Moses and the Disappearing Disability: Exegesis and Authority at the Burning Bush

The second paper examines how Jewish interpretations of Moses’s speech difficulty articulate shifting models of disability. Drawing on disability studies and biblical scholarship, it distinguishes between impairment as bodily difference and disability as the social and theological meanings attached to that difference. Reading Exodus alongside rabbinic midrash and medieval biblical commentary, the paper traces how Moses’s description of himself as “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (Exod 4:10) becomes a recurring problem of interpretation. The biblical narrative responds by restructuring prophetic authority around Moses’s impairment, modeling accommodation rather than cure through designating Aaron as Moses’s mouth. Later interpreters—including Rashi, Rashbam, Bekhor Shor, and Gersonides—reframe Moses’s speech through sociolinguistic, spiritual, and theological explanations that relocate or diminish impairment. This pattern, which the paper terms “disappearing disability,” reveals how rabbinic and medieval interpretations of this passage have negotiated the sometimes-difficult relationship between embodiment and prophetic authority.