The American Moses is George Washington. The American Moses is Harriett Tubman. The American Moses is Martin Luther King, Jr. The American Moses is anyone who is called to lead her or his people out of some kind of bondage and into a new sense of identity, often a new sense of nationhood.
The American Moses is a deliverer in both senses of the word; a deliverer in terms of being a liberator; but also, a deliverer as in a midwife who helps deliver, helps give birth to a new sense of identity. One who conveys a sense of chosen-ness and blessing upon a people.
I think one thing that fascinates Americans about the biblical Moses in the Book of Exodus is his conflicted-ness, his sense of inner conflict and self-doubt, and even his between-ness, actually very much like the character of Esther in the story of Esther. Moses is both, Prince of Egypt, as the movie describes him, and one of the Hebrew people. He identifies with both the Hebrew people who are oppressed and the empire that oppresses them. And, it is that in-between-ness that is part of Moses’s identity that puts him in a particularly strategic place to be the deliverer of the Hebrew people.
