Moses the Black

Moses was a monk of the Egyptian desert in the fourth century. He is called the Black and the Ethiopian because the Greek word Aithiops named a dark-skinned person from the Nile lands south of Egypt, and he is thought to have come from Nubia. He is also called Moses the Strong. He was the slave of an Egyptian official, was dismissed for theft and violence, and became the leader of a band of robbers.

Palladius, who knew the monks of Egypt and wrote the Lausiac History about AD 420, tells how Moses left that life and came to the monks of Scetis, in the Egyptian desert. He became a disciple of Abba Isidore, and was later made a priest.

Moses wrote nothing that survives. What we have are his sayings and the stories told of him in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Asked for a word by a brother, he told him to go and sit in his cell, and the cell would teach him everything. When the brothers gathered to judge a monk who had sinned, he came carrying a leaking basket of sand, and said that his own sins were running out behind him while he came to judge another.

He is remembered as having died about AD 405, at about seventy-five. Later accounts say raiders killed him at Scetis with companions, after he had told the brothers to flee. The Orthodox, Coptic and Catholic churches remember him as a saint.