Jeremy Rosen
Who Was Moses?
Summary
Moses is so often referred to that many of us have a fixed image in our heads of who and what he was. In this lecture, Jeremy Rosen deeply explores the stories and nuance behind the iconic figure and offers many rarely known details.
Jeremy Rosen
Manchester-born Jeremy Rosen was educated at Cambridge University England and Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He has practiced as an orthodox rabbi, as principal of Carmel College in the UK, and as professor at the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Antwerp, Belgium. He has written and lectured extensively in the UK and the US, where he now resides and was the rabbi of the Persian-Jewish community in Manhattan.
Gilgamesh. Well yes, but Gilgamesh and others were pseudo gods. They were all in this kind of position between the top god and ordinary human beings. There were plenty in Atra-Hasis and other early Mesopotamia and others. The big difference is that Moses is described as HaIsh, Moses the man. That’s what the people said when he was up the mountain all the time. They said, “Moses the man, he’s gone. We’d better have an idol or a God instead.” So that was unique about Moses. He was an ordinary human being.
Well, I think it drives our story that we emerged in history at a certain moment in time with an incredible amount of, if you like, innovation, both in terms of our understanding God, monotheism. There’s no doubt that we are the founders of monotheism even though we fell back at various times and kept on worshipping idols as well later on. The foundation of a judicial system, the foundation of a religious system, the foundation of the culture that springs from it in law, in history, in commentary, in poetry, all these things coming from this original contribution.
Lots of things about the influence of Moses as being a great teacher and a great inspirer, first of all, of the Israelites. The Quran has very great deal of respect, actually, for Judaism. It’s the Hadit afterwards that comes up with all these horrible things about if you see a Jew hiding behind those rocks, bring him out and kill him and stuff of these kinds. But then without doubt, there was a great deal of respect, certainly in the earlier years, but through the Quran for Moses and for Judaism.