Moses

Definition and Meaning

Moses is the figure in the Old Testament who led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt and delivered God's law to the people. Exodus 2:10 connects his name with the meaning "drawn out of the water." Jewish and Christian traditions regard him as one of the most important prophets.

Biblical and Historical Background

• He was born at a time when Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, had ordered that Hebrew male infants be killed, and he was adopted and raised by Pharaoh's daughter.
• After killing an Egyptian, he fled to Midian and married Zipporah. He later received God's call from the burning bush at Mount Horeb (Exodus 3).
• Following the ten plagues, the Passover, and the crossing of the Red Sea, he received the Ten Commandments and the law at Mount Sinai and erected the tabernacle, a portable place of worship.
• Because of the incident at Meribah, he was told that he would not enter Canaan (Numbers 20:12); after viewing the land from Mount Nebo, he died at the age of 120 (Deuteronomy 34).

Traditionally, Moses has been regarded as the author of the Pentateuch. Modern biblical criticism has proposed that multiple sources were edited together over a long period. Scholars are also divided over the date of the Exodus, with proposals including the fifteenth century BC and the thirteenth century BC. In the New Testament, Moses is mentioned alongside Jesus or compared with him in passages such as the account of the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:3), John 1:17, and Hebrews 3.

Practice in the Korean Church

In Korean preaching, the Exodus is frequently used as a text pointing to salvation as deliverance from sin, and the forty years in the wilderness as a picture of the journey of faith. The scene in which Aaron and Hur hold up Moses' hands (Exodus 17) is commonly cited as an illustration of intercessory prayer. Sunday school curricula and Vacation Bible School programs also feature Moses as a leading biblical figure.

Denominations differ in their emphasis when interpreting the Mosaic law.

• The Reformed tradition, including Presbyterian churches, teaches the Ten Commandments as a rule of life for believers and treats them in detail in the Westminster Confession of Faith and its catechisms.
• Lutheranism places weight on the distinction between law and gospel and emphasizes the law's function of bringing the knowledge of sin.
• Churches influenced by dispensationalism treat the period in which the Mosaic law was given as a distinct era (dispensation).
• The Seventh-day Adventist Church keeps a Saturday Sabbath on the basis of the fourth commandment. Most Protestant churches, by contrast, worship on the Lord's Day.

On the question of the authorship of the Pentateuch, conservatives have generally affirmed Mosaic authorship, while progressives have accepted the findings of critical scholarship. These differing views of Scripture became a point of contention during the schisms in the Korean Presbyterian Church in the 1950s.