The Call of Moses
c. 1447 or c. 1261 BC, traditional dateTraditional date
In Exodus Moses, born under Pharaoh’s order to kill Hebrew boys and raised by Pharaoh’s daughter, flees to Midian. At Horeb a voice from a burning bush reveals the divine name and sends him back to bring Israel out of Egypt.
Exodus opens with the descendants of Jacob grown numerous in Egypt (Exodus 1:1–7). A new king, “who didn’t know Joseph”, put them to forced labour on his store cities, Pithom and Raamses (Exodus 1:8–14), and then ordered that every Hebrew boy be thrown into the river (Exodus 1:22).
Moses was born to parents of the tribe of Levi. His mother hid him for three months and then set him among the reeds in a basket, where Pharaoh’s daughter found him. She paid the child’s own mother to nurse him and brought him up as her son (Exodus 2:1–10). As a grown man he killed an Egyptian whom he saw beating a Hebrew. When the deed became known he fled to Midian, where he married Zipporah, a daughter of the priest of Midian (Exodus 2:11–22).
Leading his father-in-law’s flock through the wilderness, he came to “God’s mountain, to Horeb”. There, Exodus says, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from a bush that burned without being consumed (Exodus 3:1–3). The voice from the bush named itself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, said that it had seen the suffering of the people in Egypt, and sent Moses to Pharaoh to bring them out (Exodus 3:4–10). Asked for a name, God answered “I AM WHO I AM” and gave the name Yahweh, which most English Bibles print as “the LORD”: “This is my name forever” (Exodus 3:13–15).
Moses objected that the people would not believe him, and was given three signs to perform (Exodus 4:1–9). He pleaded that he was slow of speech and asked that someone else be sent. His brother Aaron was appointed to speak for him (Exodus 4:10–17). The two met at the mountain and went together to the elders of Israel, who believed them (Exodus 4:27–31).
The story ties the rescue from Egypt to the promise made to the patriarchs: God, it says, “remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” (Exodus 2:23–25). The mountain of the call is the one to which Moses is told he will bring the people (Exodus 3:12), and it becomes the scene of the Covenant at Sinai. In the Gospels Jesus quotes the words spoken at the bush in his argument for the resurrection of the dead (Mark 12:26–27).
How this is dated
Traditional date. From later tradition or from internal biblical chronology, with no outside anchor.
Exodus gives no regnal year and names no pharaoh. It says only that Moses was eighty years old when he and Aaron spoke to Pharaoh (Exodus 7:7), so the call belongs shortly before the departure from Egypt. Stephen’s speech in Acts divides his earlier life into forty years in Egypt and forty in Midian (Acts 7:23) (Acts 7:30).
The calendar year therefore depends on the date of the exodus, which is disputed: about 1446 BC if the 480 years of (1 Kings 6:1) are counted literally, or about 1260 BC if the store city Raamses (Exodus 1:11) is the residence built by Ramesses II. For the first see Bryant G. Wood, “The Rise and Fall of the 13th-Century Exodus-Conquest Theory”, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48 (2005), pp. 475–489; for the second, James K. Hoffmeier, “What Is the Biblical Date for the Exodus? A Response to Bryant Wood”, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50 (2007), pp. 225–247. No Egyptian record mentions Moses or the exodus, and many scholars doubt that an exodus on the scale the Bible describes took place; the note on the Exodus from Egypt sets out the question. The timeline places the call one year before the exodus, at the earlier of the two dates, and shows both.
Primary sources
In context
Grows out of
- about 1898 BC to 1876 BC, traditional date
Leads to
- c. 1446 or c. 1260 BC, traditional date