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GODS FIRE
Moses and the Management of Exodus

by Alfred de Grazia


The Judaic, Christian, and Islamic religions go back to the Exodus from Egypt of the Hebrews
under the leadership of Moses. They center upon this event and upon Moses. Ernst Sellin, a
distinguished German authority on the Old Testament, once declared, "The ultimate and most
important question for the investigation of Israelitic-Judaic religion must inevitably be:
'Who was Moses? '" [1]  Despite his own reply and notwithstanding the hundreds of works on
Moses that are catalogued by the Library of Congress, the question has remained unanswered.

I have found no book that deals adequately with the psychology of Moses, and therefore have
portrayed fully the workings of his mind. No study has properly embraced Moses in his two
great capacities as a manager and scientist, and so I have reconstructed these his qualities
as well. Furthermore, the Exodus and Wanderings, those operations that Moses directed, are
generally misunderstood, both in their particulars as Jewish history and in their
representation of what was happening throughout the world in those days.

Part of the 3000-year misunderstanding stems from the strange environment in which Moses
lived and worked. The Exodus was not a stroll through the desert by some truant slaves. The
Exodus occurred in an extraordinary setting of great atmospheric and physical turbulence, a
catastrophic world. Unless we comprehend precisely the natural and social upheavals of those
days, we cannot grasp Moses. Nor can we fathom the religion of Moses. I have introduced in
every chapter new methods of viewing the environment of the Exodus. Meteorology and
electricity are joined to chronology, archaeology and biblical study, and all of these with
psychology, sociology and political analysis.

I have some confidence in this multidisciplinary approach, and I hope that others will
capture from its results some of the exhilaration that I experienced in its conception and
elaboration. The very first chapter tells how a comet passed by and the plagues struck. The
second chapter describes the failed negotiations between Moses and the Pharaoh, and the
subsequent pursuit and escape. Each subsequent chapter picks up a critical part of the story
-- to explain it, to add evidence, and to place it naturally, coherently and sympathetically
into the general scheme. In the end, the reader will perhaps have derived the same
conclusions as I have from the Old Testament account of the most human of all experiences,
the birth and establishment of a great god. Alfred de Grazia Washington Square New York City
21 June 1983