God sent Moses back to Egypt to demand the release of the Israelites from slavery. Moses said that he could not speak with assurance or eloquence, so God allowed Aaron, his brother, to become his spokesperson. After the Ten Plagues, Moses led the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt and across the Red Sea, after which they based themselves at Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments. After 40 years of wandering in the desert, Moses died within sight of the Promised Land.
“Go Down Moses” is an American Negro spiritual. It describes events in the Old Testament of the Bible, specifically Exodus 7:16: “And the Lord spoke unto Moses, go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, thus saith the Lord, Let my people go, that they may serve me”, in which God commands Moses to demand the release of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. The opening verse as published by the Jubilee Singers in 1872:
- When Israel was in Egypt’s land: Let my people go,
- Oppress’d so hard they could not stand, Let my People go.
- Go down, Moses,
- Way down in Egypt’s land,
- Tell old Pharaoh,
- Let my people go.
In the song “Israel” represents the African-American slaves while “Egypt” and “Pharaoh” represent the slavemaster.
Going “down” to Egypt is derived from the Biblical origin, where Egypt is consistently perceived as being “below” other lands, with going to Egypt being “down” while going away from Egypt is “up”. In the context of American slavery, this ancient sense of “down” converged with the concept of “down the river” (the Mississippi), where slaves’ conditions were notoriously worse, a situation which left the idiom “sell [someone] down the river” in present-day English.
A modern version