This chapter is a reading of the first rock-water episode (Exodus 17). It navigates through three layers of literary stratigraphy – evident in shifting emotional responses, character roles, and settings – in order to uncover a version of the episode in which Moses plays the role of a king held to account by his people for ensuring their survivial in a crisis. This version does not stand on its own but is part of a version of the exodus narrative modeled on the Sargon birth legend. The character of Moses develops through a series of acts of striking, as he realizes his destiny as one who draws (water), expressed in his name. Like its Assyrian model, this narrative is a work of political allegory. It relates to Hezekiah’s abandonment of Egyptian ties as the Assyrians threaten siege of Jerusalem and may have played a role in negotiating Judah’s continued independence. The exodus story thus does not originate in the northern kingdom of Israel, as is usually thought, but is is implicated in a decidedly Judean situation.

This chapter focuses on the proliferation of novels in the early decades of the eighteenth century that assumed the form of personal memoirs. Acknowledging arguments that link this new style of writing to demands for greater narrative plausibility, it also considers the popularity of the form in relation to the social upheavals driven by the increasing mobility of people and the flow of money associated with modernity and globalisation. It argues that the first-person form enabled novelists in this period to explore the importance of the novelistic imagination as a tool for adapting to difference and cultural change, foregrounding the use of narrative by those on the move in negotiating personal identity and social relationships. With particular reference to novels by Crébillon, Prévost, Marivaux and Lesage, it examines the different ways in which protagonists struggle to become authors and thereby exercise greater control over their lives, pointing to how the memoir-novel played a formative role in constructing the concept of an autobiographical subject and the contours of modern autobiography.