Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Biblical Moses
2. Moses in Post-Biblical Tradition
Part 1
Contemporary Images of Moses
Chapter 1
Subverting the great Man:
Violence and Magic in Moses Fiction
1. Ancient Polemical roots of the Modern Moses Novels
2. Idealism and the Egyptian Moses
3. Identity and Recognition
4. Stock Endings and Ideology
5. Violence, Magic, and Critique
a. Socialism, Fascism, and violence: Steffens and Mann
b. Moses and Magic: Hurston
6. Conclusion
Chapter 2
Double-Moses: Gender and the Sacred in Moses films
1. Doubling
2. The Ten Commandments (1956)
3. Moon of Israel
4. Prince of Egypt
5. Conclusion
Chapter 3
Legend and history in modern scholarly portraits of Moses
1. Myth, legend, and history
2. Julius Wellhausen
3. Hugo Gressmann
4. Martin Noth
5. gerhard von Rad
6. Martin Buber
7. Conclusion
Interlude
Biblical text, biblical tradition
Chapter 4
Concealment, Revelation, and Gender:
The Veil of Moses in the Bible and in Christian Art
1. The Exodus Episode
2. Post-Biblical Legacy/History of Interpretation
a. Jewish Interpretation
b. Christian Interpretation
3. Images
a. Early Images (Ninth-Twelfth Centuries)
b. Moses and Synagogue
c. Later Images (Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Twentieth entury
d. Images with the Veil Apparently Pulled Back
e. Analysis of Veiled Moses Images
4. Beyond the Veil of Moses: Enlightenment Hermeticism
and the Unveiling of Nature
5. Conclusion
Part II
Uncanny Biblial Texts
Chapter 5
Moses' Heavy Mouth
Discourse and Revelation in Exodus 4:10-17
1. Moses' Objection
2. Moses and Aaron
3. Discourse and Revelation
Chapter 6
The Torah of Moses
Deuteronomy 3-32 as a Textual Memorial
1. The question of Narrative Chronology
2. The question of Reference: Torah and Songs
3. Redactional Harmonization in 32: 44-47?
4. The Question of Genre
5. Literary concerns
6. Conclusion
Chapter 7
The Songs and the Blessing:
Poetic Discourse in Deuteronomy 32-33
1. Parallelism and Biblical Poetry
2. Deuteronomy 32: The Song of Moses
3. Deuteronomy 33: The Blesing of Moses
4. Conclusion
Chapter 8
The Birth, Death, and Writing of Moses
1. Language, Structure, and Meaning of the Birth Story
2. Language, Structure, and Meaning of the Death Story
3. The Death of Moses and the Writing of Moses
4. Writing and Memory
5. Patterns in the Birth and Death Stories
6. Body of Moses, Text of moses
7. Conclusion
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index of References
Index of Authors

Exalted for centuries as a hero and author of the Bible, Moses is inseparable from biblical tradition itself. Moses is also an inherently ambiguous figure and a perennial focus of controversy, from ancient disputes of priestly rivalry to modern issues of class, gender and race.

In Rewriting Moses, Brian Britt analyses elements of polemic and ideology in the Moses of the Bible, of film, novel, visual art and scholarship. He argues that the biblical Moses lives within writing, while the post-biblical Moses lives more often in biography. Yet later rewritings of Moses refract biblical traditions of writing in surprising ways. Rewriting Moses provides an original account of the Freudian insight that traditions preserve what they repress.