Memories of Moses: A survey through genres

Abstract

During the last few decades an increasing number of biblical scholars have turned to memory studies in their analyses of texts. The figure of Moses is one of the topics discussed, yet so far the studies have not sufficiently considered the genre of the texts that encode the memories. This article looks at the relation between genre and the ways in which Moses is remembered or forgotten. Such a relation can be most clearly seen when approaching a large array of different genres, necessitating the survey of a large material rather than the focus on a few representative texts. This article therefore considers a large material found in the Hebrew Bible, but also makes comments on the Greek Bible, and once the Latin and Slavonic Bibles. As it shows a continuation of the tendencies found in the older parts of the Bible, also the New Testament is included to a limited extent, as is other literature that may be said to belong within a “biblical” horizon.