Why Moses Is So Special

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               

    Young Moses, Prince of Egypt with an Israelite-slave birth mother who was born 1391 BCE and died at age 120 in 1271 BCE.  

As our ancestors, homo Sapiens, moved out of Africa;  they developed and grew in intelligence and traveled through the Middle East before ever reaching the rest of the world.  There they developed their minds and invented a way of communication needed in trading with others;  writing.

Egypt developed the basics with cuniform, a type of abbreviated picture writing with symbols standing for words and sounds. (Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age  of 3300 BCE to 1200 BCE until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions which form its signs.) It seems that mankind thinks according to a planned time-frame, for Mesopotamians also invented writing at this time.  The tool of writing  spread like wildfire from one to another-again, just by making contact with one another,  perhaps in trading either goods or people, like through marriage. 

Leaving Egypt, amassing 603,550 Israelite and Other slaves and heading for Canaan;  slaves held in Egypt for 400 years, conditioned to a life of slavery...now to be suddenly freed with one overseer, Moses. Moses learned that he was from the Tribe of Levi through his brother, Aaron and mother, Jochebed.    

So here we are with Moses, the product of 2 Israelite slaves held in Egypt, Amran and Jochebed.  His story is considered true by the descendants of slaves who most likely shared a few DNA segments with Moses.  The story has been passed onto the descendants of those descendants that are alive today, remembering everything that happened due to writing, for Moses had it all written down--by himself on the Exodus that lasted 40 long years.  

    The princess looking at Moses in the basket, found in bull-rushes

He had been born at a time where males were suspect to attacking the pharaoh in the future due to a dream the pharaoh had, and taking over his government, so the pharaoh decided to get rid of all suspects by killing all boy babies 2 and younger. Moses was in that group.  His mother protected his life by hiding him in a floatable basket in the Nile river along the land, and lo and behold, the Egyptian princess found him.  With motherly instinctiveness,  she kept him for her own, not having a child.  

Moses had an older sister, Mirium.  His mother, Jochabed, had her watch what the princess did with Moses.  They needed a wet nurse for the baby who could produce milk.  Mirium made herself available to the princess and suggested her mother, Jochabed, who then came every day, or even lived with them for a while, nursing Moses.  

The father of Moses was Amram, a member of the clan of Kohathites or Cohens of the Levite tribe.  Moses had a brother, Aaron, who was about 4 years old at the time.  They were both the descendants of Shem, going way back to Noah and the Flood.  

Moses's parents were Amram and Jochebed.  (Jochebed was Amram's aunt.)  Amram was the grandson of Levi, father of Moses, Aaron and Miriam.  

Amram's father was Kohath.

Kohath's parents were Levi and Milcah. (Levi had one daughter, Jochebed, who married Amram).  

Levi's parents were Jacob and Leah.(Leah was Rachel's sister and both were the children of Laban and Adinahand).   

Jacob's parents were Isaac and Rebeccah. (Rebeccah was the daughter of Bethuel)  (Bethuel, was an Aramean man, the youngest son of Nahor and Milcah, the nephew of Abraham, and the father of Laban and Rebecca.) 

Isaac's parents were Abraham and Sarah. (Sarah was Abraham's niece.)

In those days of very few people on earth, one did not marry out of one's group, for others were just that-others,, and were suspect both in culture in intelligence and mainly, morality.  The family was developed by marrying within their own family.  Being it was so long ago, it did not hurt the next generation, only strengthened certain traits that would later be very important skills.  

Abraham had moved from Ur to Canaan in order to raise his own family amid his own morality that he felt had come to him through a One and Only G-d, not like anything going on in the world at that time.  Abraham was adamant about it, so all these people listed were taught his ideas.  They kept the children from marrying Canaanites, but it happened a few times.  

        Hagar and Ishmael passing by Abram's tent

Even Abraham himself had to marry Hagar, Sarah's Egyptian maid, in order to produce the children he had wanted, for Sarah was barren except for Isaac that would be born after his child with Hagar, who was Ishmael-to be the father of Arabs.  Then again, when Isaac  and Rebecca had twins, Esau and Jacob, and Esau strayed off, mixing in with the Canaanites who remained with the them.  Abraham let it be known that he was to be the father of many, and this is how it happened.  

Moses is about to be touched with the same gift;  handed down through his genes and through G-d who must have had this all planned out-that one of Abraham's descendants would have the gift. That gift would be that he alone could communicate with this high power we refer to as G-d and receive further instructions, carrying on with what Abraham instilled in his descendants.

This slave's son was able to grow up in the luxury and with education of the other princes, sons of the pharaoh.   He could read and write and argue with the best of the best.  

One day Moses, the prince, saw a slave being beaten almost to death, and he would have died had not Moses stopped him, but by doing so he in turn had killed accidently this overseer of the slaves.  He knew that one was not to kill, whether he had learned it from the princess, his mother, or from class or from his own instinct and being raised by his own mother's milk and tenderness and genes. 

 He knew he was in trouble for doing that, so he did what many today would have done; he got out of town before the sheriff came looking for him so he could hang him.                                          

           The meeting place for young people for thousands of years, the well.  Here Moses spoke with  Zipporah.  

This young man, full of goodness and light, had to go to the badlands of Mesopotamia, a desert land with sheiks and tents and sheep, and never look back.  He came upon a beautiful young lady, Zipporah one of many watching their sheep, daughters of the local Midian Sheik, Jethro; people of the Others, who were raised in a different culture with different mores.  

In those days the world-wide practice was of sacrifice in order to subdue the gods, giving them your most precious things in order to gain a good year.  Animals and people were the sacrifice.  Even Jacob thought G-d wanted him to sacrifice Isaac, his precious, only son from Sarah, that son he prayed so for so many years that she bore in her change-of-life years. He had gone through the preparation of sacrificing him.    Jacob was to learn that it was good that he was ready to obey G-d, but that from now on human sacrifice was to end.                             

I wonder how people of those days thought about human sacrifice.  Did they worry about being the sacrifice?  Did they think it was an honor to be chosen?  This has even been going on with the Aztec Indians of Central America . From their knowledge of the eras of the Templo Mayor, archaeologists estimate that the particular phases of the tzompantli they found were likely built between 1486 and 1502, although human sacrifice had been practiced in Tenochtitlan since its founding in 1325. 

     Moses and Aaron showing their power over the Pharaoh with his cane turning into one that could beat the Pharaoh's.  

You should know the rest of the story.  By the time Moses is 80 years old, like many of us, he thought back to his early days and wondered how the slave population fared.  He returned, discovered Aaron, his older brother, and spoke with the new pharaoh as the one he had known had since died.  Aaron did the speaking for him as he had developed a lisp, a speech impediment, perhaps from the shock of killing someone and having to flee for his life.  Or perhaps he had been born with it.  

All the elements were there; family, genes, attitude, environment to develop a man who could think and come to conclusions wisely, who had learned to control his temper, almost.  He had what it took to hear G-d speak to him and to pay attention and do his best to follow what he understood.  He stood alone and stuck to his goal.  He was one of Abraham's "stiff-necked" people.  Israelites have been narrowed down to Judeans, and they in turn have become Jews, still as stiff-necked as ever, sticking to the goals of Moses-and of G-d. 

The story of Moses is told in the biblical books of Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers but he continues to be referenced throughout the Bible and is the prophet most often cited in the New Testament.

Resource
Tankah, Stone Edition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kehath

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#:~:text=Calendar%20of%20sacrifice,-Main%20article%3A%20Aztec&text=The%20cycle%20of%20fifty%2Dtwo%20years%20was%20central%20to%20Mesoamerican%20cultures.

https://www.worldhistory.org/Moses/