Who Was Moses? Was He More than an Exodus Hero? Discovering the Biblical Moses by BAS Staff, February 06, 2025 .
Extracts as follows:
- Who was Moses?
- We might say he was a man who was a son of Abraham who led the people but was not typical of them.
- A rather solitary leader, one with his people but set apart, even in his childhood, when he was raised by the pharaoh’s daughter as if he were an Egyptian prince.
- Even his physical characteristics—a speech defect—set him apart from others and is accommodated by God who arranges a leadership duo with Moses and his priestly brother Aaron.
- when God commands Moses to free the Israelites from Egypt, and Moses protests his competence to challenge the Pharaoh because of a speech defect—a “heaviness of mouth and heaviness of tongue” as the text says (Exodus 4:10)—this defect is turned, by God, into the basis of a new arrangement, wherein Aaron shall do the speaking, and Moses will direct him as though he were God Himself (Exodus 4:16).
- His role was unique—even to receiving the Law and seeing God, as evidenced by Moses’ blinding countenance.
- His wife, Zipporah, is not from Israel, but from the Midianites of the region of Sinai (e.g., Exodus 2:15–22),
- her foreignness is later criticized by none other than Moses’ brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam, in the context of a challenge to Moses’ own legitimacy and leadership (Numbers 12).
- the label that Aaron and Miriam pin on Moses’ wife, “Cushite,” has the effect of making her even stranger to an Israelite settled in Palestine, since it normally refers to the Ethiopians, a people much farther away from Palestine than the Midianites.
- In the confrontation with Aaron and Miriam, the sinful effrontery of their challenge to Moses emerges all the more clearly in the description of Moses at the opposite extreme: “The man Moses was very meek, more than all humanity that was on the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3).
- Gershom – There is also the son Moses has with Zipporah: he is named Gershom, according to the biblical text, precisely because this is to memorialize Moses as outsider (Exodus 2:22).
- Gershom has as well a curious genealogical niche. For while he has descendants, they are not arranged in a line of divine promise and authority such as is found with Abraham and his family (e.g., Genesis 26:2–5).
- In Judges 18:30–31 (following here the textual tradition that reads the ancestor’s name as Moses, not Manasseh), we learn that Gershom’s descendants were priests to an idolatrous cult in the Israelite tribe of Dan.
- Death – The biblical Moses also has an unusual death. God says he must die alone on a mountaintop outside the promised land.
Exodus 4:10-17 ASV
10 And Moses said unto Jehovah, Oh, Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant; for I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. 11 And Jehovah said unto him, Who hath made man’s mouth? or who maketh a man dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? is it not I, Jehovah? 12 Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt speak. 13 And he said, Oh, Lord, send, I pray thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send. 14 And the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Moses, and he said, Is there not Aaron thy brother the Levite? I know that he can speak well. And also, behold, he cometh forth to meet thee: and when he seeth thee, he will be glad in his heart. 15 And thou shalt speak unto him, and put the words in his mouth: and I will be with thy mouth, and with his mouth, and will teach you what ye shall do. 16 And he shall be thy spokesman unto the people; and it shall come to pass, that he shall be to thee a mouth, and thou shalt be to him as God. 17 And thou shalt take in thy hand this rod, wherewith thou shalt do the signs.
