Moses

1. The Burning Bush

Moses was a fugitive with blood on his hands, working as a shepherd for his father-in-law in Midian, when he saw a bush burning without being consumed and turned aside to look (Exodus 3). God called him by name from the bush, told him to take off his sandals because the ground was holy, identified himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and said that he had seen the affliction of his people and heard their cry.

Moses asked what to say if the Israelites asked for God's name. The answer was "I AM WHO I AM," and he was told to say that I AM had sent him (Exodus 3:14). The Hebrew consonants of the divine name, YHWH, stand behind that phrase. The Catechism treats this revelation as the point where God gives his name and makes himself knowable while remaining beyond every name (CCC 205). The claim in it is enormous: the God speaking here is not the god of one function or one place. He is the one who is.

Moses then argued. He raised five objections in a row: who am I, what is your name, they will not believe me, I am slow of speech, and finally, send somebody else (Exodus 3 and 4). God answered each and gave him his brother Aaron as a spokesman. Anybody who has tried to get out of something God put in front of them will recognise the sequence.

2. The Exodus

Moses returned to Egypt and demanded the release of the Hebrew slaves. Pharaoh refused, and the ten plagues followed, ending with the death of the firstborn. Israel was spared by the blood of a lamb without blemish, marked on the doorposts, eaten in haste with unleavened bread (Exodus 12). That night became Passover, and it is still kept.

The people left, were pursued, and crossed the sea on dry ground while the pursuing chariots were destroyed behind them (Exodus 14). The Hebrew phrase behind the traditional "Red Sea" is yam suph, which means sea of reeds, and the location has been argued over for centuries. What the text asserts is the deliverance.

Then came forty years of wilderness: bread from heaven called manna (Exodus 16), water struck from a rock (Exodus 17), the golden calf and Moses breaking the tablets (Exodus 32), the tent of meeting where the Lord spoke to Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend (Exodus 33:11), and a long series of rebellions in which Moses repeatedly stood between his people and the judgment they had earned.

The Church has read the whole sequence as a picture of Christian life from the earliest centuries. The Passover lamb is Christ, whom Paul calls our paschal lamb who has been sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7), and John notes that not one of his bones was broken in fulfilment of the Passover rule (John 19:36, Exodus 12:46). Passing through the sea prefigures baptism, and Paul says the Israelites were all baptised into Moses in the cloud and in the sea (1 Corinthians 10:1 to 2). The manna prefigures the Eucharist, and Jesus makes that explicit in the synagogue at Capernaum: your fathers ate the manna and died, and I am the living bread come down from heaven (John 6:48 to 51). Our pages on baptism and the Eucharist follow those readings out.

3. The Law

At Sinai, Moses received the Ten Commandments, given in Exodus 20 and repeated in Deuteronomy 5. The Catechism organises the whole of its moral teaching around them, because they set out what love of God and love of neighbour require in practice. The covenant made at Sinai bound a rescued people to the God who rescued them, and the commandments open by naming that rescue before they command anything.

Moses is described as speaking with God face to face (Exodus 33:11), and Deuteronomy closes by saying that no prophet has since arisen in Israel like him, whom the Lord knew face to face (Deuteronomy 34:10). Numbers calls him the meekest man on the face of the earth (Numbers 12:3). His face shone after he came down from the mountain, and he veiled it (Exodus 34:29 to 35), an image Paul takes up when he writes about reading the old covenant with a veil over the heart (2 Corinthians 3:7 to 18).

He did not enter the land. At the waters of Meribah he was told to speak to a rock and instead struck it twice, and God told him that because he had not trusted enough to treat him as holy before the people, he would not bring the assembly into the land (Numbers 20:2 to 13). He climbed Mount Nebo, saw the whole country, and died there in Moab at a hundred and twenty, his sight undimmed and his strength unabated, and no one knows his burial place (Deuteronomy 34).

That ending is theological as well as narrative. The Law given through Moses shows what righteousness is and does not itself carry anyone across the river. The man who leads Israel in is Joshua, whose name in Greek is Jesus.

4. The Life of Moses in Outline

The biblical account divides his hundred and twenty years into three parts of forty, a division Stephen makes explicit in his speech before the Sanhedrin (Acts 7).

Egypt

Born to Amram and Jochebed of the tribe of Levi (Exodus 6:20) during a decree that Hebrew boys be drowned, he was hidden for three months and then set in a basket among the reeds of the Nile, watched by his sister Miriam. Pharaoh's daughter drew him out, and Miriam arranged for his own mother to nurse him. The name Moses is explained in the text from the Hebrew for drawing out (Exodus 2:10), and it also resembles a common Egyptian name element meaning "born of," which fits a child raised in an Egyptian household. Grown, he killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew, was found out, and fled.

Midian

He came to Midian, defended the daughters of a priest named Jethro at a well, married one of them, Zipporah, and had a son he called Gershom, saying he had been a stranger in a foreign land. He kept his father-in-law's sheep until the day at the bush.

The wilderness

From the plagues to Mount Nebo he led a people who complained about food, water, leadership and direction, who built a golden calf while he was on the mountain, and who at the decisive moment refused to enter the land. Moses interceded for them repeatedly, at one point offering to be blotted out of God's book rather than see them destroyed (Exodus 32:32). Aaron and Miriam both died before he did. He handed the leadership to Joshua and blessed the tribes before he climbed the mountain.

5. What the Historical Record Can and Cannot Show

This deserves a straight answer, because it is one of the most searched questions about Moses and it is usually answered badly in both directions.

No Egyptian text mentions Moses, the plagues, or the departure of a large body of Hebrew slaves. Egyptian royal records were not in the business of recording defeats, so the silence proves less than it looks, and it remains silence. The earliest reference to Israel outside the Bible is the Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian victory inscription from around 1207 BC, which names Israel as a people already in Canaan.

Dating proposals cluster in two places. Exodus 1:11 names the store cities Pithom and Rameses, which points many scholars to the thirteenth century BC, in the reign of Ramesses II. Others follow 1 Kings 6:1, which puts the Exodus 480 years before Solomon began the Temple, and arrive in the fifteenth century. Neither reconstruction commands agreement, and archaeologists differ sharply on the scale of any departure from Egypt.

What the Church actually requires

The Second Vatican Council taught that the books of Scripture teach firmly, faithfully and without error the truth that God wanted set down for the sake of our salvation (Dei Verbum 11). That is a statement about what Scripture teaches, and it leaves room for the different literary forms the biblical writers used. On authorship, the Church has long spoken of Moses as the source and authority behind the Pentateuch, and since the middle of the twentieth century Catholic scholars have been free to hold that these books reached their final form through a long process of transmission and editing. Neither position requires a reader to defend a particular archaeological reconstruction. Our page on the Bible covers how Catholics read the Old Testament, and faith and science covers the general question of evidence.

6. Moses and Christ: How the Church Reads Him

Moses appears throughout the New Testament, and the connections are made by the New Testament writers rather than by later commentators.

• The prophet like Moses. Deuteronomy 18:15 promises a prophet like Moses raised up from among the people. Peter applies it directly to Jesus (Acts 3:22).
• The Transfiguration. Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus on the mountain, and Luke says they spoke of the exodus he was to accomplish at Jerusalem (Luke 9:30 to 31). The Law and the Prophets stand beside him, and the voice from the cloud says to listen to the Son.
• Law and grace. John writes that the law was given through Moses and that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (John 1:17).
• The bronze serpent. Jesus compares his own lifting up on the cross to the serpent Moses raised in the wilderness so that those who looked at it lived (John 3:14, Numbers 21).
• Servant and Son. Hebrews says Moses was faithful in God's house as a servant, and Christ is faithful over the house as a son (Hebrews 3:1 to 6).
• The choice. Hebrews 11:24 to 26 praises Moses for refusing to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter and choosing ill treatment with the people of God over the fleeting pleasures of sin.

The Church has also read Moses as the model of the intercessor. He stands between God and a guilty people and asks to be struck instead of them, which is the shape of what Christ does on the cross.

7. Moses in Judaism and Islam

Jews call him Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher, and hold him as the greatest of the prophets and the one through whom the Torah was given at Sinai. Judaism does not venerate him as Christians venerate saints, and the Passover Haggadah famously keeps the focus on God as the deliverer rather than on Moses. Our page on Judaism sets out the relationship between the two faiths.

Islam names him Musa, and he is mentioned more often in the Qur'an than any other prophet. Muslims hold that he received a scripture, the Tawrat, and count him among the messengers of God. The Qur'anic accounts of the burning bush, the confrontation with Pharaoh and the crossing overlap with the biblical narrative and differ in a number of details. Our page on Islam compares the two traditions.

8. Commemoration, Sites and Devotion

Two places carry the memory. St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai has been in continuous use since the sixth century and preserves the tradition of the burning bush site. Mount Nebo in Jordan looks west across the Jordan valley, and the view from it is the view the text describes Moses being given before he died.

9. What a Reader Can Take From Moses

God calls people who have already failed

Moses was a killer and a runaway before he was a prophet, and he had been out of the country for forty years. The call came anyway, and the objections he raised were answered rather than punished.

Intercede for people who do not deserve it

The most consistent thing Moses does across four books is pray for people who have just wronged him. He asks to be blotted out rather than see them destroyed. Praying for someone you are angry at is the direct application, and it can be started tonight.

You may not see the end of the work

Moses got the view from Nebo and no more. Most faithful work is like that, and it is a reason to do it now rather than to wait for a season when the results are guaranteed. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and readiness is required in the present tense.

10. Frequently Asked Questions

Why was Moses not allowed to enter the Promised Land?

At the waters of Meribah, told to speak to a rock so that water would come out, Moses struck it twice and spoke to the people in anger. God told him and Aaron that because they had not trusted enough to treat him as holy in the sight of Israel, they would not bring the assembly into the land (Numbers 20:2 to 13). He was allowed to see the land from Mount Nebo before he died.

What does "I AM WHO I AM" mean?

It is the answer God gives Moses at the burning bush when asked for his name (Exodus 3:14), and it points to God as the one who simply is, whose existence depends on nothing else. The divine name YHWH stands behind it. The Catechism treats this as the moment God makes his name known while remaining beyond all naming (CCC 205).

Is there historical evidence for Moses and the Exodus?

No Egyptian source mentions Moses or the Exodus, and archaeologists disagree about what happened and when. Proposed dates cluster in the thirteenth century BC, from the store cities named in Exodus 1:11, and in the fifteenth century, from the chronology of 1 Kings 6:1. The earliest mention of Israel outside the Bible is the Merneptah Stele from around 1207 BC, which places Israel in Canaan. Catholic teaching holds that Scripture teaches without error the truth God intended for our salvation, and it does not require any particular archaeological reconstruction.

Did Moses write the first five books of the Bible?

Jewish and Christian tradition speaks of Moses as the author and authority behind the Pentateuch. Modern scholarship, including Catholic scholarship, generally holds that these books reached their final form over a long period of transmission and editing. The Church permits that view and continues to speak of the Law as given through Moses.

Where is Moses buried?

Deuteronomy says he was buried in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, and that no one knows his burial place to this day (Deuteronomy 34:6). The Letter of Jude refers to a dispute between the archangel Michael and the devil over his body (Jude 9), drawing on a Jewish tradition outside the canonical books.

Does Moses appear in the New Testament?

Frequently. He appears in person with Elijah at the Transfiguration, where Luke says they spoke with Jesus of the exodus he was to accomplish at Jerusalem (Luke 9:30 to 31). He is cited in Stephen's speech (Acts 7), in Hebrews as the servant in God's house compared with Christ the Son (Hebrews 3), and among the examples of faith in Hebrews 11.