Interesting point (all invitations to the Pit aside).
Oddly enough, when Moses was on Mount Sinai, receiving the Ten Commandments (or the “Top 10”), he also wrote out the entire pentateuch. Hence the term “the Five Books of Moses.”
The rabbis say that Moses wept as he wrote of his own death.
I may be wrong, but I beleive that this was before he struck the rock.
So: He knew his fate, and yet was powerless to prevent it. Is this meant as a lesson in predeterminism? God knows all, all is written, you cannot escape your fate?
My theory, very simply (and probably supported by Jewish commentaries [and please, Chaim, Sdimbert, Izzy, let me know if I’m right]) Moses only received the commandments on Mt. Sinai, not the historical portions of the Torah. Those were written as they happened.
TBH, I sincerely hope I’m wrong about that. But the idea of Moses weeping has been with me since I was a kid, and I remembered it because it was so incredibly poingant.
But then, I went to a Conservative shul with a reconstructionist Rabbi and an Orthodox minyan as an offshoot downstairs, which, in my more cynical moments, casts a shadow of doubt over most of what I’ve learned.
Under the assumption that Moses wrote down the entire Pentateuch, there is nothing in the text itself that indicates what was written down when. It does not seem logical (to me) that the entire list of laws and history would be given at Mount Sinai, and then actually happen later. However, various rabbis have posed various midrashim about this. If you like the idea of Moses writing about his death in advance and weeping, that’s fine, that’s one set of midrashim and beliefs. BTW, no reason that couldn’t have been written down as Moses was about to die. The notion that Moses wrote about his sin and still committed it seems… well… silly, IMHO.
If you prefer that Moses wrote down the stuff after Sinai as it happened, that’s fine too; some say that Joshua wrote the last bit.
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*Originally posted by blessedwolf *
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TBH, I sincerely hope I’m wrong about that. But the idea of Moses weeping has been with me since I was a kid, and I remembered it because it was so incredibly poingant.
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Well, no, perhaps I didn’t make myself as clear as I should have.
There are two (Jewish) opinions about the final 8 verses in Dueteronomy.
Joshua wrote them.
Moses wrote them.
According to the opinion that Moses wrote them, he wrote them in tears. However, even this opinion would say that they were written right before his death, not at Mount Sinai.
Johnny was asking not about Moses’ knowledge of the future, but about God knowing about it. In other words, Johnny wants to know why God yanked Moses around so long if He knew in advance that Moses was going to blow it.
This question actually applies to all cases of reward and punishment, for everyone and not just for Moses.
There are other answers, but the one that satisfies me the best is that although God knows in advance what we are going to do, it is still our free-willed choice to do this or that. And it would be unfair of Him to reward or punish us for something we haven’t done yet. Therefore, in the interest of fairness, He allows events to unfold, and we get our just desserts in their proper time.
IMHO, the Pentateuch tends to take a very simplistic (or, if you prefer, straight-forward) attitude towards good and evil: good is rewarded and evil is punished, and usually the punishment is in proportion to the crime. For instance, Jacob fools his father Isaac with a piece of cloth (goat skin), and Jacob is in turned fooled by his sons with a piece of cloth (Joseph’s bloodied coat). Pharoah orders the death of Israel’s firstborn, and the final plague is the death of Egypt’s firstborn. ((ASIDE: You can argue that the children themselves were innocent victims, but that’s beside the point; the punishment of Egypt/Pharaoh is poetically consistent with their/his sin.)) Other examples abound.
Arguably, this is one reason that there is no mention of an after-life in the Pentateuch: reward and punishment happen in this world.
However, there is growing realization or recognition in later Biblical texts that the (moral) world is not so well-ordered. Sometimes bad things happen to good people; sometimes the suffering seems to far outweigh any crime; and, ultimately, in the book of Job, the notion that suffering is “punishment” is totally discredited (by being put in the mouth of one of Job’s “friends”).
If we think of a sort of evolutionary scale (or, if you prefer, growing recognition of the complexity of God’s moral universe), with Pentateuch at one end and Job at the other, it is not surprising to find stories about Elisha and Elijah sort of in-between, not willing to give up a “suffering is punishment” attitude, and yet recognizing that life is more complex than that.
I’d just like to add to what CK said. I had heard that the striking of the rock instead of speaking to it was a big deal for Moses because of its symbolic significance. G-d wanted Moses to demonstrate to the Israelites that even a rock will obey the word of G-d (through his prohets) merely upon hearing it, and that by inference, this is the way they’d be expected to act. By striking the rock instead, Moses gave the symbolic implication that only the threat of punishment is a significant enough inducement to action. This failure of leadership was a major point against Moses, leading G-d to decide that this kind of leadership was not appropriate for the Holy Land.
Zev:
Well, he received quite a bit at Sinai…not just the ten commandments, but the civil laws, instructions for the Tabernacle and the priests and the laws in the entire book of Leviticus. But yes, my understanding is that the rest was written as the time proceeded, with those last eight verses either written prophetically immediately prior to his death (in tears), or written by Joshua.
Timothy Campbell:
Or perhaps what you are reading as harmless children’s taunting is actually more akin to dangerous young punks, allied with the Baal cult, intentionally baiting him.
Good lesson. 2 commanders with their armies were burned up by fire for ordering Elijah to come witih them. The 3rd one learned and begged him to go. Goes to show, all you gotta do is ask nicely.
