as a figure of roughly 1350-1250 BCE who "transformed a wandering people into a nation." His is the only forward-facing bas-relief; the other twenty-two profiles are turned toward him. Moses appears eight times in carvings ringing the Supreme Court Great Hall ceiling, and the building's east pediment shows him holding two tablets. Sigmund Freud's last book, Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, proposed that Moses was an Egyptian nobleman who followed the monotheism of Akhenaten and was later murdered in the wilderness, producing what Freud called a collective guilt driving Judaism ever after. On film, Cecil B. DeMille directed two versions of The Ten Commandments: a 1923 silent version with Theodore Roberts, and the 1956 remake with Charlton Heston, whose resemblance to Michelangelo's statue was widely noted. The 1998 DreamWorks animated film The Prince of Egypt cast Val Kilmer as Moses' speaking voice, with gospel singer Amick Byram providing his singing voice.