Moses: A Life PDF
Preview Moses: A Life
“[A] PROBING STUDY … Unlike the familiar, granite image of Moses, Kirsch sees a man torn by fits of violence, prone to arguing with God, marked by physical handicaps, reluctant to be a savior.” —Los Angeles Times “Kirsch’s book is strengthened by both a close reading of the Torah and his intimate knowledge of rabbinic folklore that grew up around the biblical tale, to help fill in the famous silences in the Bible.” —Houston Chronicle “In Moses, Kirsch paints a fascinating picture of the biblical Moses as a complex man subject to mood swings ranging from compassion to rage, from piety to pomposity.” —The Denver Post “Even the most learned will find previously unfamiliar material explained in a clear, intelligent and accessible fashion.… There is a tremendous amount of fascinating material for anyone interested in Moses and his family as well as some wonderful insights.” —Jewish Journal “A RAFT OF INTERESTING CONJECTURES AND FACTS FILL THESE PAGES.” —The Christian Science Monitor “A serious, sometimes brutal anatomy of Moses … Kirsch doesn’t gloss over the rough stuff.… Among the best of the new crop of ‘historical search’ writers.” —San Diego Union-Tribune “Books treating religious themes and written for a popular audience seem to abound today. Many of these writers, though not biblical scholars, are rigorous in their historical reconstruction and provide readers biblical information that is quite enlightening. This is such a book.… [It] brings Moses to life and makes scholarship available to a popular audience.” —The Bible Today “[Kirsch expresses himself with] zeal and showmanship … skill and sensitivity.… Kirsch is very good at providing the cultural and social background necessary for a close reading of all the tales told of Moses … but he’s at his very best in showing how the text of the Bible holds together, in one compelling portrait, the many images of Moses that compete for the reader’s attention as his life unfolds from birth to death.… Kirsch leaves nothing out of his account, and doesn’t gloss over any of the passages.… He distills valuable insights into the biblical Moses out of sources as varied as the early rabbis through Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century to Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber in the twentieth.” —Toronto Globe & Mail From the bestselling author of The Harlot by the Side of the Road comes an even more controversial conversation on the topic of Moses.… Kirsch brings an intelligent perspective to the Bible as both a work of literature and a sacred text.… As fresh and exposing as the unmasked face of Moses himself.” —The Jewish Transcript “[Kirsch] reveals a Moses that will forever banish Charlton Heston’s portrayal from the popular consciousness (and not a moment too soon). … Kirsch’s scholarship and storytelling skill introduce us to a much more interesting and compelling figure than we’d known before.” —Yoga Journal A Ballantine Book Published by The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group Copyright © 1998 by Jonathan Kirsch All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., and Faber and Faber Limited for permission to reprint an excerpt from “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” from W.H. Auden: Collected Poems by W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and Faber and Faber Limited. Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. www.ballantinebooks.com Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99–90419 Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd. eISBN: 978-0-30756792-5 v3.1 I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live. —M OSES D 30:19 EUTERONOMY Four hundred years of bondage in Egypt, rendered as metaphoric memory, can be spoken in a moment; in a single sentence. What this sentence is, we know; we have built every idea of moral civilization on it. It is a sentence that conceivably sums up at the start every revelation that came afterward: “The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” —C O YNTHIA ZICK M & M EMORY ETAPHOR Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Map Chapter One—The Moses No One Knows Chapter Two—Born at the Right Time Chapter Three—A Prince of Egypt Chapter Four—The Fugitive Chapter Five—The Man God Befriended, the Man He Sought to Kill Chapter Six—Signs and Wonders Chapter Seven—Exodus Chapter Eight—The Sorcerer and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Chapter Nine—God of the Mountain, God of the Way Chapter Ten—Man of War Chapter Eleven—“Moses is Dead” Chapter Twelve—The Search for the Historical Moses Dedication Acknowledgments Endnotes Bibliography Other Books by This Author About the Author Chapter One THE MOSES NO ONE KNOWS God answered, “While the light of truth is not in thee Thou hast no power to behold the mystery.” Then Moses prayed, “O God, give me that light.…” —J , D J AMI IVINE USTICE The Bible is remarkably blunt and plainspoken in telling the life story of Moses. Unlike the sacred writings and court histories of other figures from distant antiquity, which tend to dress up their heroes as saints, kings, and even gods, the Bible portrays Moses with brutal honesty and flesh-and-blood realism. Indeed, the essential impression of Moses that we are given in the Bible—and the real genius of his depiction at the hands of the biblical authors—is that he was born like every other infant, grew to manhood with all the impulses and excesses of which real men and women are capable, lived a life marked with passions that are perfectly human, and came to a tragic end that is no less riddled with ambiguity and contradiction than any other human life. “There is nothing divine about Moses,” observes the eminent Bible scholar Gerhard von Rad,1 and, as if to remind us of this crucial fact, the Bible refers to him with a simple, sturdy, and straightforward phrase —“the man Moses.” (Exod. 32:1, 23; Num. 12:3) Yet much of what we think we know about Moses is simply made up, and much of what the Bible does say about him is left out of both sacred and secular art. When they conjured up the visions of Moses that are so deeply familiar to us today, Renaissance artists and Hollywood moguls alike felt at liberty to make him over into a shimmering icon—the ultimate irony for the first iconoclast in recorded history. Even the learned theological commentaries and richly decorated sermons of the clergy tend to leave out the more scandalous incidents of his troubled and tumultuous life. Ironically, some of the most intriguing details to be found in the biblical account of Moses never find their way into art and literature, sermons and Sunday school lessons, and what is invented is
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