Moses, Man of the Mountain

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1939

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Author’s Introduction-Chapter 9

Chapters 10-19

Chapters 20-30

Chapters 31-40

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Author’s Introduction-Chapter 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Author’s Introduction Summary

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of suicidal ideation.

Hurston establishes the traditional Christian conception of Moses as a law-giver who led his people out of slavery in Egypt. She also acknowledges other perspectives on Moses: Across Africa, Moses is worshiped as a god because of his ability to speak directly to God. In Haiti and other parts of the African diaspora, the descendants of enslaved people consider Moses to be a source of mystical powers and magic. In America, people of all races look to Moses for magical power: She points to the best-selling book the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses as evidence. A reverence for the power of his magical staff lies consistently at the heart of his legend.

Chapter 1 Summary

In Goshen, the region of Egypt given to the Hebrew people, the new Pharaoh has prohibited the birth of Hebrew boys. Knowing their sons would be drowned, Hebrew women give birth in secret. The threat of Pharaoh’s violence lurks in every household, but Hebrew women keep getting pregnant.

Pharaoh’s oppression began with pushing the Hebrews out of their homes and into the furthest corners of Goshen. His next decree established the enslavement of Hebrews of all ages in Pharaoh’s brickyards and road camps. Aliens in their own country and without hope for the future, the Hebrews begin to sink into a collective depression.

Chapter 2 Summary

As the sun sets, Hebrew workers move massive stones into a foundation. An Egyptian foreman praises the sun-god Horus as the beginner of all things. Amram and Caleb, two Hebrew workers, discuss Amram’s fears about his wife’s pregnancy. Caleb offers to help him find a cave where she can safely give birth. Caleb shares his plans to attend a protest of Pharaoh’s mistreatment of the Hebrews. Amram argues that Pharaoh enjoys mistreating the Hebrews and that having a group of second-class citizens makes him feel powerful. Caleb suggests praying; Amram believes Egyptian gods will only help Egyptians, and their only hope is freedom after death.

Chapter 3 Summary

Caleb encourages Amram to attend the protest, explaining that resistance helps him to feel human. At home, Amram discovers that his wife, Jochebed, has already gone into labor. Jochebed orders Amram to keep her from screaming. The labor is long and difficult, and Amram struggles to keep Jochebed quiet and restrained. Old Puah, the midwife, criticizes the Egyptian laws that force women to give birth in secret. Jochebed and Amram’s 12-year-old son, Aaron, returns with the horrific news that the neighboring family has been massacred by secret police who discovered a newborn boy in the home. Moments later, Jochebed herself gives birth to a baby boy.

Chapter 4 Summary

Amram suggests killing the baby rather than letting Pharaoh kill him. Jochebed stops him, accusing him of not loving their son and demanding he find a solution. Amram digs a hole under the wall of the house to hide the baby from the secret police. In the first weeks of the baby’s life, the hiding spot is used frequently. Amram is constantly fearful of the secret police, while his wife is more hopeful.

In a public meeting, Pharaoh claims that the Egyptians have been good to the Hebrews, despite the fact that the Hebrews came to Egypt with the oppressive Romans. Because the Hebrews are now protesting Pharaoh’s laws, he has decided to make them harsher, increasing work hours and banning Hebrews from Egyptian temples. He also claims to be working with midwife spies, including Old Puah.

Amram considers killing himself. When Jochebed hears about Pharaoh’s speech, she decides to set her baby on the Nile, as other women have done. The family works through the night to build a boat from reeds. Jochebed releases the baby, weeping and praying to the Nile to protect him.

Chapter 5 Summary

Miriam, Amram’s young daughter, falls asleep while watching the baby float down the Nile. When she wakes, a group of young women including Pharaoh’s daughter are bathing across the river. Miriam watches the women retrieve a dark object from the river, which she assumes to be their supplies. The women’s guard spots and threatens to kill Miriam, but the Princess tells him to let her go.

Miriam runs home, excited to tell her mother about the Princess. When she remembers what she was sent to watch, Miriam makes up a lie: The Princess found the baby and brought him home to the palace. She claims to have spoken to the Princess, who asked her to be a nurse to the baby. Jochebed is thrilled by this news, and spreads it widely. Amram is pessimistic, believing the baby to be dead. Although the palace denies the story, the people of Goshen believe that they have a Hebrew prince in the palace.

Chapter 6 Summary

Pharaoh’s son, Ta-Phar, has all of his father’s arrogance and none of his skill. Ta-Phar is resentful of both his sister, the widowed Princess, and of her son Moses who is second in line to the throne. A naturally inquisitive child, Moses spends most of his time in the library and with the stableman, Mentu. Mentu spends hours answering Moses’s questions about the origin of things, offering subtle criticism of life in the palace. At Mentu’s urging, Moses tries to learn more about religion and priesthood by spending time in the temples. Worried that a religious Pharaoh would put them out of a job, the priests tell Moses to return after his manhood ceremony.

Chapter 7 Summary

Moses grows into a strong and confident young man. Pharaoh’s young military leaders appreciate his skills as a soldier, but the old guard favors Ta-Phar, the Pharaoh’s son. Ta-Phar is desperate to be a leader in his own right and resents Moses’s popularity. During the bi-annual military demonstrations, Ta-Phar takes his injured father’s place as Commander-in-Chief and leads troops in a demonstration against troops led by Moses. Moses’s forces upset Ta-Phar, surprising the Pharaoh and enraging his son. Pharaoh attempts to save face by pretending Moses is a secret weapon. After the demonstration, Mentu tells Moses about the Book of Thoth, which grants readers complete knowledge of nature and the ability to cross into the world of ghosts. Moses asks Mentu to accompany him on a journey to find it one day.

Chapter 8 Summary

Pharaoh declares Moses the Commander-in-Chief of Egyptian forces, angering Ta-Phar. Moses begs Pharaoh to give the role to Ta-Phar and allow him to travel with Mentu to find the Book of Thoth. Pharaoh forces Moses to accept, and Moses successfully leads Egyptian forces on conquests in Ethiopia, Assyria, and Babylonia. Despite his success, Moses feels unsatisfied.

Mentu falls ill. Just before he dies, he tells Moses to hold monkeys and snakes sacred. Moses spends time with the priests, and comes to believe they wield religion as a tool of oppression. He advocates for better treatment of the Hebrews, which Ta-Phar vehemently opposes. Pharaoh ends the restriction on the birth of male Hebrew babies, but warns Moses not to criticize the way he runs the country.

Chapter 9 Summary

One day Moses’s wife, an Ethiopian princess, accuses him of being a Hebrew. She says that Ta-Phar has been spreading rumors about a Hebrew woman claiming to be his sister who came to the palace to find him. Distressed, Moses leaves the palace and walks into the city. At a construction site, Moses watches as a foreman mercilessly whips a Hebrew worker. Moses kills the foreman with a single punch and tells the workers to bury him in the sand. Moses is happy when the foreman he killed is replaced by a Hebrew foreman, but the workers feel there is no difference. They accuse Moses of seeking power himself. Frustrated by his sense of powerlessness, Moses decides to leave the palace in secret.

Author’s Introduction-Chapter 9 Analysis

The Author’s Introduction to Moses, Man of the Mountain establishes the cultural context for the novel in the biblical figure of Moses. Hurston’s exploration of the various iterations of the Moses story secures the novel’s place among the pantheon of tellings—including the Bible, the Koran, and other religious texts and oral traditions. The introduction pre-empts potential criticisms of Hurston’s attempts to refigure Moses as a Black man by identifying (and situating her novel within) a long tradition of Moses stories.

Hurston’s retelling of Moses’s birth and young adulthood closely follow the narratives found in Christian and Jewish traditions, with one important exception. The narrative deliberately obscures the truth of Moses’s origin, leaving the reader unsure if Moses is Hebrew or the biological grandson of Pharaoh. It is possible that the “dark, oval object” (33) that the Princess’s ladies retrieve is the baby Amram and Jochebed released onto the Nile as their daughter Miriam claims. However, Hurston depicts Miriam as an unreliable narrator, telling lies about other elements of the day, such as claiming the Princess asked her to nurse the baby at the palace. The narrative indicates that regardless of the truth, Jochebed and the Hebrews believe that the baby was rescued by the Princess: “They wanted to believe, and they did” (39). This early and deliberate insertion of doubt subverts the traditional Moses story, complicating audience expectations about the familiar biblical hero. Complicating Moses’s ancestry also has the potential to transform him from an exclusively Hebrew hero to a hero who can lead all of Egypt out of bondage, pointing to The Political Value of Storytelling.

Throughout the novel, characters speak in a 20th century African-American dialect familiar to Hurston’s audience. Amram’s first lines in the novel offer a representative example: “Horus may be all those good things to the Egyptians, brother, but that sun-god is just something to fry our backs” (12). The use of this contemporary dialect, as opposed to a more formal historical voice, draws direct parallels between the events depicted in the novel and contemporary politics. The use of slang such as “Phooey” (39) and “man alive” (53) firmly situates the story within the realm of American experience. Employing a contemporary African-American dialect and slang allows Hurston to draw a direct connection between the enslavement of the Hebrews in Egypt and the enslavement of Africans in the United States.

The opening chapters of the novel demonstrate Hurston’s specific interest in the devastating effect of political disenfranchisement and genocidal oppression. The existence of secret police to enforce Pharaoh’s prohibition on Hebrew births causes paranoia in the community: “Hebrew began to suspect Hebrew” (22) and “a casual conversation might bring a public whipping” as neighbors betrayed each other. The fact that this secrecy and betrayal centers on the home—women give birth in secret, and Pharaoh brags about his midwife spies—demonstrates how deeply the surveillance state has penetrated society in the novel. This political atmosphere leads some Hebrews, such as Moses’s father Amram, to despair. Although Jochebed convinces Amram not to kill their baby, Amram believes that death is preferable to a life of enslavement, asking “why would anybody want to live? Why don’t we kill ourselves and be done with the thing?” (29). Amram’s pessimism is countered by the hope of his wife and Caleb, but remains a powerful symbol of the devastating emotional effects of disenfranchisement and oppression, underscoring the novel’s thematic interest in Freedom as a Constant Struggle—echoing the words of Black political activist, academic, and author, Angela Y. Davis.

By dedicating three chapters to the trauma of Amram and Jochebed’s loss, Hurston recenters the focus of the Moses story away from the man himself onto the larger community. Hurston’s narrative reveals a specific interest in the effect of oppression on women. The violence of the scenes describing Jochebed’s labor is a reflection of the sexual violence facing enslaved women throughout history. As a result of the enslavement of the Hebrew people, “Pharaoh had entered the bedrooms of Israel. The birthing beds of Hebrews were matters of state” (10). This specifically gendered form of oppression highlights the full extent of bodily autonomy denied to enslaved women. Jochebed’s panic at the thought of losing her son mirrors the pain of enslaved African women in the United States, who often faced family separation at the whims of their enslavers. This focus on Jochebed’s suffering highlights the unique oppression of enslaved women, and ties the Moses story firmly to the history of Black Americans.