Lives of Scripture

Life Story

Moses was born under a death sentence — Pharaoh had ordered every Hebrew infant son drowned in the Nile — and survived because his mother hid him, then set him adrift in a basket where Pharaoh's own daughter found and raised him in the Egyptian court (Exodus 1:22-2:10). At forty, seeing an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, Moses killed the Egyptian and buried the body, then fled into the wilderness when the killing became known (Exodus 2:11-15; Acts 7:23-29). He spent the next forty years as a shepherd in Midian before God met him at a burning bush and commissioned him to return to Egypt and demand Pharaoh let Israel go — a task Moses resisted with a string of objections about his own inadequacy, including his difficulty speaking, until God grew angry and provided his brother Aaron as a spokesman (Exodus 3-4). Through Moses, God struck Egypt with ten plagues, instituted the Passover, and led Israel out of slavery through the Red Sea (Exodus 5-14). At Sinai, Moses received the Law and mediated the covenant between God and Israel, a role the New Testament treats as a real but incomplete forerunner of the greater mediation of Christ (Exodus 19-24; Hebrews 3:1-6; Galatians 3:19-24). Moses was not sinless in this role: he pleaded successfully with God not to destroy Israel after the golden calf, yet later, provoked by the people's complaints at Meribah, he struck the rock in anger instead of speaking to it as God commanded, and took credit alongside God for producing water — an act of unbelief and self-assertion serious enough that God barred him from entering the promised land he had led Israel toward for forty years (Numbers 20:1-13; Deuteronomy 34:1-8). Moses died on Mount Nebo, having seen the land only from a distance, and Scripture records that no prophet like him arose again in Israel until the one greater prophet the Law itself anticipated (Deuteronomy 34:10-12; Deuteronomy 18:15-18; Acts 3:22).

Family

Moses was the son of Amram and Jochebed, of the tribe of Levi, and the younger brother of Aaron and Miriam, both of whom stood beside him through the Exodus and both of whom also clashed with him — Miriam and Aaron once challenged his unique authority and Miriam was struck with leprosy for it, while Aaron built the golden calf in Moses' absence at Sinai (Exodus 15:20; Numbers 12; Exodus 32). Moses married Zipporah, a daughter of the Midianite priest Jethro, during his years in exile, and they had at least two sons, Gershom and Eliezer, whose names Moses gave in memory of his own displacement — 'a sojourner in a foreign land' and 'my father's God was my help' (Exodus 2:21-22; Exodus 18:2-4). Zipporah appears directly in only a few scenes, most strikingly circumcising their son herself in a tense episode on the road back to Egypt that saved Moses' life (Exodus 4:24-26), a passage Scripture leaves largely unexplained rather than smoothed over. Jethro later advised Moses to delegate judicial authority over Israel rather than carry the whole burden alone, counsel Moses accepted (Exodus 18:13-27).