This chapter is a reading of the first rock-water episode (Exodus 17). It navigates through three layers of literary stratigraphy – evident in shifting emotional responses, character roles, and settings – in order to uncover a version of the episode in which Moses plays the role of a king held to account by his people for ensuring their survivial in a crisis. This version does not stand on its own but is part of a version of the exodus narrative modeled on the Sargon birth legend. The character of Moses develops through a series of acts of striking, as he realizes his destiny as one who draws (water), expressed in his name. Like its Assyrian model, this narrative is a work of political allegory. It relates to Hezekiah’s abandonment of Egyptian ties as the Assyrians threaten siege of Jerusalem and may have played a role in negotiating Judah’s continued independence. The exodus story thus does not originate in the northern kingdom of Israel, as is usually thought, but is is implicated in a decidedly Judean situation.

This chapter tracks the hierocratic version through revisions of the manna and rock-water episodes (Exodus 16–17) and the scouts episode (Numbers 13–14), but its primary focus is a new version that begins at the sea (Exodus 14). This version is tracked through another revision of the scouts episode and readings of the episodes involving bitter water (Exodus 15), divine fire, quail, objection to Moses’s foreign wife (Numbers 11–12), and snakes (Numbers 21). The bitter water episode bypasses Aaron as mediator of torah and introduces the wilderness as a period of testing. The divine fire episode decentralizes the sanctuary and provides a way to mitigate threat of divine wrath as Moses intercedes with God. The quail episode initially protects Aaron’s control of meat consumption but is revised to reimagine the structure of Israel’s political leadership. Miriam’s complaint initially construes ritual impurity as a punishment for sin and transforms social isolation into banishment, but a revision sidelines Aaron and reestablishes Moses as a trustworthy mediator. Finally, God, the divine healer, prescribes the manufacture of a snake icon, which does not instill fear-driven obedience but prompts viewers to studiously reflect on uses and abuses of sovereignty.

Chapter 7 discusses how the Transfiguration is seen within the Synoptic Gospels – and especially in the careful New Testament and Patristic scholarship of Daniel Kirk, Teresa Morgan and Peter Anthony-- as the principal occasion when the moral and spiritual perfection of Jesus received divine affirmation. Alongside the patriarch Moses and the prophet Elijah, Jesus is glimpsed in the Transfiguration narratives, falteringly, as someone immensely special and divinely endorsed, by three of his disciples, who (in Luke and two sixth-century church mosaics) are themselves included within the cloud (perhaps even theösis) that envelops Jesus, Moses and Elijah. This chapter examines both Aquinas’ and recent Eastern Orthodox accounts of the social implications of transfiguration. It also notes that transfiguration has been deeply disfigured by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on the Feast of the Transfiguration in 1945.

Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am), was a reclusive, self-taught intellectual active in a small circle of Hebraists in early twentieth-century Odessa. Though born to a wealthy Hasidic family, he reinvented himself as a secular rationalist and modeled himself after a prophet-hero he identified in biblical, rabbinic, and Kabbalistic traditions. Ahad Ha’am’s monumental prophetic persona, though, carried within it demonic forces that he couldn’t shake: ever-present anger, despair, and failure. As Ahad Ha’am, then, takes up a Romantic prophetic figure to convey a strong nationalist ideal, his multivalent allusions to Jewish and European culture expose his personal anxieties and weaknesses – as well as those of the secular Hebrew culture he hoped to create. Ahad Ha’am draws on an eclectic array of sources to construct his heroic, seemingly indigenous, Jewish prophetic model: perhaps the most surprising is Thomas Carlyle’s Victorian portrait of Muhammad, which inadvertently introduces a (Scottish) Zionist Muhammad into early Hebrew literature.

This chapter argues that Paul’s gospel was based on the conviction that God’s promises through the prophets—specifically the promise of a renewed covenant with Israel—were being fulfilled through Jesus’ death, resurrection, and the gift of the spirit. Working primarily from 2 Corinthians 3 and the central chapters of Romans, this chapter puts Paul in conversation with Jubilees, a variety of texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QS, CD, 1QPHa, etc.), Philo of Alexandria, and more. The chapter demonstrates that all of these texts bear witness to a view of Israel as having fallen under the Torah’s curses for covenantal disobedience and awaiting a restoration that includes an ethical transformation through divine intervention.

One of the central issues to which the Cappadocian fathers frequently returned was the possibility of Christian paideia. It has been pointed out that the idea of morphosis, a never-ending process of giving shape to one’s life in imitation of Christ, is at the heart of Gregory of Nyssa’s educational thinking. What has been overlooked is the way Gregory’s awareness of paideia as an engagement of the subject with an object raises the methodological problem of how this relationship can be established. This chapter illuminates Gregory’s concept of self-formation by investigating the ways in which he theorises the acquisition and ordering of knowledge suited to the life of faith. A reading of his Life of Moses demonstrates that, drawing on the rhetoric of an opposition between Christianity and classical culture, Gregory re-evaluates this tension from a pedagogical perspective. His novel idea is that the negotiation of foreignness and kinship can be a catalyst for Christian self-perfection.

Chapter 6 investigates Augustine’s explanation, in De trinitate, of how the single paschal mystery of Christ’s dead and resurrected flesh harmonizes with our double paschal mystery, serving both as the sacrament of the spiritual death and resurrection of our interior man and as the example of the fleshly death and resurrection of our exterior man. As Augustine recognizes, the sacramentality and exemplarity of Christ’s fleshly death and resurrection are furnished to us on account of our spiritual blindness. In exegeting the theophany of God’s back to Moses, Augustine observes that living faith in Christ’s resurrection makes us friends with God and socializes us anew within the Catholic Church. Augustine articulates how Christ, the humble mediator of life, has vanquished the devil, the proud mediator of death, and his demonic and human associates, by the justice of Christ’s obedience unto death, and by the power of Christ’s resurrection to eternal life.

Nguyen explores how the Qur’ānic understanding of gratitude to God spills out into other relationships, so that all ethics is founded on the response to divine benefaction: as righteous deeds are incomplete without gratitude to God, gratitude to God is incomplete without righteous deeds.

Chapter 8 assesses De Excidio 3.16–17, a set of speeches made after the Battle of Jotapata (66 CE) by Josephus’ Jewish comrades and then by Flavius Josephus, the Jewish general, himself. The chapter shows how Pseudo-Hegesippus articulates and plays with very Roman ideas of death, war, and virtue by inserting biblical exempla into these two speeches, which are radically changed and rewritten from the Greek versions found in Josephus’ Jewish War.

This article examines the earliest rabbinic comment on Deuteronomy 32:36, which is part of Moses’s final words to the Israelites before he dies and they enter the Promised Land without his charismatic prophetic guidance. The Hebrew noun mitzvah and verb tzivah, usually understood to mean “commandment” and “command” (“enjoin” in NJPS) respectively, are understood in their biblical context and rabbinic explication to suggest as well the sense of passing something on at death as a legacy or inheritance. Whereas a commandment is usually understood as authoritatively imposed from without, a legacy is understood as something voluntarily received (transmitted) from within. The midrash suggests that at the age of 120 years, and unable to accompany the Israelites as they enter and settle the Promised Land, Moses can no longer command with authority but must cajole and implore with gratitude the Israelites in each generation to maintain the Torah through voluntary acceptance. In a striking scene, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch is depicted imploring his students in the same words as did Moses. By implication, the auditors of the midrash in each generation, down to the present, are similarly besought, with the greatness of the Torah and Moses being continually at stake.

The chapter begins with the concept of satire for the reader’s understanding of its broad and deep meaning and its significance. It proceeds to show the methodology of satire, which is to “highlight” and “ridicule” an act of folly to effect change in an individual, group, or society behind the act. It does this using figurative tools such as humor, hyperbole, irony, or sarcasm. In context, the chapter examines the use of satire and satirical expressions in works to mirror the African society. Importantly, the chapter notes that for satire to be birthed, there must be a set societal standard by which the subject’s action is measured against that which has been breached. While “morality is often the end goal of tales, parables, proverbs, etc., for satire, the concern goes above morality to include public interest.” The chapter finds satire in “songs of abuses,” which is very prominent among the Yoruba. These songs are often sung or performed when people are deemed to have fallen short of societal set standards. Or when criminals such as murderers, thieves, witches, and other extreme violators of social conduct are caught and especially exposed.

Numenius (second century AD), the only witty Platonist after Plato himself, memorably described Plato as ‘Moses talking Attic’. He did not mean thereby to rate Eastern wisdom more highly than Platonic philosophy, as is sometimes suggested, but to recognise in the words ‘I AM THAT I AM’, spoken to Moses by the God of the Hebrews, an anticipation, unique in Eastern lore, of the conception Numenius championed of the Platonic first principle One or Good as Being itself. This paper proposes that his further exploration of that idea shows him to have construed the Timaeus account of such being as an eternal present, or in Boethius’s words ‘the complete possession all at once of an infinite life’, not as timelessness (the Timaeus interpretation advocated by Richard Sorabji). It is argued that this was both a correct interpretation of Plato’s text, and one shared in much subsequent ancient and medieval philosophy, including Plotinus, Augustine, and Aquinas. From our own human perspective, a present tense without past or future connections might be considered ‘a kind of logical torso’, a defective remnant of ordinary time. For Plato that human conception of present time is itself a mere image of eternity.

Chapter 3 begins the introduction to Jan Assmann through material that is shared between him and Girard: Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. This text stepped into a multi-century discourse that tried to abolish the monotheistic distinction between “Israel” vs. “Egypt.” But, contrary to simplistic readings of Freud as the enemy of religion, he ultimately argues (with mixed veracity) that monotheistic intolerance is a beneficial “progress in intellectuality.” This introduces much of Assmann’s topics: that is, comparing monotheism between Akhenaten and Egypt, Moses and Israel, and theorizing monotheism’s relationship to violence and politics.

Philo of Alexandria (about 20 BCE–50 CE) applied the logic of Platonic daimonification to the Jewish lawgiver Moses. Philo is important for three reasons: he did theoretical work identifying angels, daimones, and pure human souls. He also discussed why an angelic soul such as the pre-incarnate Moses would arrive on earth in flesh. Finally, Philo’s depiction of Moses as a living law in complete control of his emotions reinforced the ethical emphasis of the tradition. Philo's portrayal of Moses as a king descended from heaven best resembles the thought of the Hermetic Kore Kosmou.

Every judge who judges with complete fairness even for a single hour, the Writ gives him credit as though he had become a partner to the Holy One, blessed be He, in the creation.(BT Shabbat 10a)

In acting and judging with fairness—in applying the law in an impartial and equitable way—a judge models himself on divine creation. In this chapter, I interpret this rabbinic dictum along Maimonidean lines, drawing in part on some of Maimonides’ own views on creation and Mosaic prophecy. In the second part of the Guide Maimonides draws close connections between the two topics, and I help myself to that in presenting my own discussion of the aforementioned rabbinic dictum. The chapter proceeds in three sections, over the course of which I am concerned with teasing out the juridical analogy in a variety of ways: morphologically/structurally, psychologically, and finally teleologically.