Abstract
Against the backdrop of problem of the meaning of life as constructed in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, this article asks the question of what the supposed meaning(s) of the biblical character of Moses’ life were assumed to be. By comparing a variety of contemporary philosophical perspectives on life’s meaning with what appears to be related nascent folk-metaphysical presuppositions in the world(s) of the biblical text, the pros and cons of reading with an anachronistic philosophical-theological meta-language are clearly demonstrated. It is concluded that what Moses’ life might have meant cannot be reduced either to a singular purpose or a unified teleology. Given the complex construction of his character’s personal identity over time, the point of it all remains fragmented, plural and elusive.
Highlights
Against the backdrop of the problem of the meaning of life as constructed in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, this article asks the question of what the supposed meaning(s) of the biblical character of Moses’ life were assumed to be
The context constructed for the question of the meaning of Moses’ life in the present article is to be located in the realm of comparative philosophy in general[8] and, in relation to Moses, in descriptive philosophy of religion[9] in particular
As regards the inner-biblical perspectives adopted in the discussion to follow, it is not assumed that there is just one coherent thing one can call the life of Moses or that any sort of teleological meaning(s) it historically had was something above and beyond the literary and theological agendas of the authors
Summary
Once upon a time in the world of the text began one of the most significant lives in the HB. 1 The man Moses’ life might have been rather short and pointless were it not for a number of miracles and set-backs which enabled it to drag on for a full 120 years in the story’s symbolic time-frame. It is true that the question of the meaning of Moses’ life in literary and historical-critical perspectives thereon is not a philosophical one at all but is concerned with the ideological and theological agendas of the post-exilic redactions of the Pentateuch.[7] A valid concern raised as a result of these seemingly incommensurable related domains of secondorder scholarly discourse is that the article asks a question that did not concern the biblical authors The latter were only interested in the story of Moses in terms of the Israelites or Jews as a people and the use of Moses to legitimate later belief revision within the associated scribal and communal traditions. With nor in the same genre of commentary as the more familiar literary, historical, social-scientific and theological approaches to the life of Moses
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