Moses Bible stories for kids
Moses arrives here as a baby who can do nothing for himself and leaves it as an old man coming down a smoking mountain with two slabs of stone. In between he runs away, keeps somebody else's sheep for forty years, argues with God out of a burning bush, and walks a whole nation into a desert with no map. Heard in order, the odd thing about him shows up early: he is the least confident hero in the Bible.
They are laid out in Exodus order below, and each works alone if you have four minutes rather than an hour. Nearly all are on this website in full text, with the memory verse, questions and prayer, and every one has a free audio preview of up to two minutes. Two are written for ages 5 to 8 rather than 3 to 8, and the arc below says which.
8 stories · about 62 minutes of audio
Moses’s story, in order
Exodus 1-2
Baby Moses in a Basket
A tiny basket floats among the river reeds while a brave big sister watches nearby. This tender Baby Moses story follows a mother's careful plan and the unexpected kindness that keeps her little boy safe.
Exodus 14-15
Moses Crosses the Red Sea
God's people reach the edge of the sea with danger close behind and nowhere obvious to go. Moses asks them to stand still, trust God, and watch an impossible road appear.
Exodus 3-4
Moses and the Burning Bush
Forty years after running away from Egypt, Moses is walking the same dusty hills with the same sheep when a bush catches fire and simply refuses to burn up. What happens next turns an old shepherd who is sure he is nobody back toward the palace he fled.
Exodus 5-10
Moses and the Plagues of Egypt
Nine times Moses walks into the golden throne room and asks Pharaoh to let God's people go, and nine times he gets the same one-word answer. Sign after sign piles up outside the palace while one man's heart stays as hard as the bricks his slaves are making.
Exodus 12
The First Passover
Every family in Israel picks one small lamb and keeps it close for four days, and then paints its blood around the doorframe and bolts the door until morning. Inside, with sandals on and bread still flat, they eat their supper standing up and wait for the night that finally sets them free.
Exodus 16
God Sends Manna from Heaven
A month into the wilderness the last crumb of bread carried out of Egypt is gone, and hungry people say hard things to Moses. God's answer arrives overnight, scattered across the sand, and nobody can work out what it is.
Exodus 17:1-7
Moses Brings Water from the Rock
The people reach a place called Rephidim with cracked lips and empty water skins, and they are not gentle with Moses about it. Then God gives him an instruction that makes no sense at all: walk out to a rock, and hit it.
Exodus 19-20, 24, 31
The Ten Commandments
The mountain is smoking, the ground is shaking, and a whole nation stands very still at the bottom while Moses climbs up into the cloud. What he carries back down is not gold or silver but ten short rules, written for a family by the finger that scattered the stars.
Listening through Moses’s life
Baby Moses in a Basket is where to start and the gentlest of the set. A mother waterproofs a papyrus basket with tar, sets her baby among the reeds where the current cannot take him, and sends his sister Miriam to stand a little way off and watch. The king's order against the Hebrew baby boys is named once, without detail; the rescue is built out of small decisions made by women. Moses and the Burning Bush then picks him up at eighty, minding someone else's sheep, and he spends most of ten minutes trying to talk God out of choosing him.
Then the two hard ones, the only two written for ages 5 to 8 rather than 3 to 8. Moses and the Plagues of Egypt is the most intense thing we have published: nine signs over Egypt, hail and fire on the fields, a three-day darkness, and a king who ends it by threatening Moses' life. It stops after the ninth sign. The First Passover takes the last night on its own, and its subject is the lamb, chosen, kept in the house four days, then given up so the family behind the painted doorway is safe. The tenth plague is one sentence with no detail in it.
Moses Crosses the Red Sea gives the east wind its whole night rather than parting the water in a sentence, so that by morning there is a road where there was no road. Then the two calmest stories in the arc: manna on the sand at dawn that nobody can identify, and, at three minutes, water from a grey cracked rock at Rephidim after the crowd has said some hard things to Moses.
The Ten Commandments closes it at Mount Sinai, with thunder, a trumpet nobody blew, and an old man climbing into the cloud to fetch back ten short rules. End to end it runs a little over an hour, and the thread is not Moses being brave. It is God going back, again and again, to the same reluctant man who kept saying he was the wrong one.
Common questions
- Do you have the burning bush, the plagues and the Ten Commandments?
- Yes, all three. Moses and the Burning Bush is Exodus 3 and 4, Moses and the Plagues of Egypt covers Exodus 5 to 10 and stops after the ninth sign, and The Ten Commandments is Exodus 19 and 20 at Mount Sinai. They sit inside a run that also takes in the basket in the reeds, the first Passover, the Red Sea, the manna and the water from the rock, and every one of them has its own page here with a free audio preview.
- Which Moses stories are too much for a three-year-old?
- Two of them. Moses and the Plagues of Egypt is rated Ages 5-8: nine signs fall on Egypt, hail and fire among them, and Pharaoh finishes by threatening to kill Moses. The First Passover is also Ages 5-8, though it is a much quieter telling, because the tenth plague is given a single sentence with no detail and the weight of the story sits on the lamb that saved the family behind the door. Everything else in the arc is Ages 3-8.
- What happened to Pharaoh's army? My child always asks.
- The water comes back and the army cannot follow. The narration never describes it and there is nothing graphic in the telling, but death is in the background of the story and it is fairer to say so plainly than to dodge it. The story page carries a short note for parents with wording that keeps the answer honest and brief.
- Can I read the Moses stories here for free?
- Nearly all of it. Seven of the eight carry the complete story text on the page, and Moses and the Plagues of Egypt carries the opening third with the rest in the app. Every page publishes the memory verse from the World English Bible, the discussion questions, the prayer and the note for parents in full, plus a free audio preview of up to two minutes. The full narration, offline listening and bedtime mode are in the Bible Wonders app.