Moses

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A basket of reeds, daubed with pitch and set among the rushes at the river’s edge, carries the whole future of a people. The infant inside it is a Levite boy whose mother has hidden him three months against a royal order to drown the Hebrew sons in the Nile; the daughter of Pharaoh comes down to bathe, finds the ark of bulrushes, and takes the child as her own, paying his own mother to nurse him without knowing it. She names him Moses — in the Egyptian princess’s mouth a name the text glosses from the Hebrew mashah, to draw out, because she drew him out of the water. From that crossing — a Hebrew child raised in the house of the power that meant to kill him — the rest follows: a man who will speak to God face to face, lead a nation out of bondage, and bring down from a burning mountain the law by which it will live. He is the central human figure of the Pentateuch, the five books that the tradition that holds them calls, simply, the Torah of Moses.

The arc of a life in the five books

The life is given in four of the five scrolls, from the second chapter of Exodus to the last of Deuteronomy, and it is built as a single ascending line broken at the very end. Grown to manhood, Moses kills an Egyptian he sees beating a Hebrew, and flees east into Midian, where he marries Zipporah, the daughter of the priest Jethro, and keeps his flocks. There, at the mountain called Horeb or Sinai, the line turns. He sees a bush that burns without being consumed, and from it a voice that names itself the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, and sends him back to Egypt to bring out the enslaved people. When Moses asks by what name he shall call the one who sends him, the answer comes in the untranslatable first person: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh — I am that I am, or I will be what I will be — and then the four consonants of the divine Name itself, the Tetragrammaton, the Name later tradition would not pronounce. The whole of what follows turns on that disclosure: the God who has no image gives, instead, a name.

Moses returns with his elder brother Aaron as his spokesman, for he protests that he is slow of speech. Before Pharaoh the two contend through the ten plagues — water turned to blood, frogs, lice, flies, murrain, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and at the last the death of the firstborn, the night Israel marks its doorposts with blood and is passed over. The people go out, and at the sea, pursued, Moses stretches his hand over the water and it divides; Israel passes through on dry ground and the pursuing chariots are drowned behind them. Three months out, at Sinai, the covenant is sealed. Moses goes up into the cloud and the fire and is there forty days and forty nights; he receives the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, cut into two tablets of stone, and the long body of covenant law, and the pattern for the Tabernacle, the portable sanctuary where the divine presence will travel with the camp. He comes down to find the people, in his absence, dancing before a golden calf that Aaron has cast from their melted ornaments — and in fury he shatters the first tablets at the foot of the mountain, the covenant broken at its giving. He grinds the idol to powder, intercedes for the people against their destruction, and is given a second set of tablets. When he descends this second time his face shines so that the people cannot look at him, and he veils it.

Then the forty years. The generation that left Egypt does not enter the land; it murmurs, rebels, and dies in the wilderness, Moses leading it the whole long way through the wandering recorded in the Book of Numbers. At the very end, in the speeches that fill Deuteronomy, he gathers the law once more and lays it before the generation born in the desert, and then climbs Mount Nebo, across the Jordan from the land he has spent his life walking toward. From the height he is shown the whole of it — Gilead to Dan, the Negev, the plain of Jericho — and told he will not cross over. He dies there, on the mountain, at the word of God; he is buried in the valley, and, the text says, no one knows his grave to this day. The book closes on a verdict it makes about him: there has not arisen since in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.

The lawgiver and the question of the hand

For most of the long history of the traditions that carry these books, the question of who wrote them had one answer, and it was Moses. The Pentateuch speaks of itself, in the later scriptures and in the liturgy, as the law of Moses; the prophet who climbs the mountain and returns with the tablets is taken also to be the hand that set down the whole. To call the five books the Torah of Moses was, first of all, a claim about authority and origin rather than about manuscripts: that the instruction binding Israel came through the one mediator who spoke with God as a man speaks with his neighbor, and so carried the weight of revelation. In rabbinic teaching the claim widens. Moses receives at Sinai not only the written Torah but an oral Torah alongside it — the interpretation, the unwritten law, handed down, in the famous opening of the Pirkei Avot, from Moses to Joshua to the elders to the prophets and on to the sages — so that the whole later edifice of Jewish law is understood as the unfolding of what was given, in seed, to one man on the mountain.

Modern source criticism reads the same text along a different axis, and the two readings answer different questions. From the close reading of seams — duplicated stories, alternating divine names, shifts of vocabulary and theology from passage to passage, and not least the account of Moses’s own death and unmarked burial that closes the fifth book — scholarship since the eighteenth century has come to regard the Pentateuch as composite: assembled over centuries from several originally distinct bodies of material, brought to its final form, on the most widely held reckoning, in the period after the Babylonian exile. The documentary hypothesis given its enduring shape by Julius Wellhausen, and the rival composition-historical and neo-documentary models that have succeeded it, agree against single Mosaic authorship while disagreeing about almost everything else. This is a historical proposal about how the scroll came to exist; the ascription to Moses functions, within the traditions that hold it, as a statement about where the instruction comes from and why it binds. A reader can hold the second as revelation and study the first as history, and many do. As for the man behind the portrait, the documentary record outside the Bible is silent: no Egyptian source names him, no inscription fixes a date, and the Exodus itself leaves no archaeological trace that scholarship has agreed to read as its own. The figure is monumental within the text and unlocatable beyond it.

The mediator and the Name

What the tradition fixes on, more than any single deed, is the kind of access Moses has. He is the mediator — the one who stands between, carrying the people’s words up the mountain and the divine words down it, interceding when the covenant is broken, alone admitted into the cloud. Where the later prophets receive their word in vision, dream, and riddle, Moses is said to receive it plainly. The distinction is drawn sharply in the rabbinic tradition: all the prophets beheld through a glass that does not give light — aspaklaria she-einah me’irah, a dim or clouded lens — while Moses alone beheld through the clear glass, aspaklaria ha-me’irah, a direct and unmediated seeing, as the Babylonian Talmud sets it out in the tractate Yevamot. His prophecy is of a different order, not merely a higher degree of the same thing; the Torah’s own coda, that no prophet has arisen like him, is read as a statement about this unique nearness.

Bound up with that nearness is the Name. Moses is the one to whom the Tetragrammaton is revealed at the bush, and the one through whom it enters the common life of Israel; he is, in the tradition’s memory, its revealer. This single fact opened, in the long afterlife of the figure, an entire territory of speculation. Once God is known by a name — by particular letters, in a particular order — the letters themselves become objects of contemplation. The divine names, their permutations, the numerical values of their characters, the ways the unpronounceable Name underlies and generates the others: these became, in later Jewish esotericism, a discipline in their own right, and Moses, as the Name’s first bearer, stands at the head of it. The architecture of that name-speculation belongs to the Kabbalah; what matters here is that its root runs back to a man on a mountain being told what to call the one who sends him.

His face, when he comes down, carries the mark of the encounter. The Hebrew says that the skin of his face qaran — sent out rays, shone — built on the noun qeren, a horn, the word the language reached for because it had no separate term for a beam of light. When Jerome rendered Exodus into Latin near the end of the fourth century, he gave it as cornuta, horned, and the medieval West, reading the Vulgate, gave Moses literal horns — the tradition behind Michelangelo’s marble Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli, two stubs of light frozen as bone. The shining face is the visible residue of the meeting that the rest of the figure is built around: the man who comes back changed from speaking with God.

Moses among the Greeks

The figure did not stay inside the synagogue. In Hellenistic Alexandria, where Jews read and wrote in Greek and lived inside a Greek intellectual world, Moses was recast for that world, and the recasting ran in two directions at once. One made him a culture-hero on the Egyptian and Greek model. The historian Artapanus, writing perhaps in the second century before the Common Era and surviving only in fragments quoted later by Christian apologists, identified Moses with the Greek Mousaios — and then, in a deliberate inversion of the usual genealogy, made him the teacher of Orpheus rather than his pupil. The same fragments credit Moses with the inventions of Egyptian civilization and report that the Egyptian priests called him Hermes for his mastery of the sacred letters. Here, at the very root of the Hellenistic reception, Moses and Hermes touch — a juncture that the much later Renaissance would find waiting for it.

The other direction was philosophical, and its great practitioner was Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jewish thinker who read the Torah as a complete philosophy encoded in narrative. Philo’s De Vita Mosis, his Life of Moses in two books, presents him under four heads that map the offices of the ideal life: king, lawgiver, priest, and prophet — the philosopher-king of Plato’s Republic realized in a Hebrew. Across his vast allegorical commentary Philo reads the Mosaic books as carrying, beneath the letter, the truths the Greeks reached by argument; Moses becomes the sage in whom revelation and philosophy are one, and the Logos the mediating principle his text everywhere implies. The move had a polemical edge that others pressed harder. The Pythagorean Platonist Numenius of Apamea, in the second century of the Common Era, asked what Plato was but Moses speaking Attic Greek — the line preserved by Clement of Alexandria, who, with the earlier Aristobulus, argued that the best of Greek philosophy had been drawn from the Hebrew books, that Plato and Pythagoras had read Moses. The chronology is upside down and the borrowing runs, where it runs at all, the other way; but the claim that Moses stood at the fountainhead of wisdom, with Greece downstream of him, became a durable and consequential idea.

The fountainhead: prisca theologia and the Hermetic chain

That idea reached its most elaborate form a millennium and a half later, in the Florence of the Medici. The Renaissance recovery of ancient wisdom built itself around the prisca theologia — the conviction that a single divine theology had been disclosed in remotest antiquity and handed down through a chain of sages. In Marsilio Ficino’s canonical version the chain ran from Hermes Trismegistus and Zoroaster through Orpheus and Pythagoras to Plato; and the question of where Moses stood in relation to that line was live and load-bearing. Ficino placed Hermes as a contemporary of Moses, or older — which set the Egyptian sage and the Hebrew prophet side by side as twin headwaters of the one wisdom. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, folding Jewish Kabbalah into the synthesis, ranked the Mosaic-Kabbalistic strand above the pagan ones precisely because its origin was Mosaic: a secret oral wisdom given to Moses at Sinai alongside the written law, and so a more direct draught from the source. The Italian humanist Agostino Steuco, who coined the companion phrase philosophia perennis, set Moses among the ancient witnesses to the one truth that he held God had diffused among all peoples from the creation. In this whole construction Moses is no longer only the lawgiver of one nation; he is a fountainhead of universal divine knowledge, set beside Hermes and Zoroaster at the head of the world’s wisdom — and the engine of Christian Kabbalah drew its warrant from exactly that placement. The frame is itself an old one in this register: the same impulse that fused Enoch with Hermes in the figure of the ascended sage was at work in making Moses a master of the hidden wisdom.

Moshe Rabbenu: the prophet of Kabbalah

Within the Jewish esoteric tradition the elevation took its own form, and a title. Moses is Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our teacher — the master through whom the whole Torah, written and oral, came down, and so the human source of everything the Kabbalah claims to transmit. The mystics read his unique prophecy through the clear glass into their own map of the divine: where the other prophets received through the lowest of the emanations, Moses received through Tiferet, the central radiance of the sefirotic tree, the place of harmony and beauty at the heart of the structure — and in some schemes through Netzach, the channel of endurance and prophetic flow. He is the paradigm of the prophet who beholds the source without a veil. In the stratum of the Zohar called the Ra’aya Mehemna, the Faithful Shepherd, Moses returns from beyond death to teach: the dead prophet appears to the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai and his circle and discloses the mystical reasons hidden in the commandments, so that the law Moses once delivered is, in this late and visionary layer, unfolded by Moses himself into its secret sense. The Faithful Shepherd is the prophet not merely as lawgiver but as the one who keeps returning to lead — the shepherd image, from his years with Jethro’s flocks, carried up into the highest grade of revelation.

The medieval philosophers worked the same material toward a different end. Maimonides, building on the rabbinic distinction of the lenses, read Moses’s prophecy as the perfection of the human intellect — the prophetic faculty at its fullest reach, knowing without the mediation of imagination that the lesser prophets required — and made the uniqueness of Moses a cornerstone of his account of prophecy itself. Lawgiver, philosopher’s ideal, fountainhead of the ancient wisdom, and the highest of the prophets: the same man carries all of it, each tradition reading its own deepest concern into the figure who spoke with God on the mountain.

The end that was disputed

The death on Nebo, with the grave no one can find, left a space that later writers filled. A Hebrew tradition held that Moses did not simply die but was taken up — that a man so near to God could not be left to ordinary corruption — and the question of what became of his body became a matter of contention. The Assumption of Moses, a Jewish apocalyptic work of the early first century framed as Moses’s farewell prophecy, belongs to this elevation of the figure in the late Second Temple imagination; and the New Testament Epistle of Jude preserves a strange notice, reported by the Alexandrian Origen to be drawn from that very book, of the archangel Michael contending with the devil over the body of Moses. The dispute over the corpse is, at bottom, a dispute over the rank: whether the man who saw through the clear glass could be allowed the death of other men. The space above the unmarked grave on the mountain is where the tradition placed everything it could not let his death contain.

Scholarship and the texts

The primary spine is scriptural — the Exodus through Deuteronomy narrative — and the modern critical literature on the Pentateuch as a composite work is treated under that scripture’s own heading; Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1885, trans. Black and Menzies) gave the documentary hypothesis its lasting form, and Richard Elliott Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Summit Books, 1987) remains its most widely read modern presentation. On Moses specifically as a figure of cultural memory rather than of recoverable biography, Jan Assmann’s Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) traces the long history of the idea that Moses was, or carried, an Egyptian wisdom — the very thread that runs from Artapanus to the prisca theologia.

The Hellenistic reception rests on the Alexandrian sources. Philo of Alexandria’s De Vita Mosis is edited and translated by F. H. Colson in the Loeb Classical Library (Philo, vol. VI, LCL 289, 1935); the foundational modern account of Philo’s Moses as philosopher-king and of his allegorical method is set out across the scholarship surveyed in Maren R. Niehoff’s Philo of Alexandria: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Artapanus and the other Hellenistic-Jewish historians survive in fragments collected by Carl Holladay and discussed in the standard handbooks; Numenius’s line that Plato is Moses speaking Attic Greek is preserved at Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis I.22, and the philosopher’s engagement with the Hebrew scriptures is laid out in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Numenius.

For the Renaissance afterlife, D. P. Walker’s The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1972) remains the indispensable study of the prisca theologia and of Moses’s place within its chain of sages. The parabiblical material is gathered in R. H. Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), which prints the Assumption of Moses and is hosted here in full. The Kabbalistic elevation of Moshe Rabbenu — the clear glass, the association with Tiferet, the Ra’aya Mehemna — descends through the Zohar and is mapped in the foundational scholarship of Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941), whose account of the Zoharic strata and their stamp on later Jewish prophecy remains the baseline of the field.

→ In the library: Charles — Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913)

→ Related: Pentateuch · Torah · Ten Commandments · Aaron · Philo Of Alexandria · Hermes Trismegistus · Prisca Theologia · Kabbalah · Abraham · Assumption Of Moses · Golden Calf · Enochic Idris Prophetology