Exodus 2:1-10
Drawn out of the water
Hidden three months, set adrift in a basket sealed with pitch, and lifted out by the one household in Egypt that could protect him. His mother is paid to nurse her own son.
People of the Bible
Moses
Argued with God for most of a chapter about why he was the wrong man, and was sent anyway.
Moses is pulled out of a river by the daughter of the king who ordered him drowned, raised in the palace that owned his people, and loses it all in a day by killing an Egyptian. Forty years later a bush burns without burning up and he is told to go back. He refuses five separate times. What follows is the rest of his life: ten confrontations with Pharaoh, a sea that opens, forty years of leading people who keep asking to go back, and a mountain where he is handed the law twice because he broke it the first time.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Moses
- 01
- 02
Exodus 3:1-4:17
The bush that would not burn up
Five objections: who am I, what is your name, they will not believe me, I cannot speak, send someone else. The last one makes God angry, and he is sent regardless.
- 03
Exodus 7:1-12:32
Ten times asked, ten times refused
The signs move from the river to the livestock to the sky to the firstborn, and each one takes apart something Egypt worshipped. Pharaoh relents only after the last.
- 04
Exodus 14:10-31
Stand still and see
Trapped between the sea and the chariots, the people say they would rather have stayed slaves. He tells them to stop shouting, stretches out his hand, and the wind blows all night.
- 05
Exodus 32:1-35
The tablets broken at the foot of the mountain
He comes down carrying stone written on both sides and finds a calf and dancing. He breaks them, grinds the calf to powder, and then asks to be blotted out of the book instead of the people.
- 06
Deuteronomy 34:1-12
Shown the land from Nebo
He climbs where he can see all of it and is told he will not cross. He dies there at a hundred and twenty with his sight undimmed, and is buried by God in a valley nobody has found.
Why it matters
Nothing in the Old Testament is untouched by him. The law, the tabernacle, the priesthood, the shape of the nation and the memory of the rescue all come through one man who insisted he was not a speaker. Scripture says no prophet arose like him, that God spoke with him face to face, and in the same breath records that he never entered the land, because he struck a rock he had been told to speak to.
59 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
