Moses who is

The job God called Moses to do was full of difficulties and challenges. Moses never hid his emotions and questions from God. Meanwhile, the people got tired of waiting for Moses, made an idol, and started worshiping it. This made God angry, and He offered to kill them all, making Moses into a great nation instead. For 40 years Moses led the Israelites, and God kept His promise to always be with him. Even when Moses messed up, due to his anger, which disallowed him from entering the promised land.

God was with Moses to the very end, burying him in secret. Moses lived to be years old and was completely healthy. The people grieved 30 days for him until God put a stop to it, instructing Joshua to take the leadership position.

It flatly contradicts the pattern of expectation that the biblical narrative had accustomed us to, namely, that promises would be fulfilled and lives would reach closure. For Moses is not allowed to die in, let alone enter, the land promised to Israel already in patriarchal days—the land that he had been divinely commanded to return Israel to, without any indication, initially, that he would be barred from it so Exodus 3, —9.

Indeed, at the end Moses cannot even be buried in the promised land, as key patriarchal figures had been, including Jacob and Joseph, who had died outside of Israel Genesis —, 24—26; Joshua — Rather, Moses dies and is buried outside of the land, across the Jordan River in Moab, a region otherwise often at odds with Israel; and he is buried in a spot unknown, placed there not even by human hands, but by God alone.

Now the Bible, it has to be noted, tries to explain this end; yet it succeeds in doing so only by a series of incomplete and obscure reasons Numbers 20, esp.

For the Bible, in sum, Moses is indeed a man apart—apart not only from the people he guides and the land to which he directs them, but apart also, in many fundamental ways, from the kinds of leaders the previous generations of patriarchal figures had been.

He remains the permanent outsider, a unique and towering figure. The question that remains is why should this be so, and what does it mean. Three possibilities, at least, come to mind. The stories circulating in many societies often picture their founders as different from the rest, even as distant—in short, as heroes. Yet if Moses in some sense belongs to this common type, in other ways he is an unusual, perhaps rare mutation of it, since, in his excessive modesty, distance, inexplicable fate, and strangeness, he is a kind of anti-hero: someone who does not easily serve in the native tradition as a role model, someone who cannot really be emulated.

Indeed, Israel is an outsider to the very land which its God promises it and which it then has to make its own in a continual struggle. Thirdly, and lastly, by focusing on Moses as outsider, and especially as remote, inimitable outsider, the Bible ends up by shifting the emphasis away from who Moses is to what he communicates, namely, to the Law and to God as its source. We face, then, the paradox that the towering character of Moses may be stressed in the Bible, at least in part, precisely to efface him, so that his message may emerge more clearly and sharply.

In other words, there is no cult of personality here—that is, no cult of human personality—and this comports with a more general strain of ambivalence in the biblical corpus toward human leaders and the limits of human authority e. For the laws it offers are laws designed for the human community: laws that, however difficult, all can carry out e.

Who, then, is Moses, as the biblical authors see him? The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in February See James L. Moses himself is far from passive or reticent, yet he represents a prototype of the biblical hero whose greatness lies not in self-assertion but in obedience to God. Moses is a compelling figure because he possesses human faults.

He is passionate and impulsive. Descending from Mount Sinai, Moses knows ahead of time that the people are worshipping a golden idol, because God has warned him of this fact. God seems to value this passionate quality in Moses, for Moses is an effective mediator between God and the Israelites. By the end of the dig, they had found enough stables for at least horses and chariots. And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night.

But if the exodus took place in the 16th century BCE, could the pillars of fire and cloud by explained by a column of volcanic ash from Santorini? Santorini is miles away, but the column of smoke would have towered some 40 miles above sea level. Climatologist Mike Rampino thinks that the ash could have been seen from as far away as Egypt. During the day, the ash would have looked like a column of smoke and by night static electricity in the atmosphere would have caused lightning in this cloud.

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. If you read the bible in the original Hebrew, the word 'red' is mistranslated. In the Hebrew bible Moses and his people cross the 'yam suph' - the Sea of Reeds.

Now this is a strange story. You can imagine trying to cross the Red Sea would be horrendously difficult but a Reed Sea is something quite different. This is marshland areas and this is probably what they crossed. Ancient Egyptian texts mention an area called Patchoufy : The Reeds. This is probably what they crossed. So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its normal course when the morning appeared. If you're talking about a shallow reed swamp of maybe two or three metres maximum of water, this sort of thing is physically possible.

In fact it's been witnessed within the last years The Egyptian army might not have been completely decimated. Many of the horses would have been killed, chariots would have been stuck in the mud. Computer simulations of the Santorini eruption show that the collapse of the island would have triggered a mega-tsunami - a foot wave travelling at miles an hour. Floyd McCoy, a tsunami expert, says this was one of the largest waves in history and must have reached Egypt.

We find evidence, believe it or not, on the deep ocean floor. The tsunamis actually scraped across the bottom of the ocean floor in the Mediterranean and disturbed the sediment.

We can find that sediment. That gives us some indication of the directions they went The computer model showed us waves radiating out all over the Mediterranean, reaching the Nile Delta. Could the tsunami have divided up the waters of the Reed Sea? If you look at ordinary waves you can see that just before they break, the water withdraws from the shore.

A mega-tsunami would syphon billions of gallons of water - not just from the shore but from connecting rivers and lakes - creating dry land for as long as two hours.

We should think of a two-metre tsunami wave like a rapid change of the sea level by two metres along the coast, and that can can travel several kilometres inland. The destructive force of the wave could easily destroy an army. In , the Philippine island of Mindoro was hit by a tsunami and an earthquake. The earthquake caused a massive crack in the bed of a lake about a mile inland.

An eye-witness said he saw the water like a waterfall in the centre of the lake just go down. After a while, he could see the bottom of the lake: "I thought I could even walk through. Then the tsunami arrived one mile further down the river and swept away a 6, ton barge lying on the shore. The mega-tsunami which hit the Nile delta was a thousand times more devastating than this one.

Moses' appearance marks a kind of new beginning in the biblical story. Israel's ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are in the past. In time of famine their descendants went down to Egypt, the largest and wealthiest neighbouring country, and settled there. These Hebrews became numerous, but Egypt's ruler, the Pharaoh, decided that they would be a good source of cheap labour, and began to exploit them in building projects; he also decided to make them less dangerous by keeping their numbers down through killing their male children at birth Exodus 1.

When Moses was born, his mother sought to protect him by putting him in a basket to float on the river Nile. Here he was providentially found by the Pharaoh's daughter who took pity on him and brought him up as her own child Exodus 2. One day Moses saw an Egyptian and a Hebrew fighting.

He intervened and killed the Egyptian. But when this became known he fled for his life. In the land of Midian, probably somewhere in the Sinai peninsula, he married the daughter of a priest, had two children, and settled down to life as a shepherd. That might have been the end of his story - except that his compatriots were still enslaved in Egypt, and God resolved to do something about it.

The Bible contains astonishing accounts of God and Moses speaking face to face begin when Moses is quietly minding his own business as a shepherd. God appears to Moses in a burning bush. Moses sees a bush which burns without being consumed - a symbol of the presence of God which defies usual human experience of things. And he hears a voice which calls him by his own name Exodus The point is that God has chosen to effect his plan through a human agent, Moses.

It is for this reason that Moses is called the greatest prophet in Israel, for a prophet is someone who speaks and acts on God's behalf. God is calling Moses to embody the pattern of human response to God that becomes basic within the Bible. The other great face to face encounter with God is when Moses has brought the Israelites out of Egypt and has returned with them to Sinai where he first met God.

The encounter is awesome. When God appears to the people of Israel, a whole mountain burns; for when God comes, Sinai becomes like a volcano not an actual volcano, but God's coming is so awesome that the only way to depict it is in the language of the most overwhelming of known phenomena :. God then gives the Ten Commandments to Moses as a kind of basic constitution or charter for Israel, together with some more detailed laws that apply the Commandments within everyday situations.

Israel responds by promising obedience Exodus As soon as Moses has rescued Israel from Egypt and brought them to Sinai where they become God's people, things almost unravel.

For while Moses is on the mountain with God receiving the law the people persuade his brother Aaron, who had clearly been left in charge, to make a golden calf to symbolize God's presence.

They want to worship the calf, instead of God. Consequently the new relationship between God and Israel almost comes to an end. When Moses comes down from the mountain he symbolically smashes the stone tablets which contain the Ten Commandments, Israel's charter.

Yet even so Moses does not give up on Israel, but prays for them and asks God to be merciful. He persists in this, and God responds favourably. Exodus But even Moses gets caught up in a failure to heed God.

The story of his failure is told in Numbers The consequence is that Moses is prohibited from entering the Promised Land with Israel. So he gives a long series of addresses in the book of Deuteronomy, explaining in depth the dynamics of God's relationship with Israel. Then, he ascends Mount Nebo, east of the river Jordan, from where God gives him a panoramic vision of the whole of the Promised Land; and there he dies, as he had lived, in God's presence Deuteronomy Moses has an understanding of God that perhaps his ancestors didn't have.

So he hides in a cleft in a rock, and God passes by. As He passes, he defines himself in 13 ways. Moses understanding of God is that we can only see what God does after the event, we can look back and understand. Moses has a much closer relationship to God than anyone ever had, but it's still an elusive one. We understand through Moses that although we can get very, very close, God remains always beyond us. We can never define God. We discover that he owes a lot to women.