Moses

Moses is credited by tradition with the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and the attribution is one of the oldest and most thoroughly examined problems in biblical scholarship.

The internal difficulties are visible without any theory. Deuteronomy narrates Moses' death and burial and adds that no one knows his grave to this day, which is an odd thing for him to write. The books contain two creation accounts with different sequences and different names for God, two interleaved flood narratives with different numbers of animals and different durations, and repeated doublets where the same event happens twice in different words. Laws contradict one another on where sacrifice may be offered and on the treatment of slaves.

The classical analysis, given its influential form by Julius Wellhausen in 1878, distributed the material among four sources, conventionally J, E, D and P, composed at different periods and combined by editors, with the priestly material late and the whole assembled after the exile. The four-source model has since been heavily criticised and substantially revised; there is no current consensus replacing it, and European and North American scholarship have diverged. What is not in dispute among critical scholars is that the Torah is composite, that it reached its form long after the period it describes, and that Mosaic authorship is a traditional ascription rather than a historical claim.

Traditional Judaism, and some conservative Christian scholarship, hold to Mosaic authorship or to a substantial Mosaic core. That position exists and should be named rather than ignored.

Whether an exodus happened is a separate question from who wrote about it, and the evidence is thin in a specific and instructive way.

No Egyptian record mentions Israelite slaves, a departure, plagues, or a drowned army, though Egyptian royal inscriptions do not generally record defeats, so silence carries limited weight. The Merneptah stele of about 1207 BCE names Israel as a people in Canaan, which is the earliest external mention of the name and puts an entity called Israel in the land by that date. Archaeological survey of the Sinai has found no trace of a large population moving through it or camping for a generation, and the sites the narrative names as occupied at the time of the conquest were, in several cases, unoccupied then.

The account of Israelite origins that now commands the widest support is that the early Israelites emerged largely from within Canaan, from highland settlements that appear in the archaeological record from around 1200 BCE and are distinguishable from lowland Canaanite sites mainly by the absence of pig bones and by pottery of local descent. On that model the exodus narrative is a foundation story rather than a report.

A minority of scholars argue that a smaller group did come out of Egypt and that its story was adopted by the wider population. Points in its favour: Moses, Hophni, Phinehas and Merari are Egyptian names, not Hebrew ones, and no one invents an origin story about having been slaves.

The figure and the event are contested. Saying so is not the same as saying either is disproved.

Within Judaism Moses is Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher, and the honorific states the claim: he is not primarily a miracle-worker or a liberator but the one through whom the Law was given.

The tradition holds that at Sinai he received the Torah, in the rabbinic understanding, both the written text and an accompanying oral teaching transmitted alongside it, which the Mishnah's tractate Avot opens by tracing from Moses at Sinai down through an unbroken chain of teachers. The 613 commandments (taryag mitzvot) that later tradition counts in the Torah are all referred to this event. The Hebrew Bible itself sets him apart: Deuteronomy closes by saying that there has not since arisen in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.

Maimonides, in the twelfth century, made this uniqueness an article of faith, the seventh of his thirteen, holding that Mosaic prophecy differed in kind, not merely degree, from all other prophecy. This remains the mainstream position, and it is why the tradition can revere later prophets without ever ranking them beside him.

The Bible is also careful to keep him human. He is described as the most humble of men; he argues with God; he strikes the rock in anger, and for that is refused entry to the land he has spent forty years approaching. He sees it from Mount Nebo and dies outside it, his grave unknown. A tradition this invested in a founder rarely denies him the ending, and this one does.

Moses is the rare figure the three Abrahamic traditions all hold as central, and each reads him toward its own concerns.

In Christianity he is the giver of the Law that the New Testament sets in a relation, of fulfilment, of contrast, or of both, depending on the writer, to Jesus. Matthew shapes Jesus as a new Moses, delivering teaching from a mountain; the Gospels place Moses beside Elijah at the Transfiguration, representing the Law and the Prophets; and Paul argues at length about what the Law can and cannot do.

In Islam he is Musa, and he is named in the Quran more often than any other prophet. The Quranic Musa confronts Pharaoh, receives revelation at the burning bush, is given the Tawrat (the scripture Islam associates with him), and leads his people out of Egypt, a narrative broadly parallel to the biblical one but told for its own purpose, as a sign of God's deliverance and of Pharaoh's arrogance. One striking episode has no biblical parallel: in Sura 18 Musa journeys with an unnamed servant of God, traditionally identified as al-Khidr, whose baffling acts teach him the limits of human understanding.

That the same prophet anchors the law of Judaism, prefigures the teacher of Christianity, and is the most-mentioned messenger of Islam is a fact about the shared descent of the three, and a reminder that holding a figure in common has never meant reading him the same way.