Moses

Moses is the central prophet, lawgiver, and leader of the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible, and a foundational figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. According to the Book of Exodus, he was born in Egypt to Hebrew parents of the tribe of Levi at a time when a pharaoh had ordered the drowning of newborn Hebrew boys. His mother hid him and placed him in a reed basket on the Nile; he was found and adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised at the Egyptian court. As an adult he killed an Egyptian overseer who was beating a Hebrew slave, fled to Midian, married Zipporah the daughter of the Midianite priest Jethro (also called Reuel), and had sons named Gershom and Eliezer. No independent contemporary inscription or archaeological find has confirmed these events, and no historically verified year of birth is known.

The biblical narrative describes God appearing to Moses in a burning bush on Mount Horeb and sending him back to Egypt to demand the Israelites’ release. After a sequence of plagues, the people left Egypt in the Exodus, crossed the Sea of Reeds, and received the covenant and the Ten Commandments at Sinai, where Moses is portrayed as mediator of the Torah. He is then said to have led the people through a generation of wilderness wandering. Deuteronomy states that he died on Mount Nebo in Moab, within sight of Canaan, at the age of 120, and that God buried him in a valley opposite Beth-peor, a place no one subsequently knew. Proposed historical settings for an Exodus (often the fifteenth or thirteenth century BCE) remain scholarly hypotheses, not established facts.

In Jewish tradition Moses is Moshe Rabbenu, the greatest of the prophets and the transmitter of the Written and Oral Torah. Christianity has long read him as a type of Christ and as a saint of the Old Covenant; the Roman Martyrology and Eastern Orthodox calendars commemorate him on 4 September. In Islam he is the prophet Musa, mentioned in the Qur’an more often than any other figure. He was not a bishop of Rome, Coptic pope, or ecclesiastical patriarch, nor a member of a later religious order. Veneration of Moses as a holy figure is ancient and pre-congregational; there is no recorded papal canonization or beatification in the later Catholic sense, and no securely documented list of official patronages comparable to those of later saints.