Moses is someone that I don't think gets nearly enough press time in Christianity. We like to tell stories of David or Daniel or Joshua or some other Old Testament hero but Moses seems to get overlooked. More often than not, when Moses is mentioned, it is as the man who brought the Law and somehow he gets critiqued for simply doing his job.
But when you study the Bible, arguably no other character other than Christ himself had more impact both on the world of the Bible and even our world today. Many of the laws and principles that he wrote down (although he did not create them) are still used today. The 10 Commandments are still looked at as the standard of morality whether you believe in God or not (a fact I find somewhat ironic).
More than that, Moses's life was an epic drama. He seemed to go from one mountaintop experience to the next, dealing with absurd problems with even grander solutions. Elijah had Mount Carmel as his pinnacle; for Moses, that was in a day's work.
He was tasked not just with bringing Yahveh's people out of the land of slavery but then leading them to the Promised Land all the while teaching them what it meant not only to be an independent nation, but Yahveh's people.
Above all what fascinates me about Moses though is his relationship with Yahveh. It is one of the most unique in history. There seemed to be such a closeness and familiarity between the two that it was almost an informal friendship. Yahveh himself remarked as the specialness of the relationship in Numbers 12 when Yahveh tells Miriam and Aaron that unlike other prophets, he speaks with Moses "face to face."
Prophet, liberator, poet, leader, judge, warrior, shepherd; Moses was all of these things and much more. And so I am going to do a character study of him which will be posted in the next few blogs which (hopefully) won't have months in between.
It would almost be criminal if Moses wasn't born in dramatic circumstances. Everything else in his life was epic, so why not this.
The book of Genesis, which largely functions as a long introduction to the rest of the Bible, ends with Jacob (or Israel and the progenitor of the Israelites) being in Egypt which is basically under the care of his son Joseph. Exodus 1 opens up with Jacob and all of his sons, Joseph included, being dead and a new Pharaoh ruling Egypt who, the Bible says, "did not know Joseph." So naturally he enslaves the Israelites, who had apparently been breeding like rabbits in the intervening time.
We read this and immediately go, "What?" I mean, this seems to escalate rather quickly from, "Hey, come down to Egypt and live with us," to "You're all my slaves because I'm scared you might join my enemies." So perhaps a little historical background would help.
The Exodus (Israel escaping Egypt) happened roughly around the year 1446 BC, which is 480 years before Solomon completed the Temple, something that is dated from when Shishak (an Egyptian Pharaoh ironically enough) sacked Jerusalem. Admittedly there is a lot of debate over when the Exodus happened; many scholars prefer to date the Exodus to the reign of Ramses II in the 13th century BC due to other factors, but I disagree.
Why is this date important? Between the time of Joseph in the late 18th-early 17th centuries BC and the Exodus, a group of people from Canaan called the Hyksos conquered/took over northern Egypt, which is where the Israelites had settled. The Hyksos ruled up until the year 1560 or so when the Pharaoh Ahmose I kicked them out. In fact Ahmose and subsequent Pharaohs went on a rampage in Canaan, sacking just about anything they could get their hands on to ensure that the Hyksos never came back.
So look at it from the Pharaoh's point of view. He has just reunited Egypt from a bunch Semitic barbarians (in his mind) and he discovers a horde of Semitic shepherds still living in Egypt. Even though the Israelites aren't Hyksos, they are far closer to being Hyksos than Egyptian. The natural question is what if the Hyksos come back? They have potential allies sitting right here and if the Israelites join them, we're in deep trouble. Pharaoh's fear was a legitimate one.
His response to this is less so. Pharaoh's idea of population control is to literally work the Israelites to death. The Bible says that he "put Slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor and they built the Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh."
But it didn't work. Instead, the Israelites grew even more numerous so Pharaoh resorted to even more drastic measures. He commanded the Hebrew midwives, a couple of women named Shiphrah and Puah to kill every boy that is born. Naturally the midwives are horrified and don't carry out the ghastly order. Finally at his wits end, Pharaoh sends in the army with orders to get every young boy and toss him into the Nile River.
Into this mess is born a child to a family of Levi, Amram and Jochobed. Naturally they didn't want their son tossed to the crocodiles and so they tried to hide him from the soldiers, more or less successfully for three months. But soon enough they realized they couldn't keep him forever.
Drastic times call for drastic measures they say and what the family did was certainly drastic. Figuring that the child was supposed to be thrown into the Nile, they decided to follow through with that order on their own terms. The family made a reed basket, waterproofed it, put the baby inside, and tossed him into the river, praying that somewhere, someone would take pity on him.
As fate or luck or providence would have it, that is precisely what happened. The reed basket bore its precious cargo through the perils of the Nile to the place where one of the princesses of Egypt bathed. Picking it up and looking inside, she discovered, much to her shock I imagine, a baby.
Taking it as a religious sign (the Nile, like literally everything else, was considered holy) she decided to adopt the baby, naming him Moses. Actually, Moses real name was probably longer than that, as Pharaohs during that time were fond of using "Moses" as a suffix to their royal name (Ah-mose, Thut-mose I-IV, and a couple of others). Whatever his full name was, Moses became a prince of Egypt.
But this is only the beginning of our story. Moses spent his first 12 years or so living with his mother, learning about the Hebrew God El-Shaddai and his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He saw firsthand the oppression of his people. After this, Moses went to the Egyptian schools where he learned Egyptian theology, philosophy, diplomacy, strategy, reading, and writing, as well as much more. According to the book of Acts, Moses spent 40 years as the prince of Egypt, leading their armies and ruling their people.
Two things were happening simultaneously. First, Moses began to believe that it was his mission to deliver his people. He saw how they suffered and knew that it was a stroke of fate that prevented him from being where they were. To see his people suffer burned him.
The second thing was that resentment was building against him from among the Israelites. This was only natural; after all Moses was living the life of ease and luxury while they suffered horribly and all that separated them from him was luck. They saw Moses as a sellout, a traitor.
One day Moses came down to see his people. When he did, he saw an Egyptian mercilessly beating an Israelite. Anger surged through him and Moses decided that enough was enough. Making sure that no one was watching, Moses put all that military training to use and killed the man, burying his body in the sand.
Going back the next day, Moses came across two Israelites who were fighting. Trying to break up the fight, he demanded why they, brothers, were attacking each other. The stronger and more powerful of the combatants looked and Moses and retorted, "Who made you ruler over us? Are you going to kill me like you killed the Egyptian?"
Moses knew he was in deep do-do. Prince though he might be, Moses was still an Israelite which had to have put him on thin ice with Pharaoh. Killing an Egyptian would be just the excuse Pharaoh needed to get rid of this potential foreign pest. Knowing that to stay would be suicide, Moses ran and didn't stop running until he came to the land of Midian on the far side of the Sinai Peninsula.
He had to have been discouraged. He had screwed up big time, betrayed by his people and losing everything he had. But here in the desert, Moses learned that life does not stop just because things go wrong.
Sitting by the well, he saw a group of women bringing their sheep to get some water. Suddenly, a group of other shepherds appeared and tried to drive the women away. Once again Moses put his military training to use and rescued the women (without killing anyone this time, we presume).
After initially leaving him alone at the well, the girls brought Moses to meet their father, Jethro (here called Reuel for some unknown reason), who gave Moses a home, a job, and a family (he married Jethro's daughter Zipporah who gave him two sons). Maybe Moses wasn't the deliverer he had thought himself to be and maybe he wasn't the prince of Egypt anymore, but he had a life that anyone would envy: a life of peace and quiet. But the Israelites continued to suffer.
A question that I had while reading all of this, a question that surely must have come to you as well, is where is God in all of this? Repeatedly in the book of Genesis, God promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he would make their descendants into a mighty nation. Yet for a long time (we don't know how long exactly, but most likely over a hundred years) the Israelites are suffering as slaves in Egypt. And God does nothing. What gives?
Indeed, God doesn't show up until the last couple of verses in chapter two, where it says that the Israelites "groaning" and "cries for help" reached God's ears and he "remembered" his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. What does that mean? Did God forget? Was he busy with some other disaster in the galaxy? No, of course not. God had told Abraham that this would happen (Genesis 15:14). But why did God just let it happen?
One of the great philosophical and theological questions that comes up is why does a God of love allow such awful things to happen. It's a question I'm certain the Israelites were asking. What have we done to deserve this?
The answer of course is nothing. This wasn't about the Israelites getting what they deserved; it was about the Egyptian Pharaohs being evil. A question that will come up again and again over the next few stories is the question of free will. Are we free to choose or does God control everything we do? The answer, of course, is the former. But with that freedom comes consequences and one of those consequences is that people are free to do horrible things to other people. And they do, every day. For there to be true freedom, there must be freedom for evil to have its day.
Now this would be awful and horrible if it stopped there. We would find ourselves in a never-ending cycle of oppression and persecution. But it doesn't stop there. The last verse of chapter two tells us that God was "concerned about them."
He was "concerned"? What does that mean? It is the Bible's subtle way of saying that God was paying attention and was going to do something about the evil that was going on. You see, this is where the hope comes in. Yes, God does allow evil to reign for a day but only for a day. God will hear the cries of the oppressed and there will be a reckoning. He will come to their aide and evil will be punished, as we will see in later chapters.
Maybe you're suffering from oppression right now. Maybe you're crying out to God but feel like you're only talking to the walls. Maybe you're about to give up. Don't. There is light at the end of the tunnel. God does hear you and he is "concerned" and one day, sooner or later, he will come to your rescue. Evil reigns for a day, but only a day.
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