Four Years Ago In Time

This week a look at the biblical Abraham traces the vital role he plays in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In 1998 TIME focused on the historic power of another Old Testament figure, MOSES.

It is our nature to search for heroes, and Moses, rebel and saint, is as relevant today as he ever was. He is a metaphor for our times, proof that a single flawed human being can be chosen to change the world. Is it any wonder then that the great and the small cite him for inspiration? Martin Luther King Jr. evoked him in his thunderingly prophetic speeches. Only last month several Republican Congressmen grandly compared the fallen Newt Gingrich to the man who led the chosen people out of the desert. Movie directors have immortalized him, most famously as a bewigged Charlton Heston throwing down the tablets in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments ... What we choose to dwell on in the story of Moses says as much about our dreams and fears as it does about Scripture. Eugene Rivers, a Pentecostal minister in Boston's poor Dorchester neighborhood, has depicted Moses as an African revolutionary to teach gang members about throwing off the yoke of slavery to drugs ... Moses is a universal symbol of liberation, law and leadership, eulogized by Elie Wiesel as "the most powerful hero in biblical history ... After him, nothing else was the same again." --TIME, Dec. 14, 1998