Moses – A Man Apart
Moses’ story is told in the Book of Exodus, but it starts in Genesis with the story of Abraham and his family with whom God makes a covenant. Generations later Moses draws the extended family together in the form of a nation with a structure and code of law, given to him on Mount Sinai.
Some contend God is the Exodus hero, and that point is certainly valid, but in human terms, Moses takes center stage throughout the whole Pentateuch.
Moses was a rather solitary leader, one with his people but set apart, even in his childhood and early adulthood. Set apart also in that he married an alien wife—Midianite or Ethiopian. Even his physical characteristics—a speech defect—set him apart from others.
Moses also has an unusual death. God says he must die alone on a mountaintop outside the Promised Land. Who was Moses? We might say he was a man, a son of Abraham, who led the people but was not typical of them.
The introduction of Moses in the first chapters of Exodus marks a new, second beginning in the Bible’s account of the history of Israel. The first being in the Book of Genesis with Abraham and the patriarchs that followed him. There the focus was on Israel as a family bound in covenant relationship to its God. Moses’ beginning marks the extension of Israel from family to nation, though a nation still with a strong sense of kinship. Here the emphasis is on the re-presentation of the covenant as a code of law that gives the nation its structure, without which it cannot survive.
Moses comes to us as a strange and difficult person. Running throughout the narrative of Exodus, and of the Pentateuch as a whole, is the depiction of a unique individual: one with little or no precedent, solitary, not easily approachable, set apart from the very community he is born to lead.
This set-apart quality emerges in a number of ways. For one thing, Moses’ origins may be in the community of Israel, yet they are not of it. The text of Exodus 2:1-2 assigns him a sketchy genealogy within the family of Israel, perhaps because it has to recognize that he was adopted into the court of Pharaoh, given his name by Pharaoh’s daughter, and raised as Egyptian royalty. Exodus 6:14-27 shows the complete genealogy of Aaron and Moses from Levi.
In reality, Moses’ true roots were as an Egyptian who only subsequently took on the cause of the Israelite slaves as his own.
Further, his wife, Zipporah, is not from Israel, but from the Midianites of the region of Sinai (Exodus 2:15–22), and her alien status 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). (Incidentally, Aaron and Miriam calling her “Ethiopian” (King James Version – “Cushite” in the New International Version) has the effect of making her even stranger to an Israelite since Ethiopia (the land of Cush) is a country much farther away than Midian.).
Additionally, the son Moses has with Zipporah is named Gershom, to memorialize Moses as outsider (Exodus 2:22). Gershom has as well a curious genealogical niche. For while he has descendants, Judges 18:30-31 does not indicate Moses as his father (instead Manasseh in the KJV – although other interpretations indicate Moses – NIV)). Indeed, we learn that Gershom’s descendants were priests to an idolatrous cult in the Israelite tribe of Dan.
As for the character of Moses’ leadership, here too there is difference. He holds a traditional title in Israel, that of prophet—a title first given to Abraham (Genesis 20)—but he is unlike Abraham and the others. Deuteronomy 34:10 and Numbers 12:6-8 explain why he is different. To be sure, in another encounter, Moses is not allowed to see God’s face, only His back (Exodus 33:20–23). That encounter leaves Moses with a supernatural, divine glow, which once more sets him apart (Exodus 34:30).
Finally, there is the matter of Moses’ death, at the end of the Pentateuch in Deuteronomy 34. “You shall not cross over there,” God decrees as Moses gazes across the Jordan. Rather, Moses dies in Moab (an unfriendly country to Israel) on Mt. Nebo – a strange and solitary death for a strangely solitary man. The portrayal of Moses as distant and unapproachable, as the only biblical leader to see God “face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10), presents Moses as representative of the Israelites – a people set apart. At the same time, it encourages readers to concentrate more on the law he delivered from God than on the life he lived.
Scripture addresses the reason for Moses’ death on Mt. Nebo, but leaves us to wonder why the penalty was so severe (Numbers 20:6-13; 27:12-14; Deuteronomy 3:26; 4:21; 32:50-52). All of this serves to underscore what an extraordinary fate Moses was given, and how well it echoes the equally strange picture of his origins in, but not of, Israel.
Who, then, is Moses? Despite his complex portrayal, he is the appointed one who leads Israel to “serve God on this mountain (Sinai)” (Exodus 3:12), and so to receive the Law for their lives.
The Bible indeed presents Moses as a man apart – apart not only from the people he leads and from the land to which he leads 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. A unique and towering example of faith.