Rewriting Moses

Few figures loom as large over the Bible as Moses, who is honored both as a hero and as its author. Yet he has never been easy to pin down. Ancient quarrels among priestly factions and modern debates over class, gender and race have all turned on his image, which has remained contested throughout.

Brian Britt examines how polemic and ideology shape Moses across several media: the biblical text, film, the novel, visual art and modern scholarship. His central claim is that the Moses of Scripture is bound up with writing, whereas later versions of him tend to take the form of biography. Still, subsequent retellings bend the biblical traditions of writing in unexpected directions. The book also offers a fresh treatment of the Freudian idea that traditions keep alive what they suppress.

This volume is the fourteenth in the Gender, Culture, Theory series and the 402nd in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series.