Moses in the Sinai rewrites the books of Exodus and Numbers by way of The Arabian Nights, Nikos Kazantzakis, and Cecil B. DeMille. It makes generous use of myth and history, ancient and contemporary. The Hebrews of the novel are a varied mob of outlaws, magicians, sorcerers, aristocrats, and idolators, all content with being slaves. Moses must lead them into the Sinai against their will in the hope of serving a God whose very identity he doubts. The Hebrews of this historical and imaginative novel inhabit a world where children are born in cooking pots, meat rains from the sky, fish talk, and prophecies come true. It is a world where human emotion can take miraculous forms. Moses in the Sinai is full of such miracles.
