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:(See also the Exodus)
Moses or Móshe
(מֹשֶׁה,
Standard Hebrew Móše, Tiberian Hebrew
Mōšeh, Arabic language|Arabic
موسى Musa), son of Amram
and his wife, Jochebed, a Levite. Legendary
Hebrews|Hebrew liberator, leader, lawgiver,
prophet, and historian. 

According to the Tanakh|Hebrew Bible, Moses led
the Israelites out of Egypt, and received the
Torah of Judaism from God on Mount Sinai. The
Torah contains the life story of Moses and his
people until his death at the age of 120 years.

Moses's greatest legacy was probably expounding
the doctrine of monotheism, which was not widely
accepted at the time, codifying it in Jewish
religion with the 1st Ten
Commandments|Commandment, and punishing
polytheism|polytheists. He is revered as a prophet
in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The birth of Moses occurred at a time when the
Egyptian had commanded that all male children born
to Hebrew captives should be killed. The Torah
leaves the identity of this Pharaoh unstated, but
he is widely believed to be Ramses II; other,
earlier pharaohs have also been suggested
including a Hyksos pharaoh or one shortly after
the Hyksos had been expelled.

The daughter of Pharaoh comes to the water's edge
and finds the child. By chance the child's mother
is called as nurse, and it grew  and was brought
to Pharaoh's daughter and became her 
son.Jochebed, the wife (and paternal aunt) of the
Levite Amram, bore a son, and kept him concealed
for three months. When she could keep him hidden
no longer, rather than deliver him to be killed
she set him adrift on the Nile river in an ark of
bulrushes. The daughter of Pharaoh discovered the
baby and adopted him as her son, and named him
"Moses".

When Moses grew to manhood, he went one day to see
how his brethren, bondmen to the Egyptians, fared.
Seeing an Egyptian maltreating a Hebrew, he killed
the Egyptian and hid his body in the sand,
supposing that no one who would be disposed to
reveal the matter knew of it. The next day, seeing
two Hebrews quarreling, he endeavored to separate
them, whereupon the Hebrew who was wronging his
brother taunted Moses with slaying the Egyptian.
Moses soon discovered from a higher source that
the affair was known, and that Pharaoh was likely
to put him to death for it; he therefore made his
escape to the Sinai peninsula and settled with
Hobab, or Jethro, priest of Midian, whose daughter
Zipporah he in due time married. There he
sojourned forty years, following the occupation of
a shepherd, during which time his son Gershom was
born. 
 
One day, as Moses led his flock to Mount Horeb, he
saw a burning bush without being consumed. When he
turned aside to look more closely at the marvel,
God spoke to him from the bush revealing his
name,to Moses.

In the time of Emperor Constantine, Mount Horeb
was identified with Mount Sinai but most scholars
think it was located much farther north.

God also commissioned him to go to Egypt and
deliver his brethren from their bondage. He then
returned to Egypt .Moses was met on his arrival in
Egypt by his elder brother,Aaron, and gained a
hearing with his oppressed brethren.It was a more
difficult matter, however, to persuade Pharaoh to
let the Hebrews depart. This was not accomplished
until God sent ten plagues upon the Egyptians.
These plagues culminated in the slaying of the
Egyptian first-born whereupon such terror seized
the Egyptians that they ordered the Hebrews to
leave.

The long procession moved slowly, and found it
necessary to encamp three times before passing the
Egyptian frontier, some believe at the Great
Bitter Lake Lake while others propose as far south
as the northern tip of the Red Sea (a common
mistranslation of the Hebrew Yam Suf, meaning Sea
of Reeds). Meanwhile Pharaoh had a change of heart
and was in pursuit of them with a large army.Shut
in between this army and the Red Sea, the
Israelites despaired, but God divided the waters
of the sea so that they passed safely across on
dry ground. When the Egyptians attempted to
follow, God permitted the waters to return upon
them and drown them.

It is probable that the Pharaoh did not have a
change of heart because the Hebrews only asked to
be allowed to worship their God on a religious
pilgrimage in the desert. It took a while for the
Pharaoh to let them do this but he pursued them
not actually because he wanted them back due to a
change of heart (as is widely believed) but
because they violated the agreement to return to
Egypt because they were lost.

As a result of these the Tabernacle, according to
the last chapters of Exodus, was constructed, the
priestly law ordained, the plan of encampment
arranged both for the Levites and the non-priestly
tribes and the Tabernacle consecrated.

==Moses in Jewish thought==
There is a wealth of stories and additional
information about Moses in the Jewish genre of
rabbinical exegesis known as Midrash, as well as
in the primary works of the Jewish oral law, the
Mishnah and the Talmud.

==Moses in Christian thought==
For Christianity|Christians, Moses -- mentioned
more often in the New Testament than any other Old
Testament figure -- is often a symbol of the
contrast between traditional Judaism and the
teachings of Jesus. New Testament writers often
made comparison of Jesus' words and deeds with
Moses' in order to explain Jesus' mission. In the
book of Acts of the Apostles|Acts, for example,
the rejection of Moses by the Jews when they
worshipped the golden calf is likened to the
rejection of Jesus, also by the Jews. 

Moses also figures into several of Jesus'
messages. When he met the Pharisee Nicodemus at
night in the third chapter of Gospel of John|John,
he compares Moses' lifting up of the bronze
serpent in the wilderness, which any Israelite
could look upon and be healed, to his own lifting
up (by his death and resurrection) for the people
to look upon and be healed. In the sixth chapter,
Jesus responds to the people's claim that Moses
provided them manna in the wilderness by saying
that it was not Moses, but God, who provided.
Calling himself the "bread of life", Jesus states
that he is now provided to feed God's people.

Moses is also regarded as a symbol of the law, and
so he is presented in all three Gospel accounts of
the Transfiguration in Gospel of Matthew|Matthew
17, Gospel of Mark|Mark 9, and Gospel of Luke|Luke
9, respectively.

==Moses in Islamic thought==
In the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, the life of
Moses is narrated and recounted more than any
other prophet recognized in Islam. Although the
Qur'an reiterates what was available and currently
present in Jewish scripture, slight differences
can be found. In the Quran, Moses is known as
Musa, the Arabic language|Arabic name for the
Biblical character; a separate entry exists on the
Islamic teachings about Musa. See Musa (prophet).

== Textual origin of the Torah ==
It has been traditionally assumed that Moses
received from God and subsequently transcribed
all, or almost all, of the Torah, and this is
still the view of much of Christianity and most of
Orthodox Judaism. However, advances in textual
criticism have convinced many Bible scholars and
historians that this work, in the form we know it
today, was edited together from several earlier
sources. This idea is discussed in the entry on
the documentary hypothesis.  Others, especially
Biblical literalists, still hold the traditional
viewpoint that it is authored by Moses.

==Moses in history==
Skeptical historians, generally called Biblical
minimalism|"Biblical minimalists", suggest that
Moses never actually existed as a historical
figure, and that the Exodus is mythical. On the
other hand, historical records are so fragmentary
that extra-biblical records of Moses may have been
long lost. For example, if the Exodus occurred
during the end of the Hyksos era in Egypt as some
scholars believe (16th century BC) then those
Hyksos records of Moses would have been
deliberately destroyed by victorious Egyptians as
they drove the Hyksos out of Egypt. 

Known extra-biblical references to Moses date from
many centuries after his supposed lifetime.
Whether or not they are reliant on Jewish
tradition or also have access to additional
sources is unknown. Polyhistor, Josephus, Philo,
and Manetho refer to him, as do others. Also, of
course, there are the above-mentioned stories in
the Mishna and Qur'an. See the article on The
Bible and history. In the 3rd century BC, Manetho,
a Hellenistic Egyptian chronicler and priest,
alleged that Moses was not a Jew, but an Egyptian
renegade priest, and portrayed the Exodus as the
expulsion of a leper colony.

Even if Moses is accepted as a historical figure,
various aspects of the Biblical tale can be
re-interpreted. Manetho's claim that Moses was an
Egyptian is quite plausible. It has been suggested
that he may have been an Egyptian nobleman or
prince influenced by the religion of Aten (see
Freud's theory below), or simply sympathetic to
Hebrew culture. Moses is an Egyptian name meaning
"son" and was often used in pharaohs' names (as in
Tut-moses). The Hebrews might have fabricated the
"bulrushes" story along the lines of the tales of
Sargon of Akkad (Mesopotamian) or Oedipus
(Greece|Greek) to legitimize his position. On the
other hand, infants were sometimes abandoned by
the lower classes in ancient times, and "Moshe" is
a Hebrew word (meaning "one who draws water").

Dating the Exodus has also proved challenging.
Views include:
*it occurred around the end of the Hyksos era, as
expressed above;
*it occurred about 1420s BC|1420 BC, since records
exist of "Habiru" invasions of Canaan forty years
later - this theory fits well the modern idea that
the historical persona of Moses was the early 15th
century BC Crown Prince of Egypt called Ramose,
who also disappeared from Egyptian records around
the time of Queen Hatshepsut's death;
*or it occurred during the 13th century BC, as the
pharaoh during most of that time, Rameses II, is
commonly considered to be a pharaoh with whom
Moses squabbled - either as the 'Pharaoh of the
Exodus' himself, or the preceding 'Pharoah of the
Oppression' who is said to have commissioned the
Hebrews to "(build) for Pharaoh treasure cities,
Pithom and Raamses."  These cities are known to
have been built under both Seti I and Rameses II,
possibly making his successor Merneptah 'Pharaoh
of the Exodus.' This is considered plausible by
those who view the famed stele of Merneptah's 5th
year (ca. 1208 BC), claiming that "Israel is
wasted, bare of seed", as propaganda covering up
his own loss of an army in the sea.
*A more recent and controversial view places Moses
as a noble in the court of the Pharaoh Akhenaten
(See below). Many scholars from Sigmund Freud to
Joseph Campbell suggest that Moses may have fled
Egypt after Akhenaten's death (ca. 1358 BC) when
much of the pharaoh's monotheistic reforms were
being violently reversed. The principal ideas
behind this theory are: the monotheistic religion
of Akhenaten being a possible predecessor to
Moses'  monotheism, and a contemporaneous
collection of "Amarna Letters" written by nobles
to Akhenaten (Amarna was Akhenaten's capital city)
which describe raiding bands of "Habiru" attacking
the Egyptian territories in Mesopotamia.
(Transformations of Myth Through Time, Joseph
Campbell, p. 87-90, Harper & Row)

Finally, there is the challenge of interpreting
the many miracles in the Moses story. Most of them
are simply dismissed by scholars as legends, but
some can be explained. For example, some of the
plagues strongly resemble exaggerated versions of
actual pestilences common in the ancient world
(see Ten plagues|The Ten Plagues), the famous Red
Sea crossing may have been a marsh (the "Reed
Sea") through which the Egyptian chariots could
not penetrate, the manna which God bestowed on the
hungry Israelites may have been the secretion of
the Amaranthaceae|hammada shrub, and the
swallowing of Korah (Numbers 16) could have been
an earthquake.

There is also a psychoanalysis|psychoanalytical
interpretation of Moses' life, put forward by
Sigmund Freud in his last book, Moses and
Monotheism, in 1937. Freud postulated that Moses
was an Egyptian nobleman who adhered to the
monotheism of Akhenaten. Freud also believed that
Moses was murdered in the wilderness, producing a
collective sense of patricidal guilt which has
been at the heart of Judaism ever since. "Judaism
had been a religion of the father, Christianity
became a religion of the son," he wrote. A recent
alternative suggestion resulting from interpreting
Biblical and Egyptian history (by Egyptologist
Ahmed Osman) proposes that Moses and Akhenaten are
the same person (Moses and Akhenaten, Dec. 2002).
Opponents of this view point to the fact that the
religion of the Torah seems very different to
Atenism in everything except the central feature
of devotion to a single god.

Several professors of archaeology claim that many
stories in the Old Testament, including important
chronicles about Moses, Solomon, and others, were
actually made up for the first time by scribes
hired by King Josiah (7th century BC) in order to
rationalize monotheistic belief in Yahweh; and
that no surviving written records from Egypt,
Assyria, etc., refer to the stories of the Bible
or its main characters before 650 BC. Such claims
are detailed in Who Were the Early Israelites? by
William G. Dever (William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Co., Grand Rapids, MI, 2003). Another such book by
Neil A. Silberman and colleagues is The Bible
Unearthed (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2001).

Traditionalists point out that many of the details
of the Pentateuch are consistent with the time
period, such as the price of a slave (30 shekels
as opposed to around 60 at the time of the
Babylonian captivity), the practice of blood
covenants and the discovery of what appear to be
chariot wheels on the bottom of the Red Sea.
Skeptics view most of these as inconclusive or
otherwise consequential.

It is important to note that to date there is no
historical mention outside the Bible and ancient
historians of the enslavement of Jews by Egypt or
of their rescue in any capacity by any person.
There is no archaeological evidence that any group
of people, much less about 600,000 people,
wandered a desert for 40 years. Biblical purists
chalk this up to the fact that Egypt eliminated
any type of failures from their history and did
not make records of such events, and surely the
loss of a group of slaves would have been viewed
as a failure.

==Ethical dilemmas==
If the Bible gives an accurate description of
Moses' views, then by "modern standards" some of
his commands might amount to calls for murder, war
crimes or slavery. For instance, according to
Numbers 31:15-18, he called for the massacre of
boys and the enslavement of female children to
Israelite veterans of the Midian war ("kill every
male among the little ones, and kill every woman
that hath known man by lying with him. But all the
little girls among the women, that have not known
a man by lying with him, keep alive for
yourselves"). It is important to note, however,
that such ethical dilemmas can be cited without an
adequate understanding of the historical context.
In contrast, believers in the accuracy of the
Bible can use assumptions to discourage
exploration. But religion's opponents can also
discourage further exploration by making debatable
assumptions about a text, classifying the intent
of the text as immoral, and thereby dismissing the
text as unreliable. In the above example some
readers may infer an implied equality between
slavery under Mosaic law and "slavery" as
understood in the New World. An apparent ethical
contradiction should not be casually dismissed,
but neither should it be casually assumed.

For both Jews and Christians, the five books of
Moses are holy books revealed by God, and the
message within them is eternal. For Unitarian
Universalists, and other liberal movements, it is
regarded as a sacred text, but not as a divinely
revealed work. Adherents of all these faiths
understand the serious ethical dilemmas that arise
when reading certain parts of the Bible. As such,
Jews and Christians have developed a number of
responses to understanding such texts. There are
two basic positions that one can assume when
approaching such texts, both of which offer a
variety of responses.

One using the traditional approach was originally
called a fundamentalist. The fundamentalist term
has evolved to reflect other meanings however,
including that of "a person with an unthinking
devotion to an agenda without regard to reason."
The traditional approach assumes that Biblical
characters, the situations described, and the
words said took place as the Bible says. The Bible
is believed to be divinely revealed truth, unique
among historical texts. This view does not exempt
humans from a carefully reasoned examination of
the scriptures, however, and in fact requires it.
Translation, historical context and assumptions,
and the definition and applicability of terms used
in the original text not only affect what the
Bible "says," they define it. 

A fundamentalist may believe there is one valid
source (organization, person, etc.) for the
interpretation of the "truths" of the Bible. The
traditional Christian view implies however that a
"literal interpretation of the Bible" is an
oxymoron. The important characteristic of the
traditional Christian view comes from the Bible
itself--that scripture is useful in the context of
personal applicability
(http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?passage=
2TIM+3:16-17&language=english&version=NIV&showfn=o
n&showxref=on 2 Timothy 3:16-17). Thus, blind
adherence to an organization's or one's own static
interpretation is rejected in this view, as
devotion to the "living" God prohibits devotion to
a static ideology. The traditional Christian view
implies that the Bible is unique among texts in
its truthful nature (lack of falsehood), while
simultaneously implying that truth is meaningful
only in living application through a personal
relationship to God - attempting to adhere to a
static set of moral laws is believed to lead to
death (see, ie,
http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?passage=R
OM+7&language=english&version=NIV&showfn=on&showxr
ef=on Romans 7). The traditional Christian
believes one arrives at this view by "answering
the call of God," who speaks to all mankind
through revelation, where revelation is never
contradictory and consists of both the Bible and
experience gained through life. When faced with an
ethical dilemma in Moses's writings, a traditional
Christian might employ critical examination of
available historical context, critical examination
of how the writing should be translated, and
critical examination of his or her understanding
of God's nature to determine what the passage
means, all the while believing the Bible contains
no falsehood. For an example of this process
applied to the Midian war, see this exploration of
Moses's writing from a traditional Christian point
of view:
http://www.rationalchristianity.net/numbers31.html
Moses and the Midianites. Moses, in the
traditional Christian view, was considered a good
man not because of his ethics, but because of his
trust in God. In this view, only Jesus was a good
man for what he did, the rest of mankind
(including Moses and his contemporaries) can only
become good by believing and trusting God.
Traditional Christianity believes that one who
honestly looks for God will find God, as this is
stated in the Bible, and that honest, rational
exploration yields the Bible as the most rational
explanation for human experience.

Liberal Christianity|Liberal Christian
denominations and congregations reject this view.
They hold that the texts of the Bible were edited
together from a number of sources over a long
period of time, and the authorship and timing of
the Torah is debated. In this view, the situations
described in the Bible do not necessarily
represent divinely inspired truth but instead
represent the views of the editors of the Bible.

== The Horned Moses ==


Due to a statement towards the end of the book of
Exodus (at 34:29-35), in which Moses is depicted
as having been disfigured due to his direct
encounter with God, various traditions grew up as
to what the disfigurement was. Jonathan Kirsch, in
his book Moses: A Life, thought that, since Moses
subsequently had to wear a veil to hide it, the
disfigurement was a sort of "divine radiation
burn".

There is one longstanding early tradition that
Moses grew horn (mythology)|horns, derived from a
mistranslation of the Hebrew phrase "karnu panav"
קרנו
פניו. The root
קרן may be read as either "horn"
or "ray", as in "ray of light". "Panav"
פניו translates as "his
face". If interpreted correctly those two words
form an expression which means that he was
enlightened, and many rabbinical studies explain
that the knowledge that was revealed to him made
his face metaphorically shine with enlightenment,
and not that it suddenly sported a pair of horns.
The Septuagint properly translates the Hebrew word
קרן as
δεδοξαστ&#
945;ι, 'was glorified', but Jerome translated
it as cornuta, 'horned', and it was the latter
image that became the more popular. This tradition
survived from the first centuries AD well into the
Renaissance. Many artists, including Michelangelo
in Michelangelo's Moses|a famed sculpture,
depicted Moses with horns.

== Moses in fiction ==
Moses appears as the central character in the 1956
Cecil B. DeMille movie, The Ten Commandments (1956
movie)|The Ten Commandments. He is played by
Charlton Heston.

==See also==
*The Exodus
*Aaron
*Joshua
*Biblical figures
*List of founders of major religions
*Passage of Red Sea

==External links==
*http://www.bu.edu/mzank/STR/tr-archive/tr8/
Teaching Troubling Texts: Study Session of Textual
Reasoning at the annual meeting of the AAR 1999
*http://www.shma.com/apr01/haberman.htm "Difficult
Texts" by Bonna Devora Haberman. How do we study
difficult Jewish texts without apologizing for,
justifying, or historicizing them?
*http://www.uua.org/aboutuu/uufaq.html#bible
Unitarian Universalist approach to reading the
Bible
*http://www.harkarkom.com Prof. E.Anati:
Archaeological discoveries at Har Karkom
*http://www.thecreativeuniverse.org by Richard
Darlow, puts forward the idea that Moses was
Prince Ramose

==Further reading==
* Ahmed Osman, Moses and Akhenaten. The Secret
History of Egypt at the Time of the Exodus, 
(December 2002, Inner Traditions International,
Limited) ISBN 1591430046