Moses may have been a great author, but we have little means of ascertaining what he wrote in the present day. Divines talk of Genesis to Deuteronomy as the five books of Moses, but Eusebius, in the fourth century, attributed them to Ezra, and Saint Chrysostom says that the name of Moses has been affixed to the books without authority, by persons living long after him. It is quite certain that if Moses lived 3,300 years ago, he did not write in square letter Hebrew, and this because the character has not existed so long. It is indeed doubtful if it can be carried back 2,000 years. The ancient Hebrew character, though probably older than this, yet is comparatively modern among the ancient languages of the earth.
It is urged by orthodox chronologists that Moses was born about 1450 B. C., and that the Exodus took place about 1401 B. C. Unfortunately "there are no recorded dates in the Jewish Scriptures that are trustworthy." Moses, or the Hebrews, not being mentioned upon Egyptian monuments from the twelfth to the seventeenth century B. C. inclusive, and never being alluded to by any extant writer who lived prior to the Septuagint translation at Alexandria (commencing in the third century B. C.), there are no extraneous aids, from sources alien to the Jewish Books through which any information, worthy of historical acceptance, can be gathered elsewhere about him or them.
Moses died in the land of Moab when he was 120 years of age. The Lord buried Moses in a valley of Moab, over against Bethpeor, but no man knoweth of his sepulcher unto this day. Josephus says that "a cloud came over him on the sudden and he disappeared in a certain valley." The devil disputed about the body of Moses, contending with the Archangel Michael;** but whether the devil or the angel had the best of the discussion, the bible does not tell us.
De Beauvoir Priaulx,*** looking at Moses as a counselor, leader, and legislator, says: "Invested with this high authority, he announced to the Jews their future religion, and announced it to them as a state religion, and as framed for a particular state, and that state only.
* Gliddon's Types of Mankind: Mankind's Chronology, p. 711.
He gave this religion, moreover, a creed so narrow and negative--he limited it to objects so purely temporal, he crowded it with observances so entirely ceremonial or national--that we find it difficult to determine whether Moses merely established this religion in order that by a community of worship he might induce in the tribe-divided Israelites that community of sentiment which would constitute them a nation; or, whether he only roused them to a sense of their national dignity, in the hope that they might then more faithfully perform the duties of priests and servants of Jehovah. In other words, we hesitate to decide whether in the mind of Moses the state was subservient to the purposes of religion, or religion to the purposes of state."