Between the Basket and the Blood: A Memoir of Moses

by Moses, Servant of Yahweh

Before the wilderness. Before the burning bush. Before Pharaoh and the sea.

He was a Hebrew child drawn out of the Nile and raised in the house of the oppressor. Born of Israel, preserved by Egypt, Moses grows up divided between two worlds: the mother-house that first marked him with the name of Yahweh, and the palace that clothes him in privilege, order, and power. He is taught the wisdom of Egypt, yet never fully belongs to it. He is bound by blood to the afflicted, yet cannot return to them without shame.

In this deeply imagined literary memoir, Moses looks back on the silent years Scripture barely names—the years between the basket and the blood. Through palace instruction, divided loyalties, the fierce love of his mother and sister, the plain strength of his brother Aaron, and the brutal machinery of Egypt's power, the young Moses is formed into a man who can no longer remain innocent inside the world that raised him.

Between the Basket and the Blood is a grave, intimate, and emotionally rich work of biblical historical fiction about identity, power, kinship, and the terrible cost of choosing where one belongs. It is the story of Moses before he became the deliverer: a son of two houses, a man of divided speech and divided loyalties, and the long inward making of the blow that changed everything.