The life of St Moses, who beheld God
He led them through the sea on dry ground and for forty years through the wilderness toward the land God had promised them, receiving on Sinai the tablets of the Law by which they were to live. For a single act of unbelief at the waters of strife he was told he would see that land but not enter it, and he died on Mount Nebo at the age of a hundred and twenty, looking on the country he would never walk.
The Church remembers him not only as lawgiver but as the one who, of all the prophets, spoke with God most directly, and holds that he appeared again beside Elijah at Christ's Transfiguration on Tabor, and was seen, tradition says, quietly serving among the monks of Sinai long after his earthly life had ended. The events of his life as told in Scripture are received by the Church as sacred history, even as modern historians and archaeologists continue to debate how much of the exodus from Egypt can be independently verified and how much survives chiefly in Israel's own memory of itself.
