The story of Moses is told in the books of the Bible from Exodus to Deuteronomy. Liberator and lawgiver, Moses led his people from slavery in Egypt to Mount Sinai, where the divine law was revealed to him and the people were transformed from a band of fugitive slaves into a nation with a sense of special relationship with God. Having brought them to the borders of the Promised Land, he died before he could enter it himself.

In his superb retelling of the great epic, the famed literary critic and historian David Daiches reads the Biblical text attentively, listening for overtones and looking for parallels and contrasts with other documents from the ancient Middle East. He confirms, illuminates, and modifies the Biblical story with modern archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic evidence. He examines the Biblical narrative carefully in light of what scholars now believe about the way the traditions it embodies were transmitted. As a result, Daiches is able to trace the features of the historical Moses.

For Moses was a real person, and the exodus from Egypt, the experience at Sinai (however we interpret it), and the journey to the Promised Land were real events. The religious experience that the Bible tells us Moses first underwent alone with his flock of sheep in the wilderness of Midian was a genuine experience, which inspired him to remold the religious consciousness of his own people and, in doing so, to make possible the history of both Judaism and Christianity.

It is in the tension between loneliness and community leadership, between private mystical experience and the uncomfortable task of educating and leading a recalcitrant people, that Daiches sees the clue to Moses's character and achievement. What modern scholarship knows about the history of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine is here brought to focus on Moses, so that, peering through the mists of tradition, we are able to perceive his true face.

The dramatic story of this towering genius is brought vividly to life throughout the book with lavish illustrations-photographs that show the archaeological background to the story of the Israelites, reproductions of artists' representations of Moses and his life throughout the ages, and modern views of the countryside of Israel and Egypt in which the major events took place.