So much has been written about Moses, yet his mystery remains elusive

Chagall painted him with a green face as he received the Tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai; Basquiat set him against a pink background with Egyptian features; Michelangelo sculpted his head crowned with two horns; Thomas Mann, in his short story "The Law", recounts his clash with Pharaoh Ramessu; Christian Bale portrays his warrior spirit in Ridley Scott’s film Exodus, whilst in the Bible we encounter a man who shoulders the liberation and formation of an entire people, mediates with God and embodies the Law.

The true nature of Moses remains, of course, a mystery and so, to borrow the words used by Gilles Deleuze regarding Proust, ‘it can only give rise to ideas for research, not to actual research itself’, becoming a ‘true object of desire’ shrouded in a singularity that ‘leaves us with nothing else to do but this: to rewrite it, which is the opposite of exhausting it’.

Within this broad field of study on the central figure of the Old Testament, we now have the substantial volume by Giacomo Petrarca (Mosè: dal mondo al libro, Feltrinelli), which focuses not so much on his historicity (whilst not ignoring, as Freud warned in Moses and Monotheistic Religion, the extent to which the question of historical personality is intertwined with a figure through whom a religious, theological, political and cultural tradition is legitimised) as on his spectral nature. Drawing on the etymology of the Greek verb from which the word ‘phantom’ derives—and which relates to the semantic field of ‘appearing’—Petrarca explores the figure of Moses starting from what he defines as an ‘excess of presence’: “Moses is so overwritten and contested that he can never be grasped in his singularity, except as the product of certain religious or historical-cultural requirements, which are in turn the result of a process of constructing his figure”.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, Petrarch moves within the space that the word constructs around the figure of Moses, because his actions are always the result of the word (from the tablets delivered by God directly into his hands to the account of his deeds, which builds and passes down his story) and the very figure of Moses has been shaped over the millennia through rewritings and commentaries, thus becoming a ‘paradigm of storytelling itself’. In this sense, the figure of Moses is the result of reflections and analyses that Petrarch meticulously retraces, courageously confronting the complexities—from Kafka to Derrida, via Spinoza and the rabbinic tradition— and so Moshe Rabbenu loses his singularity and is transformed into text, into an interweaving of scriptures and words, of narrative and commentary, a symbol of that ‘cult of the sign’ common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

It is perhaps precisely in this depiction of Moses that the true heart of Petrarca’s essay lies, as he succeeds in bringing together the divergent strands of Egyptology, philosophy, anthropology, theology and literary criticism into an interpretation that prioritises, above all else, the text and its reading. And so here is another insight that can be drawn from this book: in an age of hasty opinions and an aversion to in-depth analysis, a study such as Petrarca’s – which analyses the individual words of the biblical text, constructing an evocative tapestry of references and resonances – is a precious opportunity to resist the prevailing tendency towards simplification. ‘All songs are written in black on white and white on black,’ reads a brief phrase from the Talmud that seems to encapsulate the intellectual tension of Petrarch’s gaze, suspended between the biblical text and its interpretation, between past and present. A lesson for many.