Moses: the prophet who led Israel out of slavery in Egypt and received the law from God at Mount Sinai.
Moses is the towering human figure of the first five books of the Bible: the prophet who confronted Pharaoh, led Israel out of slavery in Egypt, brought the people to Mount Sinai, and received the law there. Born to Israelite parents during Pharaoh's campaign to kill the Hebrew baby boys, he was hidden in a basket on the Nile, found and raised in the Egyptian court, and later called by God at the burning bush to set his people free. He led them through forty years in the wilderness and died within sight of the promised land without entering it.
The Bible explains his name in Exodus 2:10, where Pharaoh's daughter names the rescued baby and says it is because she drew him out of the water. The name sounds like a Hebrew word meaning "to draw out," and the naming scene turns on that echo. Most scholars, though, think the name is actually Egyptian, built from a common Egyptian element meaning "is born" or "child" that also stands in the names of the pharaohs Thutmose and Rameses. On that view the Hebrew explanation is a play on how the name sounds rather than its true origin.
Across the Bible the name carries enormous weight. "Moses" comes to stand for the law itself and for the whole covenant God made with Israel, so that later writers speak of "the book of Moses," or pair "Moses and the Prophets" to mean the Scriptures as a whole. In the New Testament, where the name appears in its Greek form, Moses is the great lawgiver through whom the covenant came and against whom the work of Jesus is measured.