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The Man Moses

By Peter Machinist

The introduction of Moses in the first chapters of Exodus marks a new, a second beginning in the Bible’s account of the history of Israel. The first beginning had been in the Book of Genesis with Abraham and the patriarchs that followed him. There the focus was on Israel as a family bound in relationship or covenant to its God. Moses’ beginning marks the extension of the group from family to nation, though a nation still with a strong sense of kinship. Here the emphasis is on the development of a common administration, as well as on the re-presentation […]

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Footnotes

1.

This Exodus verse reads: “And he called his name Gershom, for he said, ‘I was an alien [=geµr] in a foreign land.’” Clearly, then, the verse understands the name Gershom to mean “an alien was there” (=geµr shaµm).

Endnotes

1.

Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939; New York: Vintage Books, 1955; German original: Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion [1939]).

2.

See James L. Kugel, The Traditions of the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 856–859, 885–887; S.E. Loewenstamm, “The Death of Moses,” in G.W.E. Nickelsburg, Jr., ed., Studies on the Testament of Abraham (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1976), pp. 185–217.