Moses and the Exodus From Egypt

The narrative opens with a new king who does not know Joseph, a policy of forced labour that fails to reduce the numbers of the Israelites, midwives who defy an order to kill the boys, and a mother who hides her son for three months and then places him in a pitched basket among the reeds of the river. He is drawn out by the daughter of Pharaoh, nursed by his own mother for a fee, and raised in the household that had ordered his death. As a grown man he kills an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, discovers the next day that the act is known, and flees to Midian, where he marries and keeps sheep. The call comes at a bush that burns without being consumed, where he raises objection after objection, is given a name for God that is a form of the verb to be, and is finally given his brother Aaron as a mouthpiece.

The confrontation with Pharaoh runs through ten plagues, each answered by a refusal that the text describes sometimes as Pharaoh hardening his own heart and sometimes as God hardening it, a doubling that has occupied theologians ever since. The final plague is met by a meal eaten in haste with blood on the doorposts, and the departure is by night. The pursuit ends at the sea, which divides for the Israelites and closes over the chariots. The song sung on the far shore is one of the oldest passages of Hebrew poetry preserved in the Bible.

Three months out, the people camp before a mountain that smokes and shakes, and the covenant is given there with commandments spoken to the whole assembly and a long body of law given to Moses alone. The episode that follows is the calf: while he is on the mountain the people ask Aaron for gods to go before them, gold is collected, an image is cast, and Moses comes down, breaks the tablets, and destroys it. The remaining forty years are a sequence of complaints, rebellions and provisions of food and water, and they end with the leader shown the land from the top of a mountain and dying outside it, buried in a valley in a grave that no one knows.

The Qur'an names Musa more often than any other prophet and returns to the confrontation with Pharaoh repeatedly. Its distinctive scenes include the contest with the court magicians, whose ropes and staffs appear to move until they are swallowed, at which the magicians prostrate and declare belief in the Lord of Musa and Harun and are threatened by Pharaoh with mutilation and crucifixion for it; the Qur'an makes their refusal to recant one of its clearest statements about faith under duress. Pharaoh drowns declaring belief at the last moment and is told it is too late, and the tradition holds that his body was preserved as a sign. The calf is attributed not to Harun, who is defended in the text, but to a figure called the Samiri, and the account of what the Israelites received at the mountain is told with the mountain itself raised above them.