Lawgiver and liberator. Seer and prophet. The only human permitted to converse with God "face-to-face." Moses is the most commanding presence in the Old Testament. Yet as Jonathan Kirsch shows in this brilliant, stunningly original volume, Moses was also an enigmatic and mysterious figure--at once a good shepherd and a ruthless warrior, a spiritual leader and a magician, a lawgiver who broke his own laws, God's chosen friend and hounded victim. Now, in Moses: A Life, Kirsch accomplishes the wondrous feat of revealing the real Moses, a strikingly modern figure who steps out from behind the facade of Sunday school lessons and movie matinees.

Drawing on the biblical text and a treasury of both scholarship and storytelling, Kirsch examines all that is known and all that has been imagined of Moses. In these vivid pages, we see the marvels and mysteries of Moses's life in a new light--his rescue in infancy and adoption by an Egyptian princess; his reluctant assumption of the role of liberator; his struggles to wrest his people from the pharaoh's dominion; his desperate vigil on Mount Sinai. Here too is the darker, more ominous Moses--the sorcerer, the husband of a pagan woman, the military commander who cold-bloodedly ordered the slaying of innocent people; the beloved of God whom God sought twice to murder.

Jonathan Kirsch brings both prodigious knowledge and a keen imagination to one of the most compelling stories of the Bible, and the results are fascinating. A figure of mystery, passion, and contradiction, Moses emerges from this book very much a hero for our time.


From the Hardcover edition.

Moses: A Life is Jonathan Kirsch's attempt to depict the historical Moses. There is not one whit of archeological evidence that the great lawgiver ever lived, but Kirsch, a California lawyer, combs through the Scripture and its cultural remains with forensic zeal in his efforts to uncover the man he calls "the most haunted and haunting figure in the Bible." Although his thirst for empirical evidence remains, at the end, unsated, Kirsch's imagination is given new life by his quest. Moses emerges, in this fascinating, wide-ranging, and somewhat frustratingly logical book, as a person both necessary and nebulous. Kirsch concludes that Moses' existence cannot be proven, even though his influence is as great as that of any man who ever lived. --Michael Joseph Gross

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