Sinai, the Wilderness, and the Qur'anic Musa

Three months out, the people camp before a mountain that smokes and shakes, and the covenant is given there with commandments spoken to the whole assembly and a long body of law given to Moses alone. The episode that follows is the calf: while he is on the mountain the people ask Aaron for gods to go before them, gold is collected, an image is cast, and Moses comes down, breaks the tablets, and destroys it. The remaining forty years are a sequence of complaints, rebellions and provisions of food and water, and they end with the leader shown the land from the top of a mountain and dying outside it, buried in a valley in a grave that no one knows.

The Qur'an names Musa more often than any other prophet and returns to the confrontation with Pharaoh repeatedly. Its distinctive scenes include the contest with the court magicians, whose ropes and staffs appear to move until they are swallowed, at which the magicians prostrate and declare belief in the Lord of Musa and Harun and are threatened by Pharaoh with mutilation and crucifixion for it; the Qur'an makes their refusal to recant one of its clearest statements about faith under duress. Pharaoh drowns declaring belief at the last moment and is told it is too late, and the tradition holds that his body was preserved as a sign. The calf is attributed not to Harun, who is defended in the text, but to a figure called the Samiri, and the account of what the Israelites received at the mountain is told with the mountain itself raised above them.