A few weeks ago I submitted a paper proposal for this year’s annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), scheduled for November 17–19 in Denver, Colorado. Today I heard back from the Torah Section (the group that focuses on the first five books of the Bible) that my proposal was accepted. Praise God!

The working title is “The Songs of Moses from the Torah to the Apocalypse.” That section specifically called for studies of the “characterization of Moses … across the canon.” Here’s the abstract that I submitted for the proposal:

Scholarship on the characterization of Moses has devoted considerable attention to his roles as lawgiver, prophet, and intercessor within the Torah (e.g., Childs, Alexander, Craigie, McConville). Less attention has been paid to the songs attributed to Moses as a distinct canonical thread that develops his characterization across the whole of Scripture. This paper argues that the four songs attributed to Moses—the Song of the Sea (Exod 15), the Song of Moses (Deut 32), the Prayer of Moses (Ps 90), and the Song of Moses and the Lamb (Rev 15:3–4)—form a progressive canonical arc in which Moses is consistently characterized as a prophetic mediator of salvation-through-judgment, an arc that reaches its goal in Jesus Christ.

Within the Torah, the two great Mosaic songs present complementary portraits. Exodus 15 establishes the paradigm: Moses as prophet in song, interpreting the exodus event through the lens of divine Warrior-Shepherd imagery and pointing typologically beyond it toward an eschatological sanctuary (vv. 17–18). Deuteronomy 32 deepens this characterization: positioned as one of Moses’s final prophetic acts before his death, the song functions as a covenantal lawsuit that culminates not in Israel’s destruction but in God’s surprising eschatological vindication of his people (vv. 36–43). In both songs, Moses does not merely commemorate the past but prophetically mediates the meaning of redemption for all subsequent generations.

The canonical trajectory extends beyond the Torah. Psalm 90, uniquely attributed to “Moses, the man of God,” is positioned at the Psalter’s structural hinge (Books 3–4) to answer the crisis of the broken Davidic covenant with Mosaic intercession (see Wilson, Futato). Psalm 90’s petition for resurrection from death into a new morning (vv. 13–15) concentrates Moses’s mediatorial role into an eschatological prayer.

These three songs converge in Revelation 15:3–4, where the victorious saints sing “the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb.” Building on the intertextual work of Beale, Blount, and Hamilton on this passage, this paper argues that Revelation draws together not only Exodus 15 but the full Mosaic prophetic witness and connects it to the climactic work of the Lamb. The contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that reading these four songs as a canonical unit illuminates both the coherent characterization of Moses as prophetic mediator across the canon and the Christological goal toward which that characterization points.

This paper is—or rather, will be—based on a four-sermon series that I wrote a few years ago for Faith Presbyterian Church in Olney, MD:

• A Sermon from Exodus 14.30–15.21
• A Sermon from Deuteronomy 32.1–43
• A Sermon from Psalm 90
• A Sermon from Revelation 15.1–4

This summer, I’ll spend time trimming, synthesizing, etc.

One other proposal is still being considered by ETS.