Moses Moses was the founding leader of Israel as a nation. God used Moses at a critical juncture in the history of his people. He was the prophet who received the law and mediated God’s covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai (Exod 19:3-6). He was also the first known writer of Scripture. The younger brother of Miriam and Aaron, Moses was born in Egypt under dangerous circumstances (Exod 1:15–2:2). The Egyptian pharaoh, fearing a rebellion, had decreed that all Hebrew boys be killed at birth. Moses’ mother, Jochebed, entrusted her infant son to God and set him afloat in the Nile in a reed basket. Pharaoh’s daughter found him and took him into the palace to raise as her own child (Exod 2:3-10). Little is known about Moses’ upbringing. Jewish tradition holds that he received both administrative and military training in Pharaoh’s household. When he was about forty years old, he killed an Egyptian to rescue a Hebrew slave, and then he fled to Midian (2:11-15; cp. Acts 7:23-29). There he rescued some young women who were being harassed as they watered their flocks. Their father (Jethro) invited him home. Moses married one of the women, Zipporah, and began a family as he cared for h...

The Exodus as History Israel’s understanding of reality was radically different from that of all other ancient cultures. All of the other major cultures surrounding Israel—from Sumer in southern Mesopotamia in 2000 BC to Rome in AD 200—reached their view of reality by observing nature. They concluded that there were many gods and that all events go in unending cycles. Ancient Israel, by contrast, believed that there is one God who is distinct from the world, who made the world with purpose, and who is guiding its events to realize his purposes. How did the Israelites come to their unique concept of reality? Was it not through encounters with the true God in actual events of history? The most reasonable explanation for the distinctiveness of Israel’s understanding is that, as the Bible describes, God broke into their experience and showed himself to them in events that have been recorded as history. There is no report in Egyptian texts of the events the Bible describes, which has raised suspicions for many. But it would have been highly unusual at that time for a world power to report on their defeat at the hands of a group of slaves. The Bible’s historical reporting, with its...