He was marked by his imperfections. He stammered. He oftentimes hated the very people he led. Almost as frequently, he was at odds with the God who sent him on his mission–and thus the God who worked wonders through him kept Moses from the wonder that was his life’s longing, the Promised Land. And yet, for more than 3,000 years, there have been few lives more memorable. He was raised among the privileged princes of Egypt, only to throw in his lot with slaves. He would lead his oppressed people safely through a valley of watery death that had been cleft from the sea. A pillar of smoke guided them by day, a pillar of fire by night. And on the heights of Mount Sinai, above a world filled with idols, Moses walked into the terrifying presence of the divine and declared that God is One. It is in our nature to search for heroes, and Moses, rebel and saint, is as relevant today as he ever was. He is a metaphor for our times, proof that a single flawed human being can be chosen to change the world. Is it any wonder then that the great and the small cite him for inspiration? Martin Luther King Jr. evoked him in his thunderingly prophetic speeches. Only last month several Republican Congressmen grandly compared the fallen Newt Gingrich to the man who led the chosen people out of the desert. Movie directors have immortalized him, most famously as a bewigged Charlton Heston throwing down the tablets in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. And next week brings Hollywood’s latest celebration of Moses: DreamWorks SKG’s The Prince of Egypt, an animated epic that would make David Lean blush. What we choose to dwell on in the story of Moses says as much about our dreams and fears as it does about Scripture. Eugene Rivers, a Pentecostal minister in Boston’s poor Dorchester neighborhood, has depicted Moses as an African revolutionary to teach gang members about throwing off the yoke of slavery to drugs. Norman Cohen, provost of New York City’s Hebrew Union College, used the prophet’s speech defect to come to terms with his own temporary paralysis. Moses is a universal symbol of liberation, law and leadership, sculpted by Michelangelo, painted by Rembrandt, eulogized by Elie Wiesel as “the most solitary and most powerful hero in biblical history…After him, nothing else was the same again.” Even baseball managers grow eloquent about Moses as paragon: when recounting why Mets star Bobby Bonilla failed to inspire his teammates during his first stint with the team in the early 1990s, Frank Cashen explained, “He was supposed to lead us out of the wilderness, take us to the Red Sea and part the waters. It didn’t work that way. He said he couldn’t swim.” Thankfully, when The Prince of Egypt opens in 3,000 theaters worldwide, there will be no Moses and Pharaoh Beanie Babies at the local Burger King. Instead, there will be a kids’ book, a CD and lithographic portraits of the characters. Two of the more notable of several new books on the subject are Moses: A Life by Jonathan Kirsch and The Road to Redemption by Rabbi Burton Visotzky . The Moses boom is already intensifying the debate that theologians and archaeologists have been waging for years about the ancient prophet, amplifying and revivifying the much told story.
