The Education of Moses
by Patrick Henry Reardon
Saint Stephen, in the discourse that led to his martyrdom, condensed what the Bible tells us of the education of Moses: “He was instructed (epaideuthe) in all the wisdom (pase sophia) of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22).
Although offended by most of what Stephen declared on that occasion, probably none of his listeners quibbled with the comment about Moses’ education. Many Jews—perhaps most—agreed that when the child Moses was taken into Egypt’s royal household (Ex. 2:10), he entered a world where the pursuit of learning was famously rigorous.
For example, very near the time of Stephen’s discourse, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria wrote that the child Moses, adopted by the pharaoh’s daughter, “was considered worthy of royal (basilikes) nurture and care.” Consequently, “teachers immediately arrived from various places, some coming spontaneously from the neighboring countries and the different districts of Egypt, and some even being brought from Greece at great expense.”
According to Philo, this educational program especially stressed mathematics, a subject that “the Egyptians study above all things.” Its pursuit led to Moses’ proficiency in music “and the whole science of rhythm and harmony and meter, and . . . the use of musical instruments.” In addition, “the philosophers from the adjacent countries taught him Assyrian literature and the knowledge of the heavenly bodies so much studied by the Chaldeans” (The Life of Moses I.5.20–24).
Two or three centuries before Philo wrote those lines (arguably, indeed, about the time when the rabbis of Alexandria were translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek), a Jewish dramatist in that city, Ezekiel the Tragedian, composed a play based on the Book of Exodus. Among the 269 extant lines of that work, we learn that young Moses, adopted into the pharaoh’s household, enjoyed the advantage of “royal nourishment and education (trophaisi basiliskaisi kai paideumasin)” (quoted by Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.23.155f).
It is instructive to observe this interest in Moses’ “classical education” (yes, an anachronism, I know) in two authors who belonged to the synagogue of Alexandria, a congregation renowned for its high level of intellectual engagement between biblical studies and pagan learning. Probably the best evidence for that engagement is the Septuagint itself, where the divinely inspired verses of David, Jeremiah, and Job found new shape in the language of Homer, Sophocles, and Plato.
That cultural engagement between Hebrew and Greek was more than fortuitous and ephemeral, however; it was deliberate, self-conscious, and deeply philosophical and religious. Perhaps it suffices, in this respect, simply to mention Philo’s work On Creation, where he compares and contrasts the teaching of Genesis and that of the Timaeus.
A Model for Combatting Heresy
Somewhat later, certain Christian thinkers deliberately made themselves heirs to that Alexandrian engagement. Of particular importance among these were the Cappadocian Fathers, whose theology was challenged by the subtleties of second-generation Arianism. The task of these Christians was complex. Whereas Irenaeus, two hundred years earlier, had little trouble discrediting the Gnostics with virtually no help from classical philosophy, the mid-fourth-century Cappadocians were obliged to summon all the resources of their classical learning to refute the evolving metaphysics of Arianism, particularly Eunomius.
Basil of Caesarea, as he began his treatise against the latter, mentioned and complained of this necessity; he lamented that Eunomius, “not satisfied with the tradition of the Apostles and simplicity of the faith (te de paradosei Apostolon kai haploteti tes pisteos) . . . disturbs the purity and simplicity of the teaching (to katharon kai haploun didaskalias) of the divine Spirit” with theoretical and plausible alternatives.
Adequately to answer this new, more subtle expression of heresy, Basil and his companions were compelled to call on their academic training, a recourse they justified by appealing to Moses’ study of Egyptian wisdom. In the Bible itself, that is to say, they found a warrant for recourse to non-biblical learning. For these Fathers, Moses’ superior philosophical and scientific knowledge—“all the wisdom of Egypt”—became what Jaroslav Pelikan called “a case study.”
Basil, in his exhortation “To Youth (Pros tous Neous) About Reading Greek Literature,” explicitly cited Acts 7:22 on the authoritative model of Moses. And Gregory of Nyssa, Basil’s younger brother, compared his older sibling to Moses himself (Life of Moses 2).
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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