Moses

Moses is born under an order of extermination: Pharaoh commands that Hebrew boys be thrown into the Nile. His mother hides him three months and then leaves him in a pitched basket among the reeds, where Pharaoh's daughter finds him. By an irony the text clearly enjoys, the child grows up in the palace of the man who wanted him dead, nursed by his own mother on wages. At forty he kills an Egyptian overseer beating a Hebrew, buries the body in the sand and, when he learns he has been seen, runs.

He spends another forty years in Midian keeping his father-in-law's sheep. There, in front of a bush that burns without being consumed, he receives the commission. And he resists: who am I, they will not believe me, I am slow of speech, send somebody else. God answers with a name — I AM THAT I AM — and with his brother Aaron as spokesman. From the ten plagues to the night of the Passover, from the pillar of fire to the open sea, Moses spends the rest of his life as a go-between for a people who complain and a God who answers.

Sinai is the centre of everything. He goes up the mountain and comes down with the Law; he finds the people dancing round a golden calf and smashes the tablets on the ground. Then he does the thing that defines him better than any miracle: he stands before God to intercede for the very people who have just betrayed him, and offers to be blotted out of the book himself if they can be forgiven. Hence the line in Exodus 33: God spoke with him «face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend».

He did not enter the promised land. For striking the rock instead of speaking to it, at Meribah, he is told he will see it but not set foot in it. He died on Mount Nebo looking out over the Jordan valley, and nobody knows where his grave is. Deuteronomy closes his biography with a line used of no one else: there never arose a prophet in Israel like him.

Moses dismantles the idea that God is answered yes the first time. He argues, raises objections, asks for proof and twice tells God he has picked the wrong man. None of it costs him standing in the story; on the contrary, the conversation is the bond. The Bible saves its highest praise for him not for his courage but for his meekness, and for the times he put himself between the punishment and the people.

It also teaches something uncomfortable: whoever brings others to the goal may be left outside it. Forty years of desert to see the country from a mountain. The text neither softens it nor fully explains it, and part of its force is there.