The Books of Moses

After the children of Israel were saved, after they passed through the Red Sea and after the Pharaoh's army drowned, Moses and his followers immediately began to sing praises to God.

In Deuteronomy, Moses, in his exhortation to the Jewish people after the deliverance of the ten commandments, set forth the basic tenets underlying the bhakti or devotional process which forms the very root of the sahkirtana philosophy. Here Moses stresses the importance of service to God and the evocation of His name.

Knowledge of the greatness of God, Moses maintains, necessitates the devotee's "publishing" His name and broadcasting His glories. In his second song, Moses says:

As in Vaisnava philosophy, the name of God is integral with Him. Of course the Godhead, by His omnipresence, exists impersonally in all sound, and all sound has its being impersonally in Him, yet the names of God are identical with Him in a different way: they are sabda, or sound incarnations, and God is personally present in them. Thus the names of God are praised and evoked in the religious traditions of both East and West. (The English word "God," for instance, stems from the Indo-European base ghawa-and the Sanskrit havate, meaning "to call out to, invoke," the idea being that God is He to whom man calls out both in joy and distress.) Moses, the great lawgiver and father of the Jews, was not inaugurating a new tradition in advocating the verbal glorification of God but was working within the established context of Judaism.