Moses

Two dates are argued from two verses, and both readings are held by working scholars today.

1 Kings 6:1 dates Solomon's temple to the four hundred and eightieth year after Israel came out of Egypt, which puts the departure near 1446 BC. Eugene Merrill, Bryant Wood and Gleason Archer read the number as years and hold that date.

Exodus 1:11 names Rameses as a store city Israel built, and the pharaoh whose name that city carries reigned in the thirteenth century. Kenneth Kitchen, James Hoffmeier and much of Egyptology read the exodus into the reign of Rameses II, near 1260 BC.

No Egyptian text names Israel's departure, so the case on both sides is built from the biblical numbers and from the archaeology of the cities. This page names both and settles neither.

Neither site can be fixed from an inscription or an object found there.

For the mountain, the traditional site is Jebel Musa in the southern Sinai peninsula, where a Christian pilgrim tradition is attested by the late fourth century and where the pilgrim Egeria climbed around AD 381 to 384. Ras Safsafeh, Jebel Serbal, Har Karkom and Jebel al-Lawz in Saudi Arabia are each argued by others.

For the sea, the northern Gulf of Suez, the Bitter Lakes, Lake Timsah and the former Lake Ballah have all been proposed. No physical trace of a crossing has been recovered at any of them.

God gives the reason in His own words at Numbers 20:12: Moses did not trust Him to show His holiness in the sight of Israel.

Albert Barnes sets out what went wrong in the act itself. Moses was told to speak and he struck; he struck twice; he called the people rebels; and he asked whether he and Aaron would bring them water, which pointed Israel at the two men rather than at God.

Basil of Caesarea, writing in the fourth century, says he wavered only slightly and that the sentence came at once for that alone. A man who stands for a nation is held to what he represents.

Numbers 12:3 sits as a parenthesis inside a story where Miriam and Aaron attack Moses over his Cushite wife and he says nothing back. Three readings are on the table.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take it as Moses writing under inspiration what God had told him, and compare Paul defending himself in 2 Corinthians 11. The same commentary then offers a second reading, that the line looks like a gloss and may have been added later by Ezra or another prophet.

Adam Clarke offers a third. The Hebrew anav can mean depressed or afflicted rather than meek, so the verse would say that Moses was the most afflicted man in the land. The lexicon entry carries both senses. This page names all three and settles none.

The text calls the speaker the angel of the LORD at Exodus 3:2, then calls him God and the LORD from 3:4 onward, which is why the question exists.

Justin Martyr in the second century, Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose of Milan in the fourth, and Adam Clarke in the nineteenth all read the Angel of the bush as the Son before His birth. Augustine of Hippo leaves it open, asking whether the speaker was an angel standing in for his Lord. Matthew Henry names both positions in one sentence.

This site's tradition holds that the Angel is the Son, which is where the earliest witnesses stand, and Augustine's caution is named beside it.

Because the Latin Vulgate rendered Exodus 34:29 as cornuta, horned. Adam Clarke explains the Hebrew behind it: karan means to shine out or dart forth, the way horns come from a head or rays come off a polished surface. The Latin took the horns and left the light.

The Berean Standard Bible reads that his face had become radiant. The horned Moses of Western painting and sculpture comes from that translation choice.

Jude says the archangel Michael disputed with the devil over the body of Moses and would not bring a slanderous charge against him. Deuteronomy 34:6 says God buried him in a valley in Moab and that no one knows the grave.

Adam Clarke and Aphrahat the Persian Sage, writing in the fourth century, both read the hidden grave as a guard against Israel turning it into a shrine. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown record an older tradition among Jews and Christians that angels buried him, and treat it as tradition rather than fact.

Origen, in the third century, names his source: in On First Principles he cites a book he calls the Assumption of Moses as carrying this same dispute. The surviving copy of that book is damaged and does not contain the passage, so the link rests on Origen's testimony rather than on a line anyone can read today.