Maimonides calls him "the most perfect human being", and the sages of the
Talmud said that "the Divine Presence
spoke from his throat." Yet the
Torah also attests that the man who took the Children of
Israel out of Egypt and received the Torah from
G-d was "the most humble man on the face of the earth."
Moses was born in Egypt on the 7th of
Adar of the year
2368 from creation (1393 BCE), at a time when the
Israelites
were slaves to the rulers of the land and subject to many harsh decrees.
He was the third born
of Jocheved and Amram's three children -- his brother Aaron was his senior by three years, and his sister Miriam by six.
When he was three months old, Moses was hidden in a basket set afloat
in the Nile to escape Pharaoh's decree that all male Hebrew children be
drowned; he was retrieved from the river by Pharaoh's daughter, Batyah, who raised him in the palace. At age 20, Moses fled Egypt after killing an Egyptian he saw beating a Jew and made his way to
Midian, where he married
Zipporah, the daughter of
Jethro, and fathered two sons, Gershom and
Eliezer.
When he was 80 years old, Moses was shepherding his father-in-law's sheep when G-d revealed himself to him in a burning bush at
Mount Horeb (Sinai) and instructed him to
liberate
the Children of Israel. Moses took the Israelites out of Egypt,
performed numerous miracles for them (the ten plagues in Egypt, the
splitting of the sea, extracting water from a rock, bringing down the manna,
and numerous others), received the
Torah from G-d and taught it to the people, built the
Mishkan
(Divine dwelling) in the desert, and led the Children of Israel for 40
years as they journeyed through the wilderness; but G-d did
not allow him to bring them into the Holy Land. Moses passed away on his 120th birthday on Mount Nebo, within
sight of the land he yearned to enter.