The Three Lives Moses Lived Before Sinai

The Moses most people know is the Exodus Moses , the staff, the plagues, the parted sea. The Chronicles of Jerahmeel knew a different one.

After Moses killed the Egyptian taskmaster and fled into the desert (Exodus 2:15), he did not simply arrive in Midian and meet Jethro's daughters at a well. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle translated by Moses Gaster in 1899, Moses traveled far south, to the kingdom of Cush, where a war had been grinding on for years. The Cushite king had been besieged so long by enemies that his own people had nearly given up. Moses arrived at exactly the right moment, made himself useful in the war councils, and over years of demonstrated competence, the Cushites made him their king. He ruled there for forty years. He had an entire life in Cush before he ever reached the burning bush.

This is the man who then walked into the wilderness and encountered God for the first time at Horeb. Not a young fugitive. A man who had governed a kingdom, led armies, buried a king and been chosen to succeed him by the people he had served. When God told Moses he was going to lead Israel out of Egypt, Moses's protests were not the protests of an inexperienced man overwhelmed by the assignment. They were the protests of a man who knew exactly what it cost to lead people through long, hard things.

The second life the Chronicles preserves is the ascent to heaven. When Moses climbed the firmament to receive the Torah, a cloud crouched before him like a living creature. He did not know whether to ride it or grab hold of it. The cloud opened, swallowed him, and carried him upward. Then Moses walked across the firmament the way a person walks across the earth. The first angel he encountered was Qemuel, commander of twelve thousand destroying angels, who tried to block his path. Moses struck him down and kept walking. Angel after angel rose to stop him. Moses kept moving, deeper into the celestial realm, until he reached the divine throne and took the Torah by force.

Force is not too strong a word. The apocryphal tradition does not soften this. Moses argued, pushed, and prevailed. The Torah was not handed to him as a gift. He went and got it, past twelve thousand angels who did not want him to have it. A man who had already spent forty years governing a foreign kingdom in the south of the world did not arrive at the firmament to be stopped by celestial gatekeepers.

The third life ends on a mountain, and here the Chronicles of Jerahmeel asks a question most readers never think to ask: why did God personally attend to Moses's burial? Why not send an angel, the way he sent angels for everything else? The chronicle's answer reaches back to the night of the Exodus, when every Israelite was carrying out gold and silver and the wealth of Egypt. Moses spent that entire night searching through the city for one thing: the coffin of Joseph, who had made the Israelites promise to carry his bones out of Egypt when they left (Genesis 50:25). Three days and three nights Moses walked the streets of Egypt, while everyone else loaded themselves with treasure, until he found what he was looking for.

God remembered. And when the man who spent three days honoring an old promise lay down on the mountain to die, God came himself. Not as delegation. Not as representation. The burial of Moses was personal.