Moses, then, is said to have been born when the tyrant’s law forbade male children to be kept alive. Yet grace had already given him what time would normally bring only later. Even in his swaddling clothes he appeared remarkably beautiful, and his parents could not bring themselves to put such a child to death.
When the tyrant’s threat became too strong to resist, Moses was not simply thrown into the Nile. Instead, they placed him in a basket sealed along its seams with asphalt and pitch and set him on the current, as those who carefully recorded his story relate. A divine power steered the basket toward a bank at the side, and the force of the waves carried it ashore there.
The king’s daughter happened to be walking through the meadows along that bank, where the basket had come to rest. The baby cried out from inside, and she found him there. When she saw him, with the grace that was visible in him, he immediately won her affection, and she adopted him as her son. But he naturally refused a foreign woman’s breast. So, through a plan devised by one of his relatives, he was nursed at his own mother’s breast.
Once Moses had passed childhood under royal care, he was educated in the learning valued by those outside his own people. Yet he no longer chose to acknowledge as his mother the woman who had become his mother by adoption. Instead, he returned to his natural mother and joined his own people.
When a fight arose between a Hebrew and an Egyptian, Moses came to the aid of his kinsman and killed the foreigner. Later, when two Hebrews were fighting each other, he tried to stop their quarrel. He advised them that, since they were brothers, they should let their shared nature, not anger, decide their dispute.
Rejected by the man who sided with injustice, Moses turned that humiliation into the starting point for a higher way of life. He withdrew from life among the crowds and lived thereafter in seclusion. There he eventually became the son-in-law of a foreigner, a man able to discern what was better and experienced in judging people’s character and way of life.
From a single deed—Moses’ intervention against the shepherds—this man recognized the young man’s virtue. Moses had defended justice without seeking any gain for himself. He punished the shepherds’ injustice even though they had done him no personal wrong, simply because he regarded justice itself as worthy of honor. Admiring this, the man valued Moses’ virtue, though he appeared poor, more highly than great wealth. He gave him his daughter in marriage and allowed him to pursue the life he desired.
Moses chose a mountain life of solitude, free from all the bustle of public life, tending sheep in the wilderness.
After Moses had spent some time in this way of life, the story says that he received an awe-inspiring appearance of God. It was high noon, and another light, brighter than sunlight, flashed around his eyes. Startled by the strange sight, he looked toward the mountain and saw a bush from which the radiance blazed like fire, while its branches remained fresh and flourishing in the flame as though covered in dew. He said to himself, “I will go over and see this great sight.”
After he said this, he no longer experienced the wonder of the light through his eyes alone. Most astonishing of all, the rays of that brightness also illuminated his hearing. The grace of the light reached both senses: its flashing rays flooded his sight, while its pure teaching enlightened his hearing.
Then the voice from that light prevented Moses from approaching the mountain while weighed down by his dead sandals. He had to remove the sandals from his feet before touching the ground illuminated by the divine light.
I do not think we should linger too long over the bare account of his life if our discussion is to reach the subject before us. So, after this, Moses was strengthened by the appearance of God he had seen and commanded to rescue his own people from slavery to the Egyptians. To show him more fully the strength God was giving him, God commanded him to test it with what was already in his hands. The test was this: when the staff fell from his hand, it came alive and became a serpent. When he picked it up again, it returned to what it had been before. His hand too, when he drew it out from inside his robe, turned white as snow; when he put it back inside, it returned to its natural state.
As Moses went down to Egypt, he took with him his wife, who was from another people, and the children he had by her. At that point, an angel is said to have met him and threatened him with death. His wife averted the threat with the blood from their child’s circumcision. Then Aaron met Moses, having himself been moved by God to go out and meet him.