Cotton Claudius B. iv, a manuscript produced (most likely) at Saint Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, in the second quarter of the eleventh century, contains an Old English translation of the first six books of the Old Testament, interspersed with three hundred ninety-four framed illustrations (in various states of completion) in which the figure of Moses appears some one hundred twenty-seven times. This manuscript, including its program of illustrations, has been the subject of much critical attention, often exploring it within an Anglo-Saxon context. Broderick takes a different approach, considering more distant sources and influences, both textual and visual, for the discussion of depictions of Moses in the manuscript. Broderick argues that the representation of the patriarch as general, prophet, priest, and scribe is drawn from a now lost exemplar and “has its ultimate origin in a number of originally Jewish Hellenistic exegetical and apologetic texts preserved in early Christian writings by authors such as Clement of Alexandria and Eusebus of Caesarea,” while “the specific ‘Egyptianizing’ details associated with the depiction of Moses . . . are no mere ‘antiquarian’ flourishes but are instead meant to demonstrate visually the central thesis of a specific Hellenistic Jewish apologetic that asserted that Moses was indeed more ancient than all the gods and pharaohs of Egypt” (4). While that is a thesis that not all readers will find convincing as an explanation of the eleventh-century visual sequence, Broderick assembles a wealth of analogues in pursuing the case that shows how Moses's attributes can be read as allusions to facets of the gods of ancient Egypt.
Broderick devotes most attention to the horns of Moses, a feature mentioned in Exodus 34:29 in both Jerome's Latin and the Old English translation, and one for which Claudius B. iv provides the first surviving visual representation. He provides two distinct source influences. He interprets the horns which spring from Moses's countenance (from folio 105v onward) as a reflection of the phrasing in the Old English, yellow to signal radiance, an alternative understanding for the Hebrew word underlying Exodus 34.29. For a visual source, he points to an image of a horned Pan seen on a fifth- to seventh-century Coptic textile hanging now in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. More remotely, he posits that the horns may ultimately be a borrowing from representations of Egyptian gods. In later pictures (from folio 136v onward), Moses's horns rise from behind a headband or diadem, and Broderick suggests that the visual source for these representations are the two feathers and headband typical of depictions of Egyptian lector priests, illustrated, inter alia, from a second-century CE sculpted marble relief of a procession for Isis in the Vatican Museums.
Broderick discusses a range of other attributes that he sees as distinctive more briefly. He interprets the banner held by Moses on folio 105v as the veiled cross of Christ, prefiguring the crucifixion. He observes that the frontlet on Moses's forehead in the illustration on folio 136v is a priestly tzitz, signifying Moses's role as a biblical high priest, convincingly explicating a detail that is omitted in the Old English translation, which therefore cannot be the artist's source here. For many other details, Broderick's rich web of associations often seems to provide too many explanations to be convincing. In discussing Claudius B. iv's presentation of the jawbone of an ass as the first murder weapon—another first in the surviving visual record and not a detail present in the biblical account—Broderick duly acknowledges Bishoff and Lapidge's discovery of a seventh-century commentary tradition at Canterbury that explicitly fills in this detail, and which further acknowledges how the detail may easily spring from Samson's use of such a weapon to slay the Philistines but still continues with a further “interesting possibility”: “the association of the ass, as well as the color red, with the figure of the Egyptian god Set (or Seth), the brother and slayer of Osiris” (36). Broderick interprets that the depiction of a blue jeweled mountain on which Moses is seated on folio 136v was also derived from the Canterbury commentary describing the Sinai epiphany, but he also sees it as the sacred omphalos upon which the god Apollo is often represented. The rounded tops of the tablets of the law, another feature that first survives in the visual record in this manuscript, have often been seen as calling up the form of Anglo-Saxon wax writing tablets, but Broderick instead associates them with the round-topped stele prevalent in Egyptian art. Many of the projected links to Egypt, then, are speculative and quite remote.
Indeed, there is a paradox at the heart of Broderick's methodology. The excitement of his many proposed associations derives from the implication that these are quite likely the very sources the artist was influenced by, even as the remoteness of many of the proposed sources suggests a whole universe of intervening examples that have not survived. If one assumes the loss of innumerable visual (and textual) representations (and I do), then the insistent search for specific links that underlies Broderick's methodology is inevitably quixotic. To my eye, the magnificent recent study by Benjamin C. Withers, The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Claudius B. iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England (University of Toronto Press, 2007), remains crucial for a more grounded explanation and a more credible interpretation of the visual sequence in Claudius B. iv. Instead, Broderick has here provided a bold attempt at uncovering a much longer tradition for visualizing Moses in a study which will be welcomed by those interested in a broad and necessarily speculative contextualizing of an Old Testament patriarch. The remarkable visual and textual sequence in Claudius B. iv well merits multiple interpretations.
