Moses, the Pop Culture Icon

"He may not have been faster than a speeding bullet. He wasn’t more powerful than a locomotive. But he did part the Red Sea! And in America he became the inspiration for the country’s leading superhero, the star of Hollywood’s fifth-highest-grossing movie, and a model for the nation’s preeminent symbol, the Statue of Liberty.

America’s most enduring pop-culture icon may be its least known: Moses.

Artists weren’t the first Americans to be influenced by the hero of the Five Books of Moses, the prophet who was born into slavery in ancient Egypt, raised in the pharaoh’s palace, then fled to the desert, where God summoned him in a burning bush to lead his people out of bondage into freedom.

The pilgrims quoted his story on The Mayflower. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams proposed that he be on the seal of the United States in 1776. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were eulogized as his incarnation. Slaves and civil rights marchers chanted his story. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all cited him as inspiration.

But the influence of Moses reached beyond politics into the heart of the American dream. In the 1860s, Americaphiles in France wanted to pay tribute to the American experience of freedom by building a Statue of Liberty. Sculptor Frederic Bartholdi chose a Roman goddess as his model, but he imported two icons from Moses to bring her to life: first, the rays of sun around her head; and second, the tablet in her arms, both of which come from the moment Moses descends Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments.

Fifty years later, two bookish Jews in Cleveland, Ohio, channeled their religious anxieties into a cartoon character modeled partly on the superhero of the torah. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster drew on numerous sources for Superman, including Greek mythology, Arthurian legend, and the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs. But many of its principal themes are drawn from the Hebrew Bible, and its backstory was taken almost point by point from Moses.

Just as Moses was floated down the Nile in a basket to escape a people facing annihilation, Superman is floated into space in a spaceship to escape a planet facing extinction. Just as Moses is rescued by the pharaoh’s daughter and raised in an alien environment where he conceals his true identity, Superman is rescued by the Kents and raised in an alien environment where he conceals his true identity. Just as Moses is called to liberate a people from tyranny, Superman is called to liberate humanity from evil.

The most influential film of the 1950s, The Ten Commandments reflected the union of Americans and Moses. In the final scene, Charlton Heston blesses his successor, Joshua, then proceeds toward the summit of Mount Nebo, where he will die, having been prevented from entering the Promised Land after a dispute with God. Heston turns and quotes the words on the Liberty Bell: “Go, proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” These words do not come from this moment in Deuteronomy, but from Leviticus 25, yet DeMille understood their significance in American history.

Moses then continues to the top of mountain, where Heston pivots toward the camera and raises his right arm in a perfect tableau of the Statue of Liberty. In the final shot of his valedictory film, DeMille crowns his paean to the greatest prophet who ever lived by parading him through the medley of American icons to which he had been compared over the years—the Liberty Bell, Lady Liberty—until he becomes the embodiment of America enlightening the world."