Moses

c. 1400–c. 1280 BCE · Ancient Israel

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Bible5 works in canonNonfiction
Influence98th pct
Popularity77th pct

Peak-work percentile in the canon.

InfluenceDrew from 0 · Inspired 14
Active period621 BCE – 500 BCE
Influence

The lineage through Moses

Inspired(14)

who Moses shaped

  • Three chapters of Genesis become twelve books of English epic
  • Milton takes the bare frame here — the Creation, the forbidden tree, the serpent, the Fall, the expulsion from Eden — and fills it with motive, interiority, and theology
  • Paradise Lost is the most ambitious expansion of Genesis ever attempted: everything Scripture states in a sentence, Milton dramatizes across thousands of lines
  • The first verses of Genesis become Augustine's final subject — Confessions doesn't end with his conversion, it ends inside Genesis 1
  • Books 11-13 are a sustained verse-by-verse exegesis of the creation account, with Book 13 reading each day allegorically
  • Augustine pushes against the Manichaeans who dismissed Genesis, and in defending it he wrestles for pages with what "In the beginning" reveals about time, eternity, and creation
  • Genesis 4 — Cain marked, condemned to wander for shedding innocent blood — is the buried template under Coleridge's poem
  • Coleridge first tried to retell it straight as The Wanderings of Cain; that scheme, by his own account, "broke up in a laugh: and the Ancient Mariner was written instead"
  • The Mariner is a Cain at sea — kill the innocent albatross, wear the mark, wander the earth telling your tale
  • Genesis opens the Moby-Dick — Melville's Extracts section leads with Scripture, and the first extract is drawn from here
  • Its disowned outcast, Ishmael — Abraham's banished son by Hagar — gives Melville his wandering, sole-survivor narrator a name and an archetype
  • And the fall-and-pride frame is everywhere: Ahab is the wicked king of Kings, doomed inside a Genesis-shaped story of hubris
Thomas HobbesEnlightenment

via Leviathan

  • Deuteronomy gives Hobbes both his evidence and his throne — he grounds the sovereign's authority in "Moses' seat" and the Mosaic covenant
  • It also hands him a weapon: Hobbes reads Deuteronomy's own line that "no man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day" as proof the text was written after Moses died, opening his case against Mosaic authorship
  • A founding act of biblical criticism, built out of Deuteronomy 34 and the "volume of the law" in chapters 11–27
UnknownBible

via Beowulf

  • Genesis supplied the monsters their pedigree — the Beowulf poet makes Grendel a descendant of Cain, the first murderer (Genesis 4)
  • The Flood surfaces too, carved onto the hilt of an ancient sword
  • A Christian poet grafting Scripture onto a pagan Germanic legend — Genesis becomes the origin story for the dark of the moor
  • Blake spent a lifetime wrestling Genesis — he illustrated an entire manuscript of it (c. 1826–27) and painted "Elohim Creating Adam"
  • His prophetic books rewrite the Creation and the Fall as his own myth, with "The Book of Urizen" mimicking Genesis's chapter-and-verse form to invert it
  • The Bible's opening becomes, in Blake's hands, a nightmare of creation rather than a blessing
  • Douglass taught himself to read on the KJV and could quote Exodus from memory — and he turned its deliverance story into the shape of his own life
  • His escape from slavery is cast as a new Exodus: Pharaoh's Egypt becomes the slaveholding South, the Promised Land becomes freedom in the North
  • The Mosaic liberator — one man leading his people out of bondage — is the role Douglass writes himself into
  • The Fall is the template Shakespeare reaches for when England loses its king
  • Richard II casts the realm as 'this other Eden, demi-paradise' (Gaunt, 2.1), then watches it degrade — the garden scene (3.4) names Adam, Eve, and the serpent outright to frame Richard's deposition as 'a second fall of cursed man'
  • Even the thorns and thistles of Genesis 3:18 surface, turning a king's mismanaged kingdom into a fallen garden
  • Exodus gave Bunyan his master plot: a journey out of bondage, through the wilderness, toward a promised land
  • Christian's flight from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City reworks the deliverance-from-Egypt arc beat for beat
  • Bunyan even arms his hero with Moses' rod and invokes the Red Sea crossing — the Exodus typology is right there in his margins
  • Eden, but with a twist — Marvell prizes the garden and quietly wishes Eve had never arrived
  • 'The Garden' invokes the 'happy garden-state' of Adam alone — 'Two paradises 'twere in one / To live in paradise alone' — making Genesis the frame for a poem about solitude and pleasure
  • The Edenic imagery spills into 'Bermudas' and 'Upon Appleton House' too; the first garden is Marvell's recurring ideal
  • The fall-from-paradise architecture that runs underneath Brontë's moors
  • Raised at the parsonage on Scripture, Emily Brontë threads roughly 110 biblical references through Wuthering Heights — and patterns Catherine and Heathcliff's innocence-to-fall arc on Eden
  • Watch for the apples and the garden: the Genesis template surfaces in the novel's images of paradise lost
  • Emerson plunders Exodus to make the opposite point — he rewrites the Passover injunction, declaring he'd "write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim" where Israel was told to paint the blood
  • Self-Reliance takes the Old Testament's holiest commands and flips them inward: the burning-bush ground is holy because God is in you
  • The reverence is gone, the irreverence is the point — read Exodus first to feel exactly what Emerson is overturning
  • The creature's deepest grievance is a Genesis grievance — like Adam, he was made and then abandoned by his maker, and he wants to know why
  • Shelley reaches it by way of Milton (the creature reads Paradise Lost, and the epigraph is Adam's complaint), but the wound underneath is the oldest one: a creation turning to face its creator
See the full map
In their words

Famous Quotes

“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

“Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.”

— Moses and Aaron to Pharaoh, Exodus 5:1 (KJV), Exodus

“And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”

— God to Moses at the burning bush, Exodus 3:14 (KJV), Exodus

“And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?”

— Cain to the LORD, Genesis 4:9 (KJV), Genesis
Biography

About Moses

Traditional author of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Whether a historical figure or a literary attribution, Moses is the foundational lawgiver and prophet of the Israelite tradition, leading the exodus from Egypt and receiving the covenant at Sinai.

Moses, Ranked

According to Groblé

  1. 31Genesis~550 BCMosesModerate·Medium·153 pagesInfluence98Popularity77BibleScripture — NarrativeHebrew
  2. Numbers~550 BCMosesHard·Medium·132 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleScripture — NarrativeHebrew
  3. Exodus~550 BCMosesModerate·Medium·131 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleScripture — NarrativeHebrew
  4. Leviticus~500 BCMosesHard·Short·98 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleScripture — LawHebrew
  5. Deuteronomy~621 BCMosesModerate·Medium·113 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleScripture — LawHebrew