Reading Order
Moses, Man of the Mountain Reading Order
Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) by Zora Neale Hurston is her third novel and her most formally ambitious retelling — a version of the story of Moses from Exodus, told entirely in African American vernacular speech, in which the Hebrew slaves are analogized to Black Americans under slavery and segregation, Moses is figured as the greatest conjure man in the world, and the Exodus is a meditation on freedom, leadership, and the difficult relationship between a leader and the people he liberates. The novel is at once a playful act of literary appropriation (taking one of the foundational stories of Western culture and rewriting it from a Black American perspective), a serious theological meditation (on the nature of God, freedom, and the law), and a folk novel (using Hurston's ethnographic knowledge of African American vernacular speech and spiritual practice). Moses, Man of the Mountain was neglected for decades after its publication and has only recently been recognized as one of Hurston's major works. Its formal audacity — the biblical narrative spoken entirely in Black vernacular — can be startling at first, but it is also the source of the novel's comedy and its depth. The effect is to reappropriate a narrative that African American spirituals and preachers had always treated as their own (the analogy between Hebrew slavery and Black slavery is as old as slavery itself in America), and to place that reappropriation at the center of Hurston's fictional and anthropological project.
Where to start
Read Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) first — it is Hurston's masterpiece. Moses, Man of the Mountain works best for readers who already know Hurston's vernacular style; it is the formal climax of her fiction. Any HarperCollins paperback.
Complete Moses, Man of the Mountain Book List
- 1Buy
Moses, Man of the Mountain
Zora Neale Hurston·1939·The novel — the Exodus story retold in African American vernacular; Moses as the greatest conjure man in the world; the Hebrew slaves analogized to Black Americans; Hurston's most formally ambitious retelling and her most explicitly theological novel. - 2Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston·1937·The essential companion and Hurston's masterpiece — the entry point to her vernacular style; best read before Moses to build familiarity with the literary resources Hurston uses in the retelling. - 3Buy
Mules and Men
Zora Neale Hurston·1935·Hurston's folklore collection — the companion ethnographic work that gives context for the conjure traditions Moses practices and the folk worldview that the novel embodies. - 4Buy
Jonah's Gourd Vine
Zora Neale Hurston·1934·Hurston's debut novel — the companion in her fiction about religious leadership and the gap between spiritual gifts and personal power; John Pearson's preaching and Moses's conjure are companion uses of the African American spiritual tradition in fiction. - 5Buy
The Bible
Various·1611·The King James Version — the companion source text; Moses, Man of the Mountain is a rewriting of Exodus and Numbers, and readers familiar with the biblical text will find Hurston's retelling richer and more surprising. - 6Buy
Prince of Egypt
DreamWorks·1998·The animated film — the companion visual retelling of the same material in a popular register; where Hurston's retelling is literary and vernacular, the DreamWorks film is epic and musical; both show the power of the Exodus narrative as raw material for contemporary reinterpretation. - 7Buy
Beloved
Toni Morrison·1987·Morrison's Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in African American literary fiction about the legacy of slavery and the difficult meaning of freedom; where Hurston uses the biblical Exodus as an analogy for Black liberation, Morrison explores what freedom actually meant to former slaves. - 8Buy
The Color Purple
Alice Walker·1982·Walker's Pulitzer-winning novel — the companion in African American women's literary fiction that draws on and transforms biblical and spiritual traditions; Celie's letters and their religious dimension are the companion in African American women's fiction to Moses's conjure tradition.
Moses, Man of the Mountain — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Moses, Man of the Mountain about?
Moses, Man of the Mountain is a retelling of the biblical Exodus story — Moses leading the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt — told in African American vernacular English and set up as an allegory for African American slavery and liberation. The Egyptian Pharaohs speak the language of Southern white slave owners; the Hebrew slaves speak the language of the Black South. Moses is figured not as a simple liberator but as the greatest conjure man (practitioner of Hoodoo) in the world — a man who achieves his miracles through specific conjure knowledge, not supernatural gifts. The novel follows the Exodus narrative closely enough that readers familiar with the Bible will recognize the events, while Hurston consistently subverts expectations through the vernacular register and through her focus on the social dynamics of the Hebrew slave community.
Why did Hurston use vernacular speech for the biblical narrative?
Hurston's use of African American vernacular for the Exodus story is both a formal choice and a political one. Formally, it puts the living speech of Black Americans into the mouths of the ancient Hebrews, completing the analogy between Hebrew slavery and Black American slavery that African American spirituals and preachers had been making for centuries. The vernacular grounds the ancient story in the living culture that has always treated it as its own. Politically, it is an act of appropriation: taking a narrative that has been claimed by Western Christianity and showing that it has always been, in its most important dimensions, a story that belongs to the enslaved and the oppressed — not to the powerful. The comedy that results from hearing Moses and the Pharaoh speak in the idioms of the Black South is also part of Hurston's point: the powerful are not as powerful as they think they are.
What is Moses's relationship to conjure in the novel?
In Hurston's retelling, Moses is the greatest conjure man in the world — a practitioner of Hoodoo who achieves the miracles attributed to him in the Bible through specific conjure knowledge, not through supernatural intervention. Moses learns conjure in Egypt and perfects it through his years in Midian; the plagues of Egypt are the applications of his conjure skills. This framing connects the Exodus narrative to the African American folk spiritual tradition that Hurston documented in Mules and Men — the tradition of Hoodoo as a practical spiritual system that can intervene in the natural world. It also makes Moses a specifically African (or African-derived) figure: his power comes from traditions that Hurston is positioning as African in origin.
What is the relationship between Moses and the Israelites in the novel?
One of the novel's most interesting dimensions is its portrait of the complicated relationship between Moses and the people he liberates. The Israelites in Hurston's retelling are not simply grateful recipients of freedom; they are difficult, complaining, suspicious of their leader, and prone to looking back at Egypt with nostalgia for the familiar oppression. Moses is frustrated by them, sometimes contemptuous of them, and the novel dramatizes the problem that haunts liberation movements: that people who have been formed by oppression sometimes find freedom more terrifying than bondage. Hurston is drawing directly on the tradition of Black political thought that asks what it means to want freedom for people who are ambivalent about it.
What should I read after Moses, Man of the Mountain?
After Moses, Man of the Mountain, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is Hurston's masterpiece. Mules and Men (1935) is her folklore collection. Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) is her autobiography. For biblical retellings in contemporary American literature, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (which uses the story of Abraham and Isaac) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (which echoes the sacrifice of Medea) are important companions.
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