Moses: A Human Life Reading Guide

READING GUIDE

By Alison L. Joseph, PhD

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CONTENTS

Timeline

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Discussion Questions

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Further Reading

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Moses in Art

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About Jewish Lives

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TIMELINE Moses’ biography is primarily found in the book of Exodus, the second book of the Torah. The following is an outline of the major events in the life of Moses with a citation of where they can be found in the Bible.

At the time of Moses’ birth, the nameless Pharaoh is threatened by the population boom of the Israelites, worried that in the event of war, the Israelites would join their enemies and fight against Egypt (Exodus 1:9–10). The Pharaoh enslaves the Israelites, but they continue to prosper and proliferate.

As an additional measure, the Pharaoh decrees that when an Israelite boy is born, he should be killed (Exodus 1:15–22). Moses is born to a Levite man and woman (his parents are not named until Exodus 6:20, Amram and Yocheved), and his mother hides him for three months. When she could no longer hide him, she puts him into a basket and floats him down the river, while his sister Miriam looks on. This story has parallels in birth legends of other heroes, such as Sargon of Akkad, the Egyptian god Horus, and Roman Remus and Romulus.

Moses is found by the daughter of the Pharaoh, who knowing he must be an Israelite, raises him in the palace (Exodus 2:1–10).

The narrative fast forwards through the entire childhood of Moses and continues when he is a grown man. He seems to recognize that he is one of the Israelites, and on one occasion when he sees an Egyptian beating an Israelite slave, he kills the Egyptian and hides the body (Exodus 2:11). When someone says that he witnessed the murder, Moses flees to Midian, a region in northwest Arabia (Exodus 2:12–16).

Moses sits down at a well and meets the seven daughters of the priest of Midian. In a scene reminiscent of other meetings at the well of young men and women from Genesis (Rebecca and Abraham’s servant, Genesis 24:1–67; Jacob and Rachel, Genesis 29:1–35), Moses defends the daughters against local shepherds, allowing them to water their flocks. Moses marries Zipporah, one of the priest’s daughters (Exodus 2:16–22).

Moses stays in Midian and becomes a shepherd, tending the flock of his father-in-law. One day, an angel of God appears to Moses from a burning bush. God was revealed to Moses, calling out to him, and Moses answers, “Here I am” (Exodus 3:1–4). God is revealed as the God of Moses’ father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God sends Moses back to Egypt to respond to the cries and suffering of the Israelites, telling Moses that he will bring them out of Egypt to a land of milk and honey (Exodus 3:5–10).

Moses is tentative, asking, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites from Egypt?” Moses, like many prophets, is hesitant to accept this challenging task, asking who he would say sent him, protesting that he is no one special, concerned that no one will listen to him, and that he is slow of speech. God reassures him that He will be with him, demonstrating for him signs he can produce with his staff, and insisting that his brother Aaron will go with him to speak for him (Exodus 3:13–15; 4:1–17).

Moses takes his family and returns to Egypt to speak to the Pharaoh and free the Israelites (Exodus 4:18–22). God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and he refuses. Moses is unsuccessful and the Pharaoh increases the burden on the Israelite slaves (Exodus 5:6–18). The people doubt Moses and question why he even came back, only to make their lives more difficult (Exodus 5:19–23).

Eventually, after ten plagues, well-known from the Passover story, Pharaoh lets the Israelites go, and Moses leads them out of Egypt. The rest of Moses’ life, as narrated in the books of Exodus through Deuteronomy, is filled with difficulties of leading the people for forty years in the wilderness, the challenges of conveying the word of God, managing the people and their many complaints and missteps.

In one false move at Meribah, while the Israelites cry out for water, God tells Moses to speak to the rock to bring water out of it. Instead, he hits the rock, and God punishes him for his lack of trust. He will not cross into the land of Israel (Numbers 20). Ultimately, Moses dies looking into the Promised Land, but forbidden to enter (Deuteronomy 34).

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS TO OPEN THE CONVERSATION, BEGIN BY ASKING: 1. Zornberg includes an epigraph from Kafka’s Diaries, stating that “Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life.” How does this presentation of the life of Moses as “a human life” set the stage for the rest of Zornberg’s discussion? What do you think Kafka meant by “a human life”?

2. Moses has been a larger than life figure, in art, literature, law, and pop culture. Zornberg’s Moses is very human. Can you empathize with this approach? Are you compelled by “the pathos of Moses’ plight” (1) as Zornberg is?

CHAPTER 1—IDENTITIES 1. How does the question of “Who am I?” (15) permeate through the life of Moses and Zornberg’s depiction of his complex identities? What are those identities?

2. What are the roles that knowing and not knowing play in the Moses story? The biblical story begins with a pharaoh “who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8), Moses seems to always have known he was Israelite, does he know his birth mother is his wet nurse, etc.?

3. Is Moses aware of his own complex identities? Which ones does he accept and embody and which does he try to reject?

CHAPTER 2—THE MURMURING DEEP 1. If the question in chapter 1 is “Who am I?”, in chapter 2, Zornberg focuses on the question of “Lamah— Why?” (49). To whom and for what does Moses ask, “Why?” 2. Zornberg cites the Mei HaShiloach (57), the work of Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbic (early 19th century), in considering the human experience of the Other. How is Moses simultaneously the Other and the Insider?

How does he interact with the Israelites? The Egyptians? God? His brother and sister? Other divine beings (i.e., angels)?

3. From the beginning, Moses protests that he is slow of speech (Exodus 4:10), and worries that the people won’t listen to him. Whose voice does he speak with? His own? God’s? Does his brother Aaron speak for him? Does he speak for the people? For God? For himself?

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS CHAPTER 3—MOSES VEILED AND UNVEILED 1. Zornberg highlights the “practice of veiling and revealing” in this chapter. Is Moses more veiled or unveiled?

How? Is his message/God’s word veiled or unveiled? Does this make Moses of or distinct from the people?

2. What is the role of Moses, teacher, charismatic leader, prophet, over the people? How do they relate to him? With reverence, adoration? Worshipful? Fearful?

3. It is well-known that idolatry is forbidden and plays a role in the exodus story—the Ten Commandments, the gold calf incident—but is Moses set up as icon? Do the people relate to his humanity? Does he exist in the imagination of the people as a man or a symbol?

CHAPTER 4—MOSES IN THE FAMILY: MIRRORS AND FOILS 1. What is the role of women in the Moses narrative—from his three “mothers” (107–8), Yocheved, Miriam, and the daughter of Pharaoh—to the midwives who save the Israelite baby boys to his wife Zipporah?

2. How does Moses relate to his brother Aaron and sister Miriam? How do they function in the story? What do their relationships represent? Miriam and Aaron seem to have very human reactions to their relationship, sibling rivalry, jealousy, etc. Zornberg asks, “How are we to imagine Moses’ personal reaction to the family drama of love and envy in which he is involved? Is he impervious to the question of his difference? Do his siblings’ grievances affect him?” (125).

3. Much of the biblical book of Numbers is focused on rebellions of the Israelites against Moses and God. The second half of this chapter is focused on the rebellion led by priest and Moses’ cousin, Korah. The midrashim that Zornberg presents are mostly favorable towards Moses, but in what ways does the Korah story highlight both the positive and negative characteristics of Moses and his leadership? Why does Zornberg choose to highlight this episode?

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS CHAPTER 5—“MOSES WROTE HIS OWN BOOK” 1. The biblical book of Deuteronomy contains a series of speeches by Moses recounting the entire history of the Israelites and his role in it. Really for the first time, Moses shares his perspective, speaking in the first person (147). While throughout his life, Moses is known for his not speaking, what is the role of speech as Zornberg discusses it in this final chapter? What is the significance of Moses’ “spoken autobiography” (148)?

2. Why is Moses (re)telling this story? Are the people listening? Throughout the narrative, they are known to have “deaf ears” (Numbers 16:5–14; 152).

3. In this chapter, Zornberg describes the early life of the biblical narrative, much of it for the first time (153–5).

What is gained by only presenting the biblical story late in her book?

4. What is the symbolism of the tablets of the first Ten Commandments? Are they better off smashed?

Zornberg states that it is only their smashing that initiates the Oral Torah (161).

5. What is the role of faces in the Moses story? He meets God face-to-face, he sets his face, etc. “In order to advocate for Israel, Moses unceremoniously puts on a hostile face, in order to stand against God’s face of strict justice” (167). What are the faces that Moses wears? How do we get a sense of Moses’ interiority?

6. Zornberg closes with the same Kafka quotation from the epigraph. She sides with Kafka that the humanity of Moses’ life is its “incompleteness” (192)? Do you agree?

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FURTHER READING The story of Moses is well-known, beginning with the biblical books of Exodus,

Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

An essay (1904) by the early Zionist Ahad Ha-’am describes the “Ideal Moses,” an entirely new and different entity from the one in the Bible. The Ideal Moses is more than just “that guy,” but instead he is larger than life and at the same time, human, similar to Zornberg’s portrait of Moses. Ahad Ha-’am (Asher Ginzberg), “Moses,” in Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am, trans. Leon Simon (New York; Philadelphia: Meridian Books; The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), 306–29.

Over the past 2,500 plus years, there have been many biographies of Moses. He is held up as the model for all prophets (Deuteronomy 18:15–22; 34:10). He is acclaimed by the rabbis as the greatest of all time, including the story of when he visits the classroom of the great Rabbi Akiba (1st century CE) from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Menahot, page 29b.

Journalist Jonathan Kirsch wrote an excellent and very readable biography, Moses: A Life (Ballantine Books: New York, 1998).

For a more academic approach to Moses and the sources that make up the biblical text, see John Van Seters, The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus–Numbers (Westminster John Knox Press, 1994).

The portrait of Moses has been powerful in popular culture, in particular from Cecil B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), which frequently informs the average American’s idea of the person of Moses.

Also well-known, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), reconsiders the origin of Moses, claiming that he is a native Egyptian who brought monotheism from his native country and bestows it onto the Israelites.

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MOSES IN ART Moses has been the subject of countless visual representations. The image on the cover of Moses: A Human Life is by the Dutch Jewish painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. It shows Moses triumphant, holding the tablets of the covenant, the Ten Commandments, above his head.

Other noteworthy depictions include Michelangelo’s sculpture (1513–15) “Moses,” installed outside the San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, Italy https://www.wikiart.org/en/michelangelo/ moses-1515. He is depicted with horns of light emerging from his head, according to common interpretation of the biblical text, that after spending so many days with God on the mountain, receiving the words of the covenant, his face glowed like horns of light, emerging from his head (Exodus 34:29, 30, 35). Rembrandt’s Moses also has these horns, but they are somewhat obscured by the aloft tablets.

Marc Chagall completed an Exodus series (1952–66) of nineteen lithographs depicting various events of the Moses narrative. Even in those scenes that occur before the revelation at Sinai, Moses is depicted with the horns of light. https:// www.wikiart.org/en/marc-chagall/all-works#!#filterName:Series_the- story-ofthe-exodus-1966,resultType:masonry

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