Who was Moses?
When they lived Traditionally placed around the thirteenth century BC
In short
Moses is the central figure of the four books running from Exodus to Deuteronomy: the Hebrew raised in the Egyptian court who kills an Egyptian, flees to the desert, is commissioned before a burning bush, leads the people out of Egypt, receives the law at Sinai, and dies without entering the promised land.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 9 min read
The story of Moses runs across four books and takes up nearly a third of the Old Testament. It is the longest biography in the Hebrew Bible and also the hardest to date: Egyptian records mention none of these events, and proposed dates differ by centuries. What exists is the account, and the account is extraordinarily detailed.
Worth saying up front what it is not: the trajectory of a confident man. Moses argues, refuses, pleads incapacity, loses patience with the people, and is finally barred from entering the land he had spent forty years walking toward. The text keeps all of it.
The basket in the river
Exodus opens with an order of extermination: newborn Hebrew boys are to be thrown into the river. One mother hides her son for three months and, when she can no longer manage it, does what the order demands and the opposite of what it intends — she puts the boy in the river, inside a sealed basket.
The child is found by Pharaoh’s daughter. His sister, who had been watching from a distance, steps forward and offers a Hebrew wet nurse: his own mother. The boy grows up in the house that wanted him dead, and takes from the Egyptian princess the name everyone knows him by.
2And she conceived and bore a son. And seeing him to be handsome, she hid him for three months.
3And when she was no longer able to hide him, she took a small basket woven of bulrushes, and she smeared it with pitch as well as tar. And she placed the little infant inside, and she laid him in the sedges by the bank of the river.
4His sister was standing at a distance and was wondering what would happen.
Notice that the scene is staged entirely by women, and that none of them is named here: the mother, the sister and, in the next verse, Pharaoh’s daughter. The parents are named only chapters later, inside a genealogy.
The dead Egyptian and the flight
Grown, Moses goes out to see his own people and finds an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. He looks around, confirms there is no witness, kills the man and hides the body in the sand. The next day, trying to break up a fight between two Hebrews, he hears the question that exposes him: who had appointed him judge? Word reaches Pharaoh and he runs.
He spends decades in Midian, marries the daughter of a local priest, has a son and becomes a shepherd. He is pasturing his father-in-law’s flock when the next scene finds him. Which is to say: between the flight and the call there is an entire lifetime of anonymity, and the text sums it up in a handful of verses with no drama at all.
11In those days, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his brothers. And he saw their affliction and an Egyptian man striking a certain one of the Hebrews, his brothers.
12And when he had looked around this way and that, and had seen no one nearby, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.
The detail of looking around before acting belongs to the text, and it is what blocks the heroic reading: this is not the public execution of an oppressor, it is a killing he then tries to conceal.
The bush that was not consumed
What catches the attention of Moses is not the fire but how long it lasts: a shrub that burns and does not burn up. He turns aside to look closer, and it is then — after he has already stopped — that he is called by name.
What follows is a negotiation, and it is the part that almost never survives the retelling. Moses objects five times. He does not know who he is to go; he does not know what to say if they ask the name of the one who sent him; he thinks they will not believe him; he claims he does not speak well; and finally he asks, with no argument at all, that God send somebody else. The answer to the second objection is one of the most debated sentences in the Bible, and it is what names the God of the Exodus.
2And the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. And he saw that the bush was burning and was not burnt.
3Therefore, Moses said, “I will go and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.”
4Then the Lord, discerning that he proceeded on to see it, called to him from the midst of the bush, and he said, “Moses, Moses.” And he responded, “Here I am.”
5And he said: “Lest you should approach here, remove the shoes from your feet. For the place on which you stand is holy ground.”
6And he said, “I am the God of your father: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Moses hid his face, for he dared not look directly at God.
The exact sequence matters: first the fire, then the curiosity, then the call, then the order about the shoes. The ground was not holy beforehand; it starts being described that way at the moment he draws near.
10Moses said: “I beg you, O Lord, I was not eloquent yesterday or the day before. And from the time that you have spoken to your servant, I have a greater impediment and slowness of tongue.”
11The Lord said to him: “Who made the mouth of man? And who has formed the mute and the deaf, the seeing and the blind? Was it not I?
12Go on, therefore, and I will be in your mouth. And I will teach you what you shall say.”
The objection about speech, and the reply to it. Keep this verse: it is the exact antidote to the image of Moses as a born orator, which the visual tradition built up afterwards.
The plagues and the departure
The contest with Pharaoh runs across seven chapters and ten disasters, each with the same shape: the request, the refusal, the blow, the promise to relent, the reversal. The last of the plagues gives rise to Passover — the meal eaten in haste, with blood on the doorframe, on the night the people leave.
The crossing of the sea is told with far more restraint than popular memory holds. The text describes Moses stretching out his hand over the water and a strong wind blowing all night, until the bed was dry. It is an account of a night’s work by the wind, not of a snap of the fingers.
On the far side comes the song, one of the oldest poetic texts in the Bible, and immediately after it comes the first complaint about the lack of water. In the text, the distance between those two things is three days.
Sinai
In the third month after leaving, the people camp before a mountain, and there the longest section of the account begins: the laws. Not only the ten commandments — chapter after chapter of legislation on altars, slavery, damages, lending, festivals, fabric, incense and priesthood.
In the middle of this comes the golden calf episode, with Moses smashing the tablets as he descends and then climbing back up for a second set. When he comes down the second time, his face is so altered that the people are afraid to approach, and he takes to covering it in order to speak with them.
28Therefore, he was in that place with the Lord for forty days and forty nights; he did not eat bread and he did not drink water, and he wrote on the tablets the ten words of the covenant.
29And when Moses descended from Mount Sinai, he held the two tablets of the testimony, and he did not know that his face was radiant from the sharing of words with the Lord.
30Then Aaron and the sons of Israel, seeing that the face of Moses was radiant, were afraid to approach close by.
The text behind the horned Moses of medieval and Renaissance art. In this edition, as in nearly every modern one, what his face does is shine — the alternative reading comes from an old translation choice, explained in the section below.
Forty years, and a death outside the land
The generation that left Egypt does not enter the land. After the report of the scouts, the people refuse to advance, and the text turns that refusal into a sentence of forty years of walking until that generation is gone.
Moses does not enter either, and the reason is a brief and obscure episode at Meribah, where he strikes the rock instead of speaking to it. The last chapter of Deuteronomy puts him on a mountain, from which he sees the land at a distance, and records him dead there, in Moabite territory. The burial is narrated without the text naming who buried him, and the closing note is that nobody knows where the tomb is.
The book ends with an epitaph that has no parallel in the Old Testament: no prophet like him ever rose again in Israel.
What the text does not say
Biblical figures gather layers of tradition that Scripture does not support. Telling the two apart does not diminish the story — it gives back what is actually written.
What is commonly said
Moses had horns — that is how he appears in old statues and paintings.
What Scripture says
The text says that as he came down the mountain the skin of his face was radiant, to the point that people were afraid to come near him. That is what this edition publishes and what practically every modern translation carries.
Where it comes from: The Latin Vulgate rendered the Hebrew verb with a word built on the root for "horn", and Western art read that literally for centuries — the Moses carved by Michelangelo in the early sixteenth century for the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome, is the best-known example. This edition is itself translated from the Vulgate and does not follow that reading.
What is commonly said
Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, from beginning to end.
What Scripture says
Those five books carry no signature. The text records that Moses wrote specific passages — the words of the covenant, a song, a battle record — and the attribution of the whole to him is an ancient and widely respected tradition rather than a claim the books make about themselves. The final chapter, after all, narrates his death and burial and reports that the tomb is still unknown, which Jewish and Christian readers noticed a very long time ago.
What is commonly said
Moses raised his staff and the sea split in two instantly.
What Scripture says
The account describes a hand stretched over the water and a strong east wind blowing through the whole night, until the bed was dry. The instantaneous scene, with two walls of water appearing at once, belongs to illustration and to cinema; the text works with a duration of one entire night.
What is commonly said
The Ten Commandments come numbered in the Bible, and everybody counts them the same way.
What Scripture says
Exodus 20 presents a block of words with no numbering at all; a later chapter is what reports that there were ten. The division into ten numbered items was made afterwards, for teaching, and it is not the same across traditions — Catholics and Lutherans follow one division, while Orthodox, Reformed and most Protestant churches follow another. Both groups read exactly the same text; what differs is where each marks the boundaries.
Where this person appears
13Moses said to God: “Behold, I will go to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ If they say to me, ‘What is his name?’ What shall I say to them?”
14God said to Moses, “I AM WHO AM.” He said: “Thus shall you say to the sons of Israel: ‘HE WHO IS has sent me to you.’ ”
The question about the name and the answer to it. The interest here is not mystical: in a culture where every deity had a proper name, asking the name was asking which one you were dealing with — and the answer refuses to join that list.
21And when Moses had extended his hand over the sea, the Lord took it away by an intense burning wind, blowing throughout the night, and he turned it into dry ground. And the water was divided.
22And the sons of Israel went in through the midst of the dried sea. For the water was like a wall at their right hand and at their left hand.
The crossing, with the two elements popular memory tends to lose: the wind and the whole night. The wall of water appears only in the verse after the wind, and as a description of the result.
1And the Lord spoke all these words:
2“I am the Lord your God, who led you away from the land of Egypt, out of the house of servitude.
3You shall not have strange gods before me.
The opening of the Sinai legislation. Note that the first element is not a prohibition: it is an introduction, and it rests on a historical event. The order matters, because it is what gives everything after it the shape of a response rather than of a free-standing demand.
5And Moses, the servant of the Lord, died in that place, in the land of Moab, by order of the Lord.
6And he buried him in the valley of the land of Moab, opposite Peor. And no man knows where his sepulcher is, even to the present day.
7Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died. His eye was not dimmed, nor were his teeth displaced.
The death in Moabite territory, the burial with no named burier, and the note that the place is still unknown. It is a deliberately monument-free ending, and it is worth contrasting with what any neighbouring culture did with the tomb of a founder.
10And no other prophet rose up in Israel like Moses, one whom the Lord knew face to face,
11one with all the signs and wonders, which he sent through him, to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh, and all his servants, and his entire land,
12nor one with such a powerful hand and such great miracles as Moses did in the sight of all Israel.
The epitaph, written by a hand other than his. It is the final assessment of the character inside the canon itself, and it is comparative: it measures Moses against every prophet who came afterwards.