IN order to learn at first hand who Moses was and the kind of
life that was his, it is obviously necessary to study the Biblical
narrative. There are no other sources worthy of serious considera-
tion; comparison of reports, normally the chief means of ascer-
taining historical truth, is not possible here. Whatever has been
preserved of Israel's traditions since ancient times is to be found
in this one book. Not so much as the vestige of a chronicle dating
from that period, or deriving from the nations with whom the
Children of Israel established contact on their journey from Egypt
to Canaan, has been preserved; and not the vaguest indication of
the event in question is to be found in ancient Egyptian literature.

The Biblical narrative itself is basically different in character
from all that we usually classify as serviceable historical sources.
The happenings recorded there can never have come about, in the
historical world as we know it, after the fashion in which they are
described. The literary category within which our historical mode
of thinking must classify this narrative is the saga; and a saga is
generally assumed to be incapable of producing within us any
conception of a factual sequence.

Further, it is customary to accept as a fundamental tenet of the
non-dogmatic Biblical scholarship of our day the view that the
tales in question belong to a far later epoch than the events related,
and that it is the spirit of that later epoch which finds expression
in them; or, even more, the spirit of the sundry and various later
periods to which are ascribed the "sources", the different con-
stituent parts of which the story is composed or compiled according
to the prevalent view. Thus Homer, for example, to take an
analogous case, provides us with a picture of the epoch in which he
himself lived rather than of the one in which his heroes did their
deeds.

Assuming that to be the case, just as little could be ascertained
regarding Moses' character and works as is to be ascertained of
Odysseus; and we would perforce have to rest content with the
possession of a rare testimony to the art with which court writers
commissioned by the Kings of Israel, or the more popular (in the
original sense of the word) prophets of the nation, wrought the
image of its Founder out of material entirely inaccessible to us.

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