Moses
Article
Moses is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between October 10, 2022 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Moses was born on, and died on, the 7th of Adar”; “Moses is chosen in part because he was kind to a lamb”; “what’s this I hear about Moses being chosen by God in part because Moses offered to help a lost lamb quench its thirst?“. It most often appears alongside Christianity, God, Jesus.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: October 10, 2022
- Last seen: October 30, 2025
Appears In
- Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
- Your Book Review: Dominion
- Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
- Links For October 2025
Related Pages
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- Christianity (3 shared issues)
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- God (3 shared issues)
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- Jesus (3 shared issues)
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- US (3 shared issues)
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- Friedrich Nietzsche (2 shared issues)
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- Israel (2 shared issues)
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- Jewish (2 shared issues)
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- Jews (2 shared issues)
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- Judaism (2 shared issues)
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- Pharisees (2 shared issues)
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- Richard Hanania (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Jesus died two days before Passover, but Passover is linked to the Hebrew calendar and can fall on a variety of Roman calendar days. So the main remaining degree of freedom is how the early Christians translated from the (Biblically fixed) Hebrew date to the (not very clear) Roman date. This seems to have been calculated by someone named Hippolytus in the 3rd century, but his calculations were wrong - March 25 did not fall on a Friday (cf. Good Friday) on any of the plausible crucifixion years. Also, as far as I can tell, the relevant Jewish tradition is that prophets die on the same day they are born, not the same day they are conceived. For example, Moses was born on, and died on, the 7th of Adar (is it worth objecting that it should be the same date on the Hebrew calendar and not the Roman?) Maybe this tradition was different in Jesus’ time? But it must be older than the split between Judaism and Islam - the Muslims also believe Mohammed died on his birth date.
Not so fast, says Scully. Christians are supposed to be good stewards, only using animals as necessary and never being cruel. A careful reading of scripture reveals myriad instances where it’s either directly said or strongly implied that all creatures deserve kindness. In the Gospel of Mark, God says to “preach the gospel to every creature”. Moses is chosen in part because he was kind to a lamb: “You who have compassion for a lamb shall now be the shepherd of my people Israel.”
My dad is a born-again Christian. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from him it’s that evangelicals love, nay positively live, for quoting scripture. The other day, instead of just being a passive recipient, I tossed back some lines I learned from Dominion. But Dad, doesn't Jesus count every sparrow? Is there not a covenant between God and the animals, too? And what’s this I hear about Moses being chosen by God in part because Moses offered to help a lost lamb quench its thirst?
I’m skeptical of this. My favorite counterexample is the Torah, which says that Moses was the most humble man in the world (Numbers 12:3), plus the ensuing scholarly debate on how Moses himself could write this in the Torah with a straight face. My favorite answer claim that God forced Moses to write that he was the most humble man in the world, but Moses fought back by making some of the alephs in the Torah really small as a sort of steganographic claim that he was embarrassed by having to praise himself. See also this essay, “In the Jewish tradition, humility is among the greatest of the virtues, as its opposite, pride, is among the worst of the vices.”
27: Also Fatima-related: in the comments highlights post, I linked FLWAB’s criticism of David Hume’s argument against ever believing miracles. Joe James argues that FLWAB, myself, and other critics are misunderstanding Hume’s argument. FLWAB says no he isn’t. They continue the discussion in the comments, but neither comes off looking great, and they don’t get anywhere. I’m unfortunately still confused - there are many cases where something that never happened before happens for the first time. For example, nobody had ever seen a grizzly-polar bear hybrid until recently, so “the universal testimony of mankind” was that this didn’t happen. But when a reliable person did see it, we had little trouble imagining that we were wrong and it was simply very rare, or a new thing happening now because of climate change. If nobody has ever seen a sea part before, but then many people say they saw Moses part the Red Sea, what is different about this such that “the universal testimony of mankind” suddenly becomes a disqualifier? Hume seems to be trying to make this same distinction in his eight days of darkness example, but there it seems like he is only saying he will accept non-religious anomalies, but rule out religious ones, because religious people often lie. But then what happened to the “universal testimony of mankind” argument? I kind of get the impression that he’s groping towards Bayes’ Theorem, but hard-coding in a belief that the prior probability of lots of religious people lying is higher than the probability of a miracle. If that’s his belief, then fair enough, but I guess I expected the much-vaunted Hume’s Argument Against Miracles to be something more than this.