Moses

A basket of woven reeds, caulked with pitch and bitumen so the river could not seep in, drifted among the papyrus at the Nile’s edge. Inside lay a three-month-old boy his mother could no longer hide. Pharaoh had ordered every Hebrew son thrown into that same river, and this was her answer to the decree, to give the water the child on her own terms, sealed in a small tarred ark, while his sister waited in the reeds to see what became of him. What became of him was that Pharaoh’s daughter came down to bathe, heard the crying, and lifted him out. She named him Moses, and the name went with him out of Egypt, across a sea, and up a burning mountain.

He was raised in the palace and did not stay in it. Grown, he went out among the Hebrew labourers and saw an Egyptian overseer beating one of them, looked both ways, and killed the man, hiding the body in the sand. The killing did not stay buried. When word of it spread, Moses fled east into Midian, married Zipporah the daughter of a priest called Jethro, and slipped into the long quiet of a herdsman’s life. For years his days were sheep and dust and the smell of the flock, the work of a man with no destiny to speak of. He might have died there, old and unremarkable.

Instead, tending the flock near the mountain the texts call Horeb, or Sinai, he turned aside to look at something wrong: a thornbush wrapped in fire that did not char, its leaves bright and whole inside the flame. The voice that spoke from it gave him a task he did not want and a name that had never been said aloud. When Moses asked who he should say had sent him, the answer came back as a riddle folded into a verb, Ehyeh asher ehyeh, I am who I am. Moses argued. He was slow of speech, heavy of tongue, no speaker before men; who would follow him? He was given his brother Aaron to speak for him, and a plain wooden staff that would say what neither of them could. Thrown down it became a snake; snatched up by the tail it was wood again. His hand, pushed into his cloak and drawn out, came back white and scaled with disease, then whole. These were his credentials, and he went.

Back in Egypt he stood before the new Pharaoh and asked for his people’s freedom, and was refused, and asked again. What came in answer were the ten plagues, each worse than the one before. The Nile ran with blood. Then frogs, then lice, then flies, a sickness on the cattle, boils on the skin, hail shot through with fire, locusts that ate what the hail had spared, and a darkness thick enough to feel. The last was the death of every firstborn in Egypt in a single night, while the Israelites marked their doorframes with lamb’s blood so the destroyer would pass over their houses. By morning Egypt was in mourning, and Pharaoh let them go.

They went in haste, a whole people on foot with their dough still unleavened, and Pharaoh changed his mind and came after them with six hundred chariots. Caught between the army and the water, the Israelites panicked. Moses stretched his hand over the sea and a wind out of the east drove it back through the night until the seabed lay dry and they crossed between two standing walls of water, the salt hanging heavy in the air. When the Egyptians drove in after them, the walls fell. The chariots and the horsemen and the whole force of Pharaoh went under, and on the far shore the freed slaves watched the sea carry the bodies of their masters back to the sand.

Three months out they came to the mountain, and it was terrible to stand near. Sinai smoked like a kiln, the ground shook, and a trumpet blast grew louder and louder while the people were warned to keep their distance. Moses went up alone into the cloud and stayed forty days. He came down carrying two tablets of stone cut with the law, and found the camp dancing around a golden calf they had cast from their own earrings, tired of waiting on a God they could not see. He threw the tablets down and broke them at the foot of the hill. Then he ground the calf to powder, and climbed back up, and cut two more.

What he looked like, the scriptures do not much say. They give no height, no colouring, no build, nothing a reader could draw. The single physical detail they linger on comes after Sinai, when his face shone so fiercely from being in God’s presence that the people were afraid to approach, and he took to wearing a veil except when he spoke with God. The Hebrew word for that shining, qaran, can mean either that his face sent out rays or that it grew horns, and a Latin translation chose the horns. That is why so much medieval and Renaissance art, Michelangelo’s marble among it, sets two small horns of light on the brow of a man the text meant to call radiant.

Forty years of wilderness followed, the people fed on manna that lay with the morning dew like frost and vanished by noon. It was not a triumphant march but a long argument, the nation grumbling and rebelling and worshipping wrongly, and Moses pleading for them before a God who more than once offered to wipe them out and start again with Moses alone. Near the end, told to speak to a rock so that water would come, he struck it twice with the staff instead and took a share of the credit, and for that failure of trust he was told he would not enter the land. He climbed Mount Nebo, looked west across the Jordan at the country he had walked toward his whole life, and died there in Moab. No one knows the place of his grave. He was a hundred and twenty years old, the story says, his eyes undimmed and his strength not gone.

In the Quran he is Musa, named more often than any other prophet, and one of the few called both a messenger and a spokesman. He is Kalim Allah, the one to whom God spoke directly, with no angel between them. Many of the same scenes recur, the basket on the Nile, the killing of the Egyptian, the flight to Midian, the burning bush, the staff and the white hand, the drowning of Pharaoh. The contest with Pharaoh’s sorcerers is sharper here: they throw down their ropes and staffs, which seem to writhe like snakes, and Musa throws down his rod, and it swallows every one of them. He receives the Tawrat as guidance for his people, and in one strange, quiet episode he travels with a nameless servant of God, later called al-Khidr, and learns that he cannot bear the meaning of the things he is shown.

His power was never really his own. Every wonder worked through him rather than from him, the sea and the plagues and the water from the rock all lent by the God who called him, and the one time he behaved as though the power belonged to him it was held against him for good. His limits were as plain as his signs. He stammered and needed his brother’s mouth. He had a temper that killed a man in his youth and shattered the tablets of the law in his age. He tried four separate times to talk his way out of the calling before he took it up. And after everything, the deliverer of his people was kept from the land he delivered them to, allowed to see it and not to enter, buried by no human hand in a grave no one has found.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Moses?

Moses was the prophet and lawgiver of ancient Israel, revered in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the man who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. Born a Hebrew and raised in Pharaoh’s palace, he became the intermediary between God and his people, delivering them from bondage and receiving the law at Mount Sinai.

What is Moses best known for?

Moses is best known for leading the Exodus out of Egypt, parting the Red Sea so the Israelites could escape Pharaoh’s army, and receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. He is also remembered for confronting Pharaoh with the ten plagues and for guiding his people through forty years in the wilderness.

Did Moses reach the Promised Land?

No. Moses led the Israelites to the border of the Promised Land but was not permitted to enter it, a punishment for striking a rock to bring out water instead of speaking to it as God had commanded. He viewed the land from Mount Nebo and died in Moab, where the location of his grave remains unknown.

Is Moses in the Quran?

Yes. Moses appears in the Quran as Musa, the prophet mentioned more often than any other, and he holds the title Kalim Allah, meaning the one to whom God spoke directly. His story in Islam parallels the biblical account, including the basket on the Nile, the burning bush, the staff that becomes a serpent, and the drowning of Pharaoh.

What happened at the burning bush?

At the burning bush on Mount Horeb, Moses met God in a flame that did not consume the bush and was called to free the Israelites from Egypt. When Moses asked God’s name, the reply was “I am who I am,” and he was given the power to turn his staff into a serpent as a sign of his mission.

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