ABSTRACT
Moses is arguably the most important figure in the Old Testament, yet he has always stood in Abraham’s shadow in the corpus of Søren Kierkegaard. This life in the shadows has left the question of Moses’ place in Kierkegaard’s corpus relatively undisturbed. He appears very occasionally in the secondary literature alongside generic references to “the law” of the Ten Commandments,1 and even less frequently with references to Judaism.2 Yet, there is certainly more to say about Moses’ multifaceted role in inflecting and illuminating Kierkegaard’s developing thought. The purpose of this article is to highlight precisely how Moses, the very pivotal biblical figure, is important for Kierkegaard in both positive and negative ways. To accomplish this purpose, the first section of this article examines Kierkegaard’s early encounters with the Jewish Moses of world-historical importance. The second section traces Kierkegaard’s continued reflection focused on two biblical texts that surface already in the 1830s, and in the process, describes the slow revaluation and humiliation of Kierkegaard’s Moses. The third section presents a transformed Moses who becomes important again, but in a new vein as a prototype for what it means to be chosen by God. In conclusion, I suggest that there are several formal elements about Kierkegaard’s Moses that look very similar both early and late in his life. Yet, despite these formal similarities, there are irreconcilable differences, leading to a late Moses that serves as a “faithless” prototype for true Christianity.
