Portal:Bible/Featured article/September, 2006

Moses is a legendary Hebrew liberator, leader, lawgiver, prophet, and historian. Moses is one of the greatest figures in Biblical history. According to the Book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible, Moses was a son of Amram and his wife, Jochebed, a Levite. Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and into the desert, and received the Torah from God on Mount Sinai. In the Exodus account, the birth of Moses occurred at a time when the current Egyptian Pharaoh had commanded that all male children born to Hebrew slaves should be killed. Jochebed kept him concealed for three months. When she could keep him hidden no longer, she set him adrift on the Nile river in a small craft of bulrushes coated in pitch. The daughter of Pharaoh discovered the baby and adopted him as her son. After Moses had reached adulthood, he went to see how his brethren who were enslaved to the Egyptians were faring. Seeing an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, he killed the Egyptian and hid his body in the sand. Moses soon discovered that the affair was known, and that Pharaoh was likely to put him to death; he therefore escaped to the Sinai peninsula and settled with Jethro, priest of Midian, whose daughter Zipporah he in due time married. One day, as Moses led his flock to Mount Horeb, he saw a burning bush that would not be consumed. When he turned aside to look more closely at the marvel, God spoke to him from the bush revealing his name to Moses. God also commissioned him to go to Egypt and deliver his fellow Hebrews from their bondage. He then returned to Egypt. Moses was met on his arrival in Egypt by his elder brother, Aaron, and gained a hearing with his oppressed brethren. It was a more difficult matter, however, to persuade Pharaoh to let the Hebrews depart. This was not accomplished until God sent ten plagues upon the Egyptians. These plagues culminated in the slaying of the Egyptian first-borns whereupon such terror seized the Egyptians that they ordered the Hebrews to leave. Read more...