Prophet Moses the God-Seer

Moses was born around 1300 BC in Egypt, into a Levite family of the Hebrew tribes that had been in the country since the time of Joseph and were now reduced to slavery under a new Pharaoh "which knew not Joseph." That Pharaoh had ordered the killing of every Hebrew male child. Moses's mother Jochebed hid the boy for three months; when she could hide him no longer, she made an ark of bulrushes daubed with pitch and laid him in it among the reeds at the riverbank — exactly where Pharaoh's daughter would come down to bathe. The princess found him, took him for her own, and named him for the river ("Moses" — from the Hebrew root meaning "drawn out").

He grew up at the Egyptian court — "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and mighty in words and in deeds," Stephen the protomartyr would say of him centuries later. At about forty he visited his own people for the first time, saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, and killed him. The next day, when he tried to reconcile two quarreling Hebrews, they threw it back at him: "Wilt thou kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian yesterday?" The deed had been seen. Moses fled — across the Sinai desert, into the land of Midian on the eastern side of the gulf of Aqaba.

He spent the next forty years there as a shepherd in the service of Jethro, priest of Midian, whose daughter Zipporah he married. When he was eighty, tending his father-in-law's flock at Mount Horeb (Sinai), he saw a bush burning that was not consumed. The voice of God spoke from the bush — calling him by name, identifying Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and sending Moses back into Egypt to deliver His people. Moses asked the divine Name and was given the great answer: "I AM THAT I AM. Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you."

He returned to Egypt with his brother Aaron and went before Pharaoh. Ten plagues fell upon Egypt at his outstretched staff — water turned to blood, frogs, lice, flies, the death of livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness — until finally the firstborn of every Egyptian household died in a single night, and the firstborn of the Israelites were preserved by the lamb's blood on their lintels. Pharaoh let the people go. They marched out about six hundred thousand strong, crossed the Red Sea on dry land while the waters were held back, and watched the Egyptian army drown in the closing flood.

The forty years in the wilderness that followed shaped Israel into a people. At Sinai, Moses ascended the mountain alone and met God face to face for forty days. He received the Decalogue and the Torah — the Law and the pattern of the Tabernacle. The people in his absence built a golden calf; he came down, broke the tablets in fury, ground the calf to powder, made the people drink it, and went up again. The Lord at his prayer renewed His covenant; the second tablets were given, and Moses came down with his face shining so brightly that the people could not bear to look at him.

He led the people to the very border of the Promised Land. Because of his single failure at the waters of Meribah — where he struck the rock twice instead of speaking to it — he was not permitted to cross over himself. He went up Mount Nebo, on the east side of the Jordan, saw the Land from afar, and died there at 120 years old, his eye undimmed and his natural force unabated. The Lord Himself buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, and no man knows of his grave to this day.

Moses appears with Elijah on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration of the Lord — the lawgiver of the Old Covenant standing beside the prophet of true worship as witnesses to the New. He is the great type of Christ: drawn from the water, hidden among slaves, the prophet through whom the Law was given, the mediator of the covenant, the meek man (the Scripture's own description) above all men on the face of the earth. His feast is September 4.