Moses

Moses is a divinely sent liberator, lawgiver, and mediator whose brief appearance in Raphael’s account gives human history a decisive political and theological shape. He emerges as the leader through whom an enslaved people are released from Egypt, led through the wilderness, organized under law, and directed toward the promised land. His authority does not arise from self-assertion: it is delegated by God, made visible through signs and judgments, and fulfilled through obedient service. At Sinai, his role becomes representative as well as executive, because he receives and reports the divine will that mortal beings cannot endure hearing directly.

Identity and Historical Setting

Moses belongs to the later history of Abraham’s descendants. Raphael describes the patriarch’s grandchild as leaving Canaan with twelve sons and settling in Egypt during a time of famine, where the family grows into a nation. A later king, alarmed by their increasing numbers, converts the former guests into slaves and orders the death of their infant males. Moses therefore enters the narrative at the point where inherited promise has become political oppression: Abraham’s seed survives, but in a land that treats its growth as a threat.

Moses is named alongside Aaron as one of the two brothers sent by God to claim the oppressed people from bondage. Their mission links familial partnership with divine commission. They do not merely negotiate a change of status; they confront a ruler who refuses to acknowledge Israel’s God and must be compelled by signs and judgments. The narrative thus places Moses at the meeting point of providential promise, imperial resistance, and collective deliverance.

Liberation from Egypt

Moses’ first great function is to break the power of the Egyptian tyrant. Through the signs associated with his mission, the Nile is turned to blood, frogs, lice, and flies invade the palace and the land, livestock die of disease, bodies are covered with sores, and thunder, hail, and fire devastate the fields. Locusts consume what remains, while palpable darkness covers Egypt for three days. Finally, at midnight, all the firstborn of Egypt lie dead. These judgments are not random wonders but a graduated pressure upon a ruler who repeatedly hardens his heart after apparent submission.

The sequence culminates in the release of Israel. Egypt’s king at last permits the sojourners to depart, yet his surrender is unstable: after each temporary humbling, his heart becomes hard again, and he pursues the people he has dismissed. Moses then exercises the power that most clearly defines his public image. At God’s command he extends his rod over the sea; the waters divide, standing like crystal walls, and Israel crosses on dry land. When the Egyptian host follows, Moses again extends the rod, the waters return, and the pursuing army is overwhelmed. The same instrument that opens a passage for the enslaved becomes the means by which the pursuing war machine is destroyed.

The escape is guarded by divine presence. God’s Angel goes before the people, while a Cloud and a Pillar of Fire guide their movement and protect them from pursuit. Moses is therefore not portrayed as an autonomous wonder-worker. His power is effective because he acts as God’s servant, and the deliverance depends on a coordinated relation between human obedience, prophetic command, and divine intervention.

Wilderness Leadership and Law

After the crossing, Israel does not take the most direct route to Canaan. The people travel through the wilderness so that they will not immediately confront the Canaanites in war and, through fear or inexperience, turn back to Egypt. The delay becomes formative rather than merely geographical. In the wilderness they establish their government and choose a great senate to rule the twelve tribes under laws ordained by God.

Moses’ central political achievement is mediation at Mount Sinai. God descends amid thunder, lightning, and loud trumpets to establish laws governing both civil justice and religious rites of sacrifice. The mountain trembles before the divine manifestation, and the law gives institutional form to the rescued people. Liberation from Pharaoh is therefore not the final goal. Israel must move from forced service under a tyrant to ordered communal life under divine law.

The people cannot endure the direct voice of God, which is dreadful to mortal ears, and ask Moses to report the divine will instead. God grants this request. Moses consequently becomes a figure of mediation: he stands between revelation and the community, translating an overwhelming divine command into a form that human beings can receive. Raphael explicitly presents this office as a figure of a greater mediator to come, with Moses’ future prophecy pointing toward the Messiah and the promised Seed who will accomplish mankind’s deliverance.

The Tabernacle and the Promised Land

Moses’ work continues beyond the giving of laws. Once the laws and rites are established, God chooses to dwell among obedient human beings. At divine prescription, a sanctuary is built from cedar overlaid with gold. Within it stand the Ark, the testimony recording the covenant, a golden mercy-seat between two Cherubim, and seven lamps representing the fires of Heaven. A Cloud rests over the Tent by day and a fiery gleam by night, except when the people travel.

The Tabernacle makes Moses’ mediation spatial as well as verbal. The law is preserved within a sacred structure, while divine presence accompanies the moving people. The sanctuary converts the wilderness from a temporary interval into an ordered stage of covenantal life: Israel is not merely escaping Egypt but becoming a community capable of carrying law, worship, memory, and divine presence toward its destination.

The people are eventually conducted by God’s Angel to the land promised to Abraham and his seed. Moses’ story, as Raphael recounts it, thus forms a complete movement from slavery to passage, from passage to government, and from government to settlement. The account also looks beyond him. The wars, kings, and victories that will follow are mentioned only in outline, while Moses remains the crucial mediator through whom the nation receives the conditions of its identity.

Narrative and Theological Significance

Moses’ episode clarifies the poem’s distinction between legitimate authority and tyranny. Earlier in Raphael’s history, Satan argues that beings who are equal in freedom should not submit to monarchy, while Abdiel answers that authority is legitimate when it proceeds from the Creator and serves the unity and dignity of the created order. Moses’ mission provides a human historical counterpart to that dispute. Pharaoh’s dominion is coercive and exploitative: he turns guests into slaves, kills children, and pursues those he has released. Moses’ authority, by contrast, is received rather than usurped and is directed toward freeing a people and establishing justice.

His conduct also embodies the poem’s account of free obedience. Raphael teaches Adam that God made rational beings perfect but not immutable, leaving perseverance within their freely ordered will; voluntary service, not compelled action, is what God accepts. Moses’ public career reflects this principle through action rather than abstract argument. He does not replace divine authority with his own, but carries out a commission whose signs, judgments, and laws make obedience the instrument of communal freedom.

Finally, Moses belongs to a chain of mediators and anticipations. Adam hears of him as part of the history that will lead from Abraham’s seed toward the deliverer who bruises the Serpent’s head. At the close of Raphael’s revelation, Adam understands that the promised Seed will return in glory, dissolve Satan and his perverted world, and raise new Heavens and a new Earth founded in righteousness, peace, and love. Moses therefore occupies an intermediate but indispensable place in the poem’s sacred history: he is neither the final redeemer nor merely a national hero, but the lawgiving mediator whose liberation and covenant prepare the narrative ground for redemption.