This work is a contribution to the rapidly expanding field of reception history, with the novelty that it examines the reception not of a particular biblical text, but rather that of the biblical character Moses. This allows Beal's collection to include essays on the Bible itself, as a document which ‘receives’ pre-existing traditions about Moses, as well as the more traditional reception historical essays in patristic, mediaeval and Renaissance interpretations.

While innovatively treating the Bible itself as a document of reception has methodological advantages, however, it also creates a range of new difficulties, as Miller's article on the roles of Moses in the Pentateuch reveals. Miller's exposition of the ‘polysemic character’ of Moses within the Pentateuch itself effectively demonstrates the naivety of using the biblical text as a consistent original against which later presentations can be compared and contrasted. Yet Miller's analysis, which connects different heroic patterns drawn from folklore studies with the view of Moses held by particular Israelite groups, while provocative, is not always convincing.

In fact, the presence of the text of the Old Testament as a datum is vital for understanding the selections and interpretations made by later readers. As the essays in the book develop along a chronological scheme, the enormous diversity in presentations of Moses becomes apparent. A common theme in essays on Christian interpreters is, unsurprisingly, the strong Pauline association of Moses with ‘the Law’. However, as Swain points out, this association is not exclusive even within the Pauline corpus itself. Indeed, some of Swain's most interesting observations explore the meaning of ‘baptism into Moses’, and the use of Moses's biography as a narrative model in the Gospels. Other interpretations are even more diverse. Through the ages Moses is seen as a type not only of Christ, but also of a variety of other biblical figures, Queen Elizabeth i, St Francis, the Renaissance papacy, William Tyndale, and as a model for the contemplative life. By the end of the volume, the reader feels that the vital question is not that presented by the introduction – how the figure of Moses influenced the Bible's readers – but rather how these readers influenced the presentation of the figure of Moses himself.

The most acute moments in this volume are those in which the authors indicate clearly the influence of cultural context on the formation of the reception of Moses. One particularly strong essay investigates the way in which the intersection of medieval philosophical concerns and Jewish confessional commitments shaped the questions being asked of the biblical narrative in relation to Moses's prophecy (Kreisel). Another shows how the creative presentation of Moses in the minor midrashim was formed by the influence both of Islamic romance and of attempts to interpret seemingly insignificant details in the text of Exodus (Mikva). Likewise, Beal's own article on ‘Moses and Christian contemplative devotion’ is at its most engaging when it tries to account for the difference between the positive focus on Moses found in continental mystics with his absence/negative presentation in English mystical works. (Beal suggests that the importance of unmediated experience of God in the English mystics, the censoring of vernacular biblical texts in England, and the absence of the Jews from the land, all have a role to play.)

The volume does not, however, entirely resist the tendency of reception history to degenerate into anthologies of interpretations. The vast chronological scale of the work and the virtually inexhaustible supply of material lead to several articles, particularly in the latter part of the work, reporting a bewildering range of interpretation without quite enough direction to indicate to the reader what these interpretations reveal – beyond the fact that Moses could be presented in different, and even contradictory ways. In her introduction, Beal regrets that the book lacks a chapter on Moses in art or in Islam. Yet the real lack in this book is not yet more data but an epilogue or conclusion which draws together some of the themes repeatedly hinted at but not fully explored in the chronological presentation: the influence of Christian and Jewish interpretations on each other; what the reception of Moses reveals about how different groups perceived the Bible itself, as text or as witness to sacred history; whether the Biblical text was ever able to limit the broad range of ways in which Moses could be appropriated; and, most of all, a systematic analysis of how the presentation of Moses engages with the Christian problematic of an acceptance of and yet reaction against its Old Testament and Jewish inheritance.

Some of this work is done in Foster's excellent final essay on the Renaissance. This deserves to be read by all readers of this volume, whatever their specialism, not only for its modelling of how literary and cultural-historical methods can analyse as well as describe the process of reception, but also for its succinct analyses of the reception of Moses in earlier periods. Illuminating Moses provides an impressive volume of evidence and a good range of interesting and convincing interpretations. However, this collection of essays also shows that there is more work to be done in analysing the significance of such evidence and in clarifying the method and purpose of similar studies in the future. It is to be hoped that this book will provide a stimulus to just such further research.

The English text of the volume is very well presented with few typographical errors and a substantial and varied bibliography. There are, however, a wide variety of mistakes in the Greek and Hebrew. Most notably, on p. 71, the word yāšab is written in pointed Hebrew, but from left to right. It is followed by, in Latin characters, wa'eseb, a transliteration not of the given Hebrew word but of the form as it appears in its biblical context (Deuteronomy ix.9). Similarly, it is hard to imagine that transliterations like ‘h xaris kai h alhqeia’ (ἡ χάρις καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια) on p. 75 would help the non-Greek speaker to pronounce the original.