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

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 20-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 20 Summary

News of Moses’s arrival in Egypt spreads quickly among the people of Goshen. Moses asks Aaron to summon the Elders of the tribes, and is surprised to find Aaron’s sister Miriam among them. Aaron says that Miriam has been called to prophecy, and insists that she be a part of Moses’s team. Sensing Aaron’s competitiveness and personal ambition, Moses encourages him to think of himself as a tool for the mountain god’s work. Moses tells the Elders that the mountain god plans to deliver them from Egypt, and that the sound of thunder will mark their freedom. The Hebrews call Moses their rod of salvation, and pray for thunder.

Chapter 21 Summary

Moses and Aaron meet with Ta-Phar at the palace. Although Ta-Phar speaks arrogantly and flaunts his power, Moses senses his nervousness. Ta-Phar accuses Moses of trying to become king and insults the skills of the Hebrew army. Moses says the power of his right hand is enough to defeat Egypt. Ta-Phar brings in his priests, who turn sticks into snakes to demonstrate their power. Moses gives his staff to Aaron; when Aaron drops it, it turns into a snake that eats the priests’ snakes before turning back into a budding branch. Disturbed by Moses’s show of power, the priests leave. Moses asks Ta-Phar to let the Hebrews go; Ta-Phar refuses. Moses vows that they will be free and leaves. Moses’s legend grows among common Egyptians, but the elite class remain loyal to Pharaoh.

Chapter 22 Summary

Moses’s performance in the palace energizes the people of Goshen. Aaron believes that Pharaoh will soon give in. Moses explains that if Pharaoh frees the Hebrews now, they will return to Egyptian gods and Egyptian ways soon. In order for Moses to free the Hebrews and bring them fully to God, he needs to demonstrate his power by physically defeating the Egyptians.

Alone, Moses thinks about Jethro, Zipporah, and his sons. He feels isolated and lonely in Egypt. A teenage boy named Joshua approaches and asks to work for Moses, whom he believes to be the greatest man alive. Touched by his offer of service, Moses accepts and tells Joshua to move into his house immediately.

Chapter 23 Summary

Moses again orders Ta-Phar to free the Hebrews. When Ta-Phar refuses, Moses turns Egypt’s running water into blood (except in Goshen) as a sign of God’s power. Embarrassed, Ta-Phar demands that his priests repeat Moses’s trick; they manage to turn water red. Moses brings a plague of frogs, which multiply until they fill every home in Egypt, again sparing Goshen. Ta-Phar orders his priests to stop the plague. When they can’t, Moses sends the frogs into the Nile with his staff. At Ta-Phar’s command, the palace priests also create frogs; again, they can’t stop the plague, so Moses sends the frogs away. Ta-Phar passes a law banning frogs in homes. Moses sends a plague of lice. To save face, Ta-Phar blames the plague on the sins of the Egyptians.

Chapter 24 Summary

For one month, Moses stays away from the palace, focusing his energy on training Joshua and other young Hebrew men to be warriors. Joshua is a talented fighter and desperate to please Moses. Moses believes that the Hebrews will need leaders like Joshua in order to survive beyond Egypt. Joshua tells Moses that the older Hebrews are reluctant to train and join the army. Moses says that God won’t help a people who won’t help themselves. He tells Joshua that people who believe they know everything rarely think for themselves, but encourages Joshua to lead with kindness and patiently show them the way.

Chapter 25 Summary

Moses returns to the palace and demands the release of the Hebrews. When Ta-Phar refuses, he sends a plague of flies. The Egyptian nobles beg Ta-Phar to find a way to stop Moses and the plagues, but refuse to allow the Hebrews to be free. Moses sends a cattle plague that lasts for three days until Ta-Phar begs him to stop it. He sends plagues of boils, hail, and locusts, which devastate the Egyptian people and countryside. Despite these plagues, the nobles pressure Ta-Phar to keep the Hebrews enslaved. Ta-Phar hints that he might free the Hebrews if told where they plan to go, but Moses says he doesn’t know what God has planned for them. Moses brings three days of darkness, in which many Egyptians die. Ta-Phar vows to destroy Moses.

Chapter 26 Summary

Convinced by Ta-Phar that the war with Moses is over, the people of Egypt sleep peacefully. In Goshen, the Hebrews wait anxiously. At Moses’s instruction, they have sacrificed lambs and made three marks with the blood on the entrance to their homes. A great cry goes out across Egypt as the first-born son of every family is killed at once, including Ta-Phar’s son and grandson. The people of Egypt attribute this mass death to Moses and his god, and beg Ta-Phar to release the Hebrews in order to avoid further bloodshed. Ta-Phar sends word to Moses that the Hebrews must leave Egypt immediately.

Chapter 27 Summary

The Hebrews erupt into tears when they learn of their freedom, praising God. Moses orders the people to pack their belongings and follow him out of Goshen immediately, warning that Ta-Phar might change his mind. Although initially resistant to depart, the Hebrews spend the day preparing food and supplies for the journey. Moses leads the Hebrews out of Goshen in the evening, and some mixed-race Egyptians join the caravan. People die and babies are born as they march out of Egypt. As they walk, a pillar of flame appears before Moses. He explains that it is a symbol of God’s presence, and tells the Hebrews not to be afraid.

Chapter 28 Summary

Ta-Phar wakes up in his palace, feeling as if he has had a bad dream. Looking out the window, he wonders why no work is being done in his new city. His servants tell him that the Hebrews left two days ago, and have not been seen since. Ta-Phar bitterly regrets not killing Moses when he had the chance, and resolves to do so as soon as possible. In order to save face with the nobility, he claims that Moses took advantage of his grief and stole the Hebrews from him. The nobility insist that it’s sinful for the Hebrews to stop working. Ta-Phar orders 600 chariots to chase after the Hebrews, and promises to kill Moses personally.

Chapter 29 Summary

The Hebrews fear the sight of the approaching Egyptian army and begin to regret leaving Egypt. Some say that they were better off while enslaved, with guaranteed food and housing. Others suggest that Moses is a false prophet looking to be a new king. Undeterred, Moses produces a thick cloud that protects the Hebrews from the approaching army. Hidden from view, Moses uses his staff to part the Red Sea and leads the Hebrews safely across. When the cloud is removed, Pharaoh sees the Hebrews and chases them into the sea. Moses releases the walls of the sea and Pharaoh’s men are drowned. As he rests on the shore, Moses hears a tiny voice encouraging him to return to Egypt as king. He dismisses it and asks God where to lead the Hebrews.

Chapter 30 Summary

The next morning, leaders from among the Hebrews surround Moses’s tent, hoping to thank Moses for delivering them from Egypt. Joshua tells them that Moses is out talking to God; in reality, Moses is on the beach, watching Egyptian bodies wash onto the shore. Disturbed, he returns to camp and tells the people to march, following the white cloud as it leads them on their way. For three days and nights the Hebrews walk towards Sinai. When they make camp, they find water too bitter to drink and begin to grumble about Moses’s leadership. Remembering an old story, Moses puts cut branches into the water to make it drinkable. He wonders why God would call him to lead people who distrust him.

Chapters 20-30 Analysis

In this section of the novel, Hurston deepens her political allegory, in which she parallels the plight of the Hebrews and enslaved Black Americans, pointing to The Political Value of Storytelling. As Moses’s plagues make life in Egypt unbearable, Pharaoh considers giving in to his demands and freeing the Hebrews. However he faces serious resistance from the Egyptian nobility, who fear Moses’s radical political influence—“he would have the common people talking about equality!” (145)—and insist that the freedom of the Hebrews “is not to be even discussed” (156). The Egyptian nobility pressures Ta-Phar into rejecting Moses’s demands, leading to more plagues. Although it would be in Egypt’s best interest for Ta-Phar to free the Hebrews, the interests of the elite—whose power depends on the subjugation and “labor of the Israelites” (160)—compel him to act otherwise.

Within Hurston’s political allegory, the Egyptian nobility stand in for the wealthy Southern landowners who pressured American politicians to reject calls to free enslaved Black Americans in the years preceding the Civil War. The financial interests of the Southern elites relied on the free labor of enslaved Black Americans. Like the Egyptian nobility, these American elites were willing to force horrific consequences—such as the Civil War—in order to maintain the institution of slavery and reify the systems of oppression from which they derived their power and wealth. In both instances, “the majority of the ruling class saw ruin in social change,” (160). Hurston’s political allegory suggests that those with the most power (such as wealthy political and financial leaders) attempt to protect that power at all costs and stand willing to subject the general public to horrific consequences in order to do so. The conflict between Ta-Phar and the Egyptian nobility strengthen the connection Hurston draws between the Hebrews and enslaved Black Americans who experience Freedom as a Constant Struggle.

Hurston’s intentional use of both capital and lower case letters when referring to gods in the novel highlights the perspective of her protagonist, Moses. At the beginning of the novel, Hurston writes about the worship of specific “gods” (29), such as “the Hawk-god Horus” (41), in Egypt. The use of plural and lower-case capitalization—“the gods” (51) as opposed to God—indicates that there is a pantheon of multiple gods worshipped in Egypt. When Moses first learns about the Jethro’s god on Mt. Sinai, he understands the god to be part of this pantheon, calling him “the god of the mountain” (105). This phrasing indicates that, at this early stage, Moses maintains his Egyptian religious ideology. Over the course of Chapters 20-30, Hurston’s phrasing changes from “the god of the mountain” (139) to simply “God” (141, 152, 154, and others). Hurston’s use of capitalization in these moments indicates that Moses’s god is, from his perspective, the only God. The elevation of Moses’s God from one god of many to capital-G God reflects Moses’s growing devotion to God and his commitment to following God’s orders.

Moses’s evolving relationships with the other male characters in the story highlight his transition from adopted son of Jethro to instrument of God and leader of men. In the previous section of the novel, Moses’s primary relationship is with Jethro, his adopted father and father-in-law, who acts as Moses’s teacher until Moses exceeds him in skill and influence as a leader and magician. In this third section of the novel, Moses forms important relationships with three men: his uncle Ta-Phar, now Pharaoh, Aaron (who is acting as his brother), and the Hebrew teenager Joshua—all of whom Moses finds himself in a position of authority and influence over, having stepped into his own power and accepted the mission laid before him by God.

His relationships with these three men demonstrate the types of relationships possible in family units. Hurston frames the power struggle between Ta-Phar and Moses as adversarial, fueled by Ta-Phar’s resentment that Moses “has been imposing on [him] for thirty-odd years” (177). At their first meeting in nearly 30 years, Ta-Phar tries to embarrass Moses by flaunting his new wife, the “Ethiopian Princess who had once been [Moses’s] wife away back there when he was a Prince in Egypt” (135). The novel suggests that Ta-Phar’s resentment is the result of the competitiveness imposed on them as young men in Pharaoh’s court. Although Ta-Phar is Moses’s uncle, their competitive relationship makes them more like brothers.

In contrast, Aaron, who claims to be Moses’s true brother, embraces Moses’s power in order to reinforce his own position by association, thus enriching and empowering his family. Once he has been given a position at Moses’s right hand, Aaron asks Moses to bring on his sister Miriam, who he claims is “a great prophetess” (130). Aaron’s attempts to benefit from nepotism suggests that Moses cannot fully trust the people claiming to be his blood family. Hurston contrasts the wariness that characterizes Moses’s relationship to Aaron with the mentorship and trust of Moses’s close relationship with Joshua, a Hebrew teenager who devotes himself fully to Moses’s service. Moses’s close relationship with Joshua, even inviting him to share his home, is an example of the loyalty of chosen family. Hurston’s depiction of Moses’s relationship with Ta-Phar, Aaron, and Joshua in this section highlights these various types of family relationships possible between men.