As this essay concerns a religious figure, I will begin with a threshold question: why might a nonbeliever spend time thinking about religion? I was raised by a Jewish mother and a Christian father, but neither one was devout, and, following in their footsteps, I have never believed in anything supernatural or adhered to any creed. Still, I find few things more rewarding than immersing myself in a wide variety of religious traditions.

The vast majority of people in the world are religious, and I want to understand them better. Similarly, history and culture are deeply enmeshed in religion and incomprehensible without it. To fully enjoy Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son or Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, I need to know something about Christianity. The more I learn about the sacred stories of Australia, the better I will appreciate Aboriginal art. To put it more existentially, if I am searching for meaning—or meanings—wouldn’t it be foolish to ignore the storehouses of meaning that are contained in sacred traditions? After all, for most of history, that is where people have wrestled with their largest questions.

With that backdrop, I will turn to the story of Moses, beginning with a brief biographical sketch, drawn solely from the Bible, and then posing four questions. Moses was born in Egypt at a time when his people, the Israelites, were heavily oppressed and used for slave labor. The Pharaoh was concerned about their increasing numbers—their high birth-rate—and ordered that all their male infants be killed. Moses’ mother, instead, placed her baby in a small box and floated it on the Nile River. One of the Pharaoh’s daughters saw the infant, took pity, and raised him as her son.

As a young man, Moses witnessed an Egyptian beating an Israelite slave, and he struck and killed the Egyptian. He then fled to the foreign land of Midian, where he married a local woman named Zipporah and worked as a shepherd for her father, Jethro. One day, while tending sheep near Mt. Horeb, Moses saw a thorn bush that burned without being consumed. God spoke to him out of the bush, revealed His name as “I am that I am,” and ordered Moses to return to Egypt and free his people.

Moses and his brother Aaron confronted the Pharaoh, but he refused to let the Israelites go. God punished Egypt with ten plagues until the Pharaoh finally relented. After the Israelites left, however, he had second thoughts and pursued them. God helped Moses work a miracle, parting the Red Sea for the Israelites to pass through, but then letting it collapse back in and drown the Egyptian army.

Soon afterward, God summoned Moses to the top of Mt. Sinai, where He gave him ten commandments written on stone tablets. While Moses was away from camp, however, the Israelites made an idol, the Golden Calf, and worshiped it. When Moses returned, he angrily shattered the two tablets and ordered his tribe, the Levites, to slaughter thousands of the idolaters. He then returned to Mt. Sinai and pleaded with God to forgive his people. He came back down with two new tablets and supervised construction of the Tabernacle: a portable tent-temple where God could be worshipped with sacrifices and prayers.

During the desert years, God performed many miracles for the Israelites, including manna from heaven to eat; but they often complained and threatened Moses. When they reached the border of the Promised Land, Moses sent 12 men to scout it out and report back. Ten of them described a terrifying land filled with giants, and the people became afraid to enter. To punish their lack of faith, God decreed that they would wander in the wasteland for nearly 40 more years. Moses continued to lead them until, having narrated the Book of Deuteronomy as his parting gift, he died at the age of 120.

What Type of Figure is Moses?

What is the nature of “Moses?” He is a character composed of words: stories told orally for many generations before—over the course of more generations—they were written down and edited into the forms we know. Moses was created not by one author but by myriad storytellers, editors, interpreters, and readers—a very long evolution that continues today.

Many aspects of Moses seem mythical. A story such as how he was found by the Pharaoh’s daughter in the Nile is a legend similar to ones told about heroes in other traditions, including the Sumerian King Sargon. Myths such as these do not really transmit facts; rather, they use storytelling to explain, and often glorify, certain things about a people’s history and culture.

But the Book of Exodus also marks a transition from mythological religion—timeless stories about the gods—to a historical religion: a linear account of a people and their God from past to present. To this day, scholars argue about how much the story of Moses reflects historical realities. Most conclude that the Exodus is largely fictional: that what became Judaism arose in Israel itself, not during a mass movement from Egypt. This new consensus raises fascinating questions about why the Israelites would shape a founding legend in which they begin as slaves in a foreign land.

Moses is certainly an exceptional figure. Although not born into or elected to the role, he functions as a theocrat over his people. But he is not the high priest—that role goes to his brother, Aaron—and his power is not dynastic: his two sons, Eliezer and Gershon, vanish into obscurity, and he is succeeded instead by another charismatic ruler, Joshua.

Moses enjoys unparalleled proximity to God, and he works various miracles, but he is never referred to as divine—in contrast to other ancient rulers such as Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors. He is a flawed human. He has some form of speech impediment—referring to himself as “slow of speech.”  He sometimes resists—or fails to properly execute—God’s commands. He has a bad temper and a violent streak. Sages may argue over whether he violates the sixth commandment, thou shall not murder, but he kills an Egyptian overseer with his own hands and orders the execution of some 3,000 Israelites after the incident of the Golden Calf.

The Bible tells us very little about Moses’ character traits. The only virtue explicitly ascribed to him is humility: “Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.” It is part of the Bible’s genius to celebrate its greatest leader not for strength, bravery, wealth, or wisdom, but humility. Fittingly, Jewish people do not refer to Moses as their patron saint or king: he is Moshe Rabbenu—Moses, our Teacher.

What the Bible most emphasizes is his closeness to God. As Deuteronomy puts it: “No prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.” Reading this as a nonbeliever, what one might emphasize is Moses’ wonder at the mystery of existence and his commitment to transcendent values, including the ethics of the ten commandments and the stern injunctions to do right by all people, especially the most vulnerable, such as widows and immigrants.

How Egyptian Was Moses?

The Bible explains the name Moses as derived from the Hebrew verb mashash, which means “to draw out.” The Pharaoh’s daughter names him Moses because, as she says, “I drew him out of the water.” We might second-guess the Bible, however, because it seems unlikely that the Pharaoh’s daughter spoke Hebrew, and the name more likely derives from the Egyptian word, mose, which means “child” or “born of,” as seen in Egyptian names like “Thutmose” (Son of Thoth). We could say that his foster mother, not very imaginatively, called him “Son” or “Sonny.”

More important than his Egyptian name is the fact that Moses is rescued, adopted, and raised by an Egyptian princess. He grows up in the royal household of the great oppressor, the Pharaoh, speaking Egyptian and, presumably, immersed in high Egyptian culture. The Pharaoh whom he defies, plagues, and eventually drowns in the Red Sea is his foster grandfather. The founding father of Judaism (and thus Christianity and Islam) is a hybridized, hyphenated, revolutionary Israelite-Egyptian.

This complicated picture reflects the Bible’s ambivalence about Egypt. On the one hand, it is the prototypical enemy. On the other hand, it is where Abraham, and later Jacob, seek help and refuge in times of famine. It is where Joseph rises from household slave to the Pharaoh’s right-hand man. Even when the Israelites flee, Moses tells them to ask the Egyptians for articles of gold and clothing, and the Egyptians supply them. As Deuteronomy teaches: “You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land.” There is a Jewish legend in which, when the Pharaoh and his armies are destroyed at the Red Sea, the angels begin a celebratory song. God responds angrily, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea, and you wish to sing before Me?!”

How Does Moses Encounter God?

Moses’ first great encounter with God, the revelation of his calling, occurs in the story of the burning bush. At this time, Moses is a fugitive from Egyptian justice: a murderer on the lam. Having been raised in a royal court, he is working as a lowly shepherd for his Midianite father-in-law, a pagan priest. In short, he is a criminal, immigrant manual laborer in a mixed-faith marriage.

The foundational epiphany happens in neither Israel nor Egypt but an obscure borderland. God speaks not out of a thundercloud, volcano, or even tree—but a thorny bush. One legend says that Moses happened on the bush when he was scouring the area for a lamb that had run away. God concludes that such a caring man would make a good prophet, saying “You have mercy on the flock of a man—you shall shepherd my people, Israel.” The sages also emphasize that Moses “turned aside” to see the burning bush; in other words, he is someone who can turn aside from his own affairs to pay attention to the world around him.

For medieval Jewish mystics, the fact that God chose a puny thornbush for the revelation was particularly revealing. As The Zohar puts it: “Why did the Holy One, blessed be He, reveal himself in a thornbush? Because there is no place where the Shekhinah is not found—even among thorns and thistles.” (Shekhinah is a Jewish term for the earthly presence or immanence of God). I believe that these sorts of mystical interpretation can be revelatory even for those of us who do not believe in anything supernatural. They teach us that any natural phenomenon—even a common and annoying thorn bush—can, if we pay close enough attention, become a fiery font of wonder.

Why Does Moses Die Before Reaching the Promised Land?

Moses’ life is absolutely epochal, filled with miraculous triumphs and profound revelations, but also a series of failures and humiliations. Of the 600,000 men he leads out of Egypt, exactly two, Joshua and Caleb, survive to enter the Holy Land. The rest perish in the wilderness as punishment for the weakness of their faith. Most shockingly, Moses himself, the archetypal hero, dies in the wasteland because of an obscure transgression.

The story is told in the Book of Numbers. The people are camped in the desert of Zin, where Moses’ sister, the prophet Miriam, has just died. Lacking food and water, the Israelites complain bitterly, saying they wish they had never left Egypt. God tells Moses that if takes his rod and gathers the people, and speaks to the rock before their eyes, it will spout water. Moses takes the rod, gathers the congregation, and asks, angrily and rhetorically: “Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?” Then he smites the rock twice, and water pours out abundantly. That sounds like success, but God punishes Moses, telling him, “Because ye believed me not . . . therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.”

Subsequently, God takes Moses to the top of Mount Nebo and shows him the Promised Land, across the River Jordan. Immediately afterward, Moses dies, and God buries him in an unmarked grave, in an unknown location. The rabbinic sages, as you might imagine, wrestled mightily to understand how God could punish their great prototype so severely and, apparently, so capriciously.

One explanation is that God told Moses to speak to the rock, but he struck it instead. Even though the miracle happened, it didn’t happen the right way. God says that Moses “believed me not;” in other words, he did not believe that simply speaking would make the water gush out. Other rabbinic sages opine that Moses is punished for speaking angrily to the Israelites, addressing them as “rebels.” Moses lacks faith in God’s people, and thus in God. A third explanation is that Moses shows hubris, asking, “must we fetch you water out of this rock,” as if he and Aaron were to produce the miracle, rather than God.

One interesting theory is that Moses’ brain was clouded with sadness at the death of his sister, Miriam. According to rabbinic legend, Miriam was the one who had been producing water for the people throughout their desert wandering. She had a magic rock, known as Miriam’s Well, which traveled with them and which, at a word from her, would produce water. Moses lacked her empathetic ability to produce water with mere words, or at least he thought he did, and, in his anger at the people and grief over her death, he smashed it twice with his rod.

Why such an anticlimactic finale for the great Moses? An old Jewish text asks: “If Moses brought Israel out of Egypt, split the sea, and received the Torah—why deny him the land?” It answers: “So that no man might say, ‘The land was conquered by the power of Moses.’” In other words, the Bible must reserve the starring role for God, not his human emissary. Even for a nonbeliever like me, the story remains a resonant fable about the dangers of hubris and anger, and how they can manifest fatally in seemingly minor actions.

And while the idea of a “promised” or “holy” land is, for me, one of the worst legacies of the Bible, contributing to the ethnonationalism that has plagued the United States and many other countries, it, too, can be repurposed and reinterpreted to mean not a nation state, but a state of justice, a state of equity, or a better state of being—as was done by the most Moses-like leader in U.S. history, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Astonishingly, prophetically, the night before his death, Dr. King said in a speech:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity, it has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

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Sam Magavern is a public interest lawyer and writer in Buffalo, New York. His publications include a non-fiction book, Primo Levi’s Universe, and two books of poetry, Noah’s Ark and Ovid’s Creek. He is the founder of the Calamus Project, which celebrates Walt Whitman’s poetry with films, songs, and performances.