Memories of Moses: A Survey Through Genres

The last few decades have seen an increase in the use of memory studies in biblical scholarship, yet so far studies on biblical characters have not sufficiently considered the genre of the texts that encode the memories. This article explores the relation between genre and the ways in which Moses is remembered or forgotten in historiographical genres such as national histories and historiographical novellas; in wisdom genres; in prophetic genres such as oracles, biographies and apocalypticism; in genres within the Psalms; and in more recent genres such as treatises, letters and New Testament Gospels. The article demonstrates how the authors create and recreate the memory of Moses in order to serve their own ideological means in accordance with their chosen genres.