Moses: The Lawgiver Who Led a People Out of Slavery and Into History
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M. Muñoz · AI-narrated by Martin (from Google)
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4 hr 28 min
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He is the most consequential figure in the history of religion, a man claimed simultaneously by three billion people across three faiths, a leader whose decisions echo in every courtroom and conscience in the Western world. Moses is not a myth. He is a problem -- a magnificent, insoluble, endlessly generative problem that has occupied philosophers, archaeologists, theologians, artists, and psychoanalysts for three thousand years without ever being fully resolved. This book is an invitation to that problem. Born under a death sentence in the Egypt of the New Kingdom pharaohs -- the most powerful civilization the ancient world had produced -- Moses was rescued from the Nile by a princess of the royal house, educated in the finest schools of the ancient world, and then, in a single act of violent justice, stripped of everything he had been given. His decades of flight and desert solitude ended at a burning bush on the slopes of Sinai, where a God who refused to give his name demanded that this reluctant, stammering fugitive return to Egypt and liberate an entire people from the greatest empire on earth. What followed -- the ten plagues, the parting of the sea, the giving of the Law on Sinai, forty years of desert formation and crisis -- is the foundational narrative of Western civilization. Moses traces every layer of this extraordinary story: the historical questions about the Exodus that archaeology has raised but not answered, the New Kingdom Egypt that forms the backdrop of the narrative, the birth of a leader in the intersection of two identities, the theology of the burning bush and the divine name, the ecological and supernatural dimensions of the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea and its interpretations, the Ten Commandments as covenant law, the Golden Calf crisis and Moses's extraordinary intercession, the portable theology of the Tabernacle, the forty years of desert leadership that nearly broke the man entrusted with it. And beyond the biblical narrative: Moses in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- where he is Musa, the most mentioned prophet in the entire Quran -- Moses in the sculpture of Michelangelo, the oratorios of Handel, the epics of DeMille, the animation of DreamWorks, and the radical psychoanalytic reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud, who in his final years argued that Moses was Egyptian and that the Jews had murdered him. A biography of the man who gave the Western world its moral grammar.
He is the most consequential figure in the history of religion, a man claimed simultaneously by three billion people across three faiths, a leader whose decisions echo in every courtroom and conscience in the Western world. Moses is not a myth. He is a problem -- a magnificent, insoluble, endless...
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