Moses

Moses is a major religious leader, lawgiver and prophet in the bible. According to Exodus, Moses’ mother hid him in a stream when the Egyptian pharaoh ordered that all Hebrew baby boys be killed. He is found by the pharaoh’s daughter and raised in the midst of the royal family. After he kills an Egyptian whom he finds beating a Hebrew, Moses flees across the Red Sea to escape execution. Here he marries, has children and works in the in-laws’ shepherding business. Oh, and he has his first encounter with God in the form of the burning bush. God tells him to go back and lead the Israelites out of Egypt to the Promised Land. This he does, after God visits ten plagues upon Egypt due to the pharaoh’s reluctance to let the Israelites go. Moses and his people flee the Egypt via the parting of the Red Sea and make it to Mount Sinai, where the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone are given by God to Moses. The Israelites then wander in the desert for forty years, and Moses dies just as they come within sight of the Promised Land. The Bible tells us he is 120 years old. This is quite a life span, with quite a lot of remarkable living packed into it, too. And we’re pretty sure he looked just like Charlton Heston.

Moses is a major religious leader, lawgiver and prophet in the bible. According to Exodus, Moses’ mother hid him in a stream when the Egyptian pharaoh ordered that all Hebrew baby boys be killed. He is found by the pharaoh’s daughter and raised in the midst of the royal family. After he kills an Egyptian whom he finds beating a Hebrew, Moses flees across the Red Sea to escape execution. Here he marries, has children and works in the in-laws’ shepherding business. Oh, and he has his first encounter with God in the form of the burning bush. God tells him to go back and lead the Israelites out of Egypt to the Promised Land. This he does, after God visits ten plagues upon Egypt due to the pharaoh’s reluctance to let the Israelites go. Moses and his people flee Egypt via the parting of the Red Sea and make it to Mount Sinai, where the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone are given by God to Moses. The Israelites then wander in the desert for forty years, and Moses dies just as they come within sight of the Promised Land. The Bible tells us he is 120 years old. This is quite a life span, with quite a lot of remarkable living packed into it, too. And we’re pretty sure he looked just like Charlton Heston.

Moses the Raven is a character in George Orwell’s 1945 allegorical novella, Animal Farm, who is a special pet of Mr. Jones. He does not have to work and he does not listen to the revolutionary speeches of Old Major. He is a tame bird who likes to talk about “Sugarcandy Mountain”, where animals go when they die, and he is accused of giving false hope to the animals that their hard lives and sufferings will be compensated for after death. Napoleon and the other pigs find him very troublesome in their efforts to organize the animals. When the animals on the farm do revolt, Moses leaves at the same time as the Joneses and the other humans, but he returns years later. By this time, Napoleon and the pigs have become just like the humans they revolted against, and they have no objection to Moses being back – after all, he can go right back to giving the animals false hopes all over again, keeping them in their place, pacified and submissive, but now to the pigs instead of to the humans. Indeed, for his efforts, he is rewarded with beer every day. We don’t have much trouble knowing what Moses represents, do we!?