Sunday, August 29, 2021

The faith of Moses

But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.
-- 1 Cor. 2:9

And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.
--Exodus 20:21

God promised Moses, and Moses promised the people, no afterlife -- no Heaven, certainly, nor even a simple material paradise like those of Pindar and Virgil and Muhammad. No ocean breezes and flowers of blazing gold, no mossy beds by crystal streams that murmur through the meads, no gardens of palm and vine beneath which the rivers flow. Perhaps Moses thought at first that the voice from the burning bush was promising some such familiar Elysium -- the promised "land flowing with milk and honey" would fit right into many a pagan poem -- but then the voice continued, clarifying that the land referred to was "the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites." On earth. And then they would die, and of what came after that nothing was said.

For us, what follows naturally from "imagine there's no heaven" is "imagine all the people living for today." Whence then the heroism of Moses?  What motivated him? "Because there were no graves in Egypt," complained the people, "hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?" -- and didn't they have a point? Almost all of them did die in the wilderness; of the 600,000 who came out of Egypt, only two -- Moses himself not among them -- lived to enter the promised land. And even those lucky two -- well, they lived for a few more years, in a land rather more notable for its Canaanites and Hittites and Amorites than for its rivers of milk and honey, and then they died, too. So much for that.

And this is why I think there must be something authentically Mosaic in the Book of Deuternomy. Moses must have known something beyond the Lord of "core Torah" -- that barely-contained volcanic force, always on the verge of bursting forth and destroying any who got too close. He must have known that God loved him, and that must have been enough. He may not have had any clear understanding of the point of what he was doing, or of his ultimate destiny, but he had enough to go on. One of the Book of Mormon prophets says of God, "I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things" -- and some such childlike trust must have underlain the awful courage of Moses.

2 comments:

No Longer Reading said...

You make a good point here, that there is no mention of an afterlife of any kind in the Torah.
With regards to the faith of Moses, there is also the speech of Stephen in the Acts of the Apostles, where he says (Acts 7:22): "And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds."

I believe this speech preserves a tradition that had been passed down. And the Egyptians believed very much in an afterlife, so that probably also influenced the faith of Moses.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Good point, Kevin. The Egyptian background of Moses and his followers makes the absence of an afterlife from his teachings all the more striking.

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