That the idolization of Moses is not particularly surprising.
The Exodus contains a story of Moses’ battle to not be a god. This is not some kabbalistic secret underlying the text. It is a humdrum observation. The Egyptian people were prone to see the Pharaoh as a deity; prone to forget that it was their own land, labor, and militaristic might that he organized into a mechanism in order to achieve his “divine” effects. [1] Thus Joseph, whom Pharaoh “set over all the land of Egypt” for ordering the entire Egyptian state into a centrally organized mechanism for the redistribution of grain, was seen as sharing in Pharaonic divinity, and must tell his brothers who bow the knee before him, “Fear not, for am I in the place of God?”[2]
It is no wonder that a people enslaved some four hundred years in a king-worshipping climate would be tempted to worship their own ruler, Moses. The Israelite people lived under the sway of a magical, idolatrous empire longer than the United States has existed. God says to Moses, “see, I make you as God to Pharaoh,” and in this pithy line, carves out a general rule: The degree to which the Israelites remain in Egypt, members of the body of Pharaoh, addicted to their own slavery, is the degree to which their leaders will appear to them as gods. This rule of idolatry remains relevant for our political life today. The degree to which our people are immersed in sin and slavery is the precise degree to which human leadership appears as divine power and rule rather than limited, non-sovereign, analogical participation in divine sovereignty.
2. That the Israelite idolatry can be traced in their assignment of responsibility for their rescue from Egypt.
Evidence of the Israelite will to deify can be traced in the assignment of the status “who brought us out of the land of Egypt” throughout the book of Exodus. The phrase is an epithet for God, one which brings to mind His mighty power to save. Its first use in Exodus ascribes it to Yahweh: “I have come down to deliver them from out of the hand of the Egyptians.”
God, speaking to Moses from the burning bush, has no trouble assigning this task to Moses — “you may bring forth my people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt.” Moses is His servant. The assignment of salvific causality to Moses no more threatens the divinity of God than the assignment of coffee-making causality to a coffee-pot threatens the dignity and nobility of the barista. But the moment that this intimate conversation between servant and master is turned outwards to the public eye, the question of “who brought us out of the land of Egypt” becomes synonymous with the question “who has divine authority and power” — and the Israelites persistently apply the epithet to Moses over and against God.
The first episode sets the standard for the rest. The Israelites are caught between an onrush of murderous chariots and a large body of water. They turn to Moses and moan, “What have you done to us, in bringing us out of Egypt?” To Moses goes the divine responsibility. Moses, who, for obvious reasons, does not want such responsibility, redirects the Israelites meandering attention to the God who saves: “The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be still.” God agrees wholeheartedly with his assignation of responsibility. The medieval French commentator of the Torah, Rashi, sums up the Jewish tradition: God’s response “‘why do you cry out to Me’ implies responsibility for the matter is {dependent} upon Me and not you.” [3]
3. That whining can be a form of idolatry.
Because we think of deification as an obvious honor, it is difficult to see idolatry in the complaint. But the Israelites’ complaints against Moses are grounded in their application of divine status to Moses rather than God. Moses himself warns the people of the idolatry latent in their murmuring against him. In the next episode of theologically-misplaced complaining, the Israelites attribute the salvific epithet to Moses and his brother Aaron with the words “you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” Moses redirects their barb to its proper target: “At evening you will know that it was the LORD who brought you out of the land of Egypt...For what are we, that you murmur against us...because the Lord has heard your murmurings which you murmur against him—what are we? Your murmurings are not against us but against the LORD.”
The war of epithet-application escalates. If at the Red Sea Moses reminded the Israelites of the true source of the Exodus to encourage them, now, in the wilderness of Sin, he reminds them in order to warn them, making it very clear that the LORD, and not Moses or any of his family, is the proper cause of the exodus from Egypt. When there is no water for the people to drink at Reph’idim, the people once again “find fault with Moses.” Moses wastes no time in re-assigning the object of their fault-finding: “Why do you put the Lord to the test?” The idolatry of Moses in the complaint of the Israelites is stated even more strongly in the book of Numbers, where Moses is presented as the antithesis of the god-king, precisely in his weakness. Moses quite literally denies being a god after another complaint from the Israelites: “Did I conceive all this people? Did I bring them forth, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries the sucking child?’” No, the answer is implied. God brings forth men, and not vice versa, so nursing the whining sons of Israel is, once again, God’s responsibility. [4]
4. That the Israelites sought a new god to replace Moses.
This escalating ping-pong match, in which the divine epithet is swatted back and forth between Moses and the LORD, reaches a peak in two episodes of rebellion. The first is recorded in the book of Numbers, where the people refuse to take the land of Canaan for fear of its occupants. Here there is an identity between the rejection of Moses and Aaron and the rejection of the LORD. The people, in true form, “murmured against Moses and Aaron” but ascribe the divine plan to the LORD: “Why does the LORD bring us into this land, to fall by the sword?” The tacit idolatry of the complaint becomes a direct and deliberate idolatry: “And they said to one another, let us choose a captain over us, and go back to Egypt.” Rashi interprets the Hebrew literally: “‘Let us place a head.’ This is to be understood as Targum Onkelos renders it, ‘Let us appoint a leader,’ that is to say, let us set a king over us. Our Rabbis explained [this] as meaning an idol.” [5]
One could, of course, read this passage in isolation and consider the Israelites’ election of a new leader as a practical election of a non-divine “captain.” Read in the context of the constant attempt to ascribe to Moses powers and responsibility that belong only to God, however, it seems unlikely that, in the choice of a new “head,” the erring Israelites suddenly developed a theology of secular kingship, and considered this “head” to be a non-divine political leader.
If the Israelites thought they could avoid the LORD’s plan by electing a new king, they had not learned the lesson Moses desperately tried to teach them — that the LORD’s plans for the Israelites could not be identified with Moses’ plans for the Israelites; that he was not God. The Israelites, in thinking a change of leader would change a divine plan, showed their idolatrous colors. The Bible’s record of God’s response to this particular rebellion makes the most sense under this assumption of their idolatry: “[H]ow long will they not believe in Me, in spite of all the signs which I have wrought among them?”
The Israelite idolatry of Moses is most clear in the story of the golden calf. The golden calf was not built to replace God. The golden calf was built to replace Moses. This is apparent in the demand which the people make of Aaron, which most clearly and horribly plasters the divine epithet onto Moses rather than God: “Up, make us gods, who shall go before us: as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”
Moses is unequivocally credited with God’s saving action. The Israelites’ response to His absence is not to elect a new captain, appoint a new leader, or even choose a new divine representative. The people demand gods who, like Moses, like Pharaoh in his chariot, and like the god-king that the Israelites will beg from the prophet Samuel, “go before us.” The golden calf is a cumulative and not a perennial moment of idolatry. The original act of Israelite idolatry was to idolize Moses. When he raised his staff and the waters divided, the Israelites looked on as they had been educated to look on in the land of Egypt — as slaves towards a monarchical power, seeing no servant of God, but a god. When Aaron has melted down their gold into the image of a calf, they answer their own question, “as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him” in his cry of recognition: “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” The golden calf is an image of the god-king, and it is worshipped according to the method described in The Wisdom of Solomon: “When men could not honor monarchs in their presence, they...made a visible image of the king whom they honored, so that by their zeal they might flatter the absent one as though present.” This was a classically Egyptian response to a king; Egypt, whose Pharaohs could say “I am the essence of a god, the son of a god, the messenger of a god” [6] and whose images were worshipped throughout the kingdom.
5. That this interpretation makes much more sense than positing some sort of quasi-natural propensity towards polytheism.
If we imagine that the Israelites’ constant backsliding into idol-worship was the result of some hidden desire for a plenitude of gods, or even for a visible image, then the Israelites are unimaginably dense. If their golden calf is nothing more than a replacement of the God of Israel with a statue, then the whole scene is ridiculous. Academic whispers of Jewish “propaganda” or “ideology” become believable. After all, the story would amount to one in which the Israelite people, after walking through a riven Red Sea, marching behind pillars of fire, escaping an Egypt destroyed by miraculous plagues, and a few measly days after seeing Mount Sinai erupt in a supernatural trumpet blast, relapsed, forgot the whole thing and worshipped a cow. This reading makes the Israelites seem less sinful and more insane. Jewish commentators take great pains to present whole scene as one in which the people had some basis for being misled from the worship of God. According to many, the golden calf was endowed with a Satanic spirit of life. It leapt, mooed, and convinced the people.
But the desire of the Israelites is not a moronic rejection of the God of fire and cloud. The Israelites were still infected with a spirit of slavery, with a life that had grown comfortable in its own dispossession. They refused to see, in the apparent power and might of the kings of the earth, the very land, wealth and skill of the people, organized into a technological mechanism. Instead, they ascribe divine status to them. They took Moses as a god, and so they thought to bring him back as an image, an idol, when he left.
6. That such an interpretation could prove fruitful for a vexed issue in biblical interpretation, namely, Moses’ horns.
This interpretation sheds light on the ever-interesting question of Moses’ shining face, which so terrifies the Israelites after their worship of the golden calf. “The author of the verse chose קרן instead of the usual אור to communicate a display of light’” — the word for “horns” rather than “rays.” [7] There are three major interpretations of this linguistic oddity.
The first is to simply translate קרן as “shining,” doing away with the conundrum.
The second is to admit the horny presence, and describe it as a “vestigial echo,” as when Jack M. Sasson argued that Exodus 34:29–35 is “a fragment of an older pagan text recounting the worship of the moon god Sin, which is also represented by a bull.” [8]
The third interpretation is described by Joshua Philpot in his dissertation on the topic: “One could, perhaps, take the image of Moses with “horns” as prefiguring the later kings of Israel and Judah, where the horn (קרן (ֶas a symbol of power is primarily associated with kingship. God gives the קרן ֶto the king and exalts him. Like Hannah’s prayer in 1 Sam 2, Yhwh shatters the king’s enemies, gives him strength, and exalts the horn of his anointed.” [9]
The fourth interpretation was most recently represented by G.K. Beale in his work “We Become What We Worship.” Beale argues that “the bright, horned-like appearance of Moses’ face suggests a divine mocking of the worshipers of the calf idol, who had come to be described already in Exodus 32 as a calf.”
The rhetorical point accordingly is: ‘Oh, you want to worship calf idols, do you? Then not only are you becoming like the calf idol, but in so doing you have become like my idolatrous enemies and are being judged by the only true God, who has the only true glorious power (symbolized by ox horns flashing on the face of Moses, the mediator of God’s wrathful presence). The intention of the parody is to mock the people for mistakenly thinking that true divine glory was possessed by their pathetic calf god instead of Yahweh. [10]
The first view is a cop-out, as Philpot notes, “the noun form…from which it most likely derives, is fairly widespread in the OT and means “horn” in nearly every instance, as in the horn of an ox or bull, or even the horns on the corners of the altar (e.g., Exod 27:2).” [11]
The second view disrupts the unity of the text, for if there is an “echo” of another god in the story, it makes no sense that Moses receives this horned-like skin from his conversation of Yahweh and that it clearly represents the glory of Yahweh.
The third is attractive, but incomplete. As Philpot points out, “such a move would attribute kingly notions to Moses that are not explicit in the text. Moses certainly receives a sense of divine presence that is unparalleled, but he is not told to be king over the people.” [12]
The fourth is likewise incomplete. If God is simply choosing to mock the Israelites by displaying his glory shining in and through the calf-like symbol, why should Moses cover his face whenever he speaks to the people? God designs a glorious polemic on the skin of Moses and Moses covers it up?
The view that the Israelites’ idolatry was originally of Moses, in their slavish desire to be organized into a technocratic slave-state, provides an answer that synthesizes the best of these views. It simply reverses the order of vision usually assumed by the authors. The horn is an image of a king, but not because Moses was to take a formally royal role, or that God had crowned him upon Mount Sinai, but because the Israelites viewed him as a king akin to Pharaoh.
Likewise, the horned appearance is an echo of the idolatrous golden calf, but not a polytheistic, vestigial echo that just happened to find its way into an otherwise coherent and uninterrupted text. Moses appears to have horns, not in the manner that some unmentioned moon-worshippers might have seen a god, but as the Israelites saw and represented Moses. Moses, who struggles constantly not to be seen as a god; Moses, whose absence the Israelites filled with an image of a horned calf. In fact, this interpretation unifies the two views. The horn does represent kingly power, and, precisely because the idolatrous eyes of the Israelites saw kingly power as divine power, the horned face is, at one and the same time, the image of a god.
Beale provides us with the context in which God may have allowed for Moses to appear as a god-king: mockery and parody. But the mockery is even more incisive than Beale suggests. God is giving the Israelites what they ask for, yes, but not by merely recalling the calf through the image of horns and hoping they get the joke. Rather, God grants what the Israelites had been asking for throughout the entire book of Exodus — that Moses would be a god like Pharaoh. “You have asked again and again,” God seems to say, “for My servant Moses to be the one who is responsible for you. You have murmured against him, complaining that he, and not I, brought you out of Egypt with a mighty hand. You have thought of him as your god like unto the other nations — a king set over a nation of slaves. When he departs you treated him like an absent god-king and set up images to worship in his absence. You shall see my glory on him according to your own idolatrous eyes.”
7. That God acquiesces to our idolatrous forms for the sake of destroying them from within and constructing his kingdom from within their ruins.
Why would God permit Moses to be seen according to the idolatrous vision of the Israelites? To answer this question requires a total theology of the Old Testament, one which understands God as One Who permits Himself to be known under the inadequate, idolatrous categories of the nations while constantly drawing his people onwards and upwards towards the fullness of revelation. Philpot argues that an “idolatrous emblem like the horns of an ox is out of place given the indictment of the golden calf,” but this risks denying a definite theme of the Bible, in which God reveals himself through idolatrous emblems precisely because of his people’s hardness of heart and blindness of vision. Examples include his willingness to be worshipped through a system of animal sacrifice, despite declaring “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” in His prophets; His acquiescence to the Mosaic system of divorce, which Jesus later interprets as being allowed because of “the hardness of your hearts”; or His acquiescence to the Israelite demand for a king, despite His explicit condemnation of their desire as idolatrous rejection of Himself as king. In each case, the presence of God continues to appear under the signs demanded by an idolatrous nation, but always with the purpose of preparing the hearts of His people to come to know and love Him as sons rather than as slaves.
The people had shown themselves incapable of resisting the slavish idolatry of their leaders. Their hearts were hardened to the new ways into which God wanted to guide them — the ways of the Sabbath, the distribution of ownership, and the shepherd-king who would be “least” and a “servant of all.” Consistent with His usual sublime humility, God does not give them up according to His wrath, but acquiesces to their idolatrous categories. The veil with which Moses covers his face is a mercy to the Israelites. It is a symbol, as St. Paul will later argue, of the law by which God protects His people from their own idolatry, allowing them to approach His majesty through human, all too human means — sacrifice, priesthood, temple, and king. Without the Law of Moses regulating Israelite paganism, these same forms would follow their crooked course and end by revealing the face of the god-king; that is, establishing a social order in which the many are organized into a slave-state which produces the the appearance of divinity in its ruler. [13]
8. That Moses’ punishment relates to his failure not to appear as a god.
At Meribah, Moses performs a commandment of the Lord, but not according to the word of His command. God commands Moses to “tell the rock before their eyes to yield its water,” but Moses “struck the rock with his rod twice.” A minor difference, small enough to remind us of the assurances of the liturgical innovator: “God is not concerned with the details. We can achieve the ends and meanings of the Church’s rubrics without slavish adherence to the rubrics themselves — why not add a meaningful commentary into the words of consecration? Why not give a flourish here and oddity there? Why not, as the logic goes, express ourselves?”
But God is not a liturgist. He punishes Moses and Aaron, who will never enter the Promised Land, precisely for achieving His wondrous ends by innovative liturgical means. Why? Not because He is a stickler, or worse, a traditionalist, but because the form in which a miracle is per-formed in-forms its meaning. Like so many contemporary liturgical flourishes, it is the servant of God, and not God, who shines forth in the action. “Because you did not believe in Me, to sanctify Me in the eyes of the sons of Israel,” says God in His preamble to punishment. It is how the act appears in the eyes of the onlookers which matters — eyes which are prone to wander with idolatrous lust among the leaders and kings of the earth, seeing them as divine.
On its own, God’s punishment seems harsh. Indeed, Rashi points out that Moses has sinned before, questioning the power of God and doubting whether He will be able to provide food in the wilderness. Why, this time, is Moses forbidden from entering the promised land? God punishes only to save His people. Rashi argues “here where the sin was committed among the assemblage of all Israel Scripture did not spare him, because of the sanctification of the name of God.” [14] Because the sin was in the sight of a people with idolatrous eyes, rather than being pent up in the frustrations and doubts of Moses’ heart, God had to act publicly, to wrench them away from Moses, whom they so often looked on as a god. God punished to tell his people that this man who so boldly, so violently, so royally strikes the rock with his staff; who acts in his own method and manner; who angrily attributes the miracle to himself and to his brother, saying “Listen, you rebels! Shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” — that this man is not a god. “Do not worship him,” God seems to say. “The greatest of my servants is an atom in the light of my divine majesty.” Thus Moses suffers the exact same punishment of those Israelites who would have chosen an idolatrous “head” to lead them back to the ways of Egypt — he will die before he can enter the promised land.
In Deuteronomy, Moses says of Meribah, “the Lord was angry with me also on your account.” He is not passing blame where it does not belong. He describes the mercy of God, Who saves his people from their idolatry by the humiliation and punishment of their head. Nor is the punishment extrinsic to the crime, as if God, in His anger, cast about for a prohibition, any prohibition, that would cause the appropriate quantity of sorrow and disappointment in the child who had so offended Him. Rather the nature of the punishment is once again directed against the idolatry of the Israelites who would so quickly replace their leader with a golden calf. The promised land is the end of Israel’s wanderings. Here they will become like unto the other nations — stationary. For Moses to bring this assembly into their home as the one who strikes the rock how he pleases — this would be a great temptation to idolatry. But he is banned from establishing the people in their new, stationary home, one nation among nations, each with their god. He is banned, and his punishment concretizes him as a servant, rather than as a god; one who follows in the wilderness rather than a Romulus of the desert, destined for eventual deity.
9. That this is all immediately relevant to our own constructions of sovereignty and nation states.
The Israelite idolization of Moses and their apparent will to reject their new freedom for subjection under the reign of a god-king should not be considered as a deep, dark metaphysical yearning — it is a fear-based desire for food, the same indulged by fearful moderns buying up new technologies in order not to “fall behind.” The organization of the Egyptian slave-state provides a definite kind of peace and a provision for its people. The Israelites moan for the Satanic city and their “house of bondage,” whenever trouble arises in the Sabbath city they are attempting to build: “Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians. For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die here in the wilderness” (Exodus 14:12).
They constantly forget the means by which they had such material security: “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic” (Numbers 11:5). The Israelites did not eat luxuries “for nothing,” but at the cost of their freedom. This forgetting enrages Yahweh because it is idolatry, the stupidity that forgets that the power of the master to provide comes from the slavery of the people. The Israelites’ memory of Egypt as a place of provision without cost is an idolatrous rejection of the city of God; of an abundance which really does beckon its people to eat and drink “without cost.” The Satanic city is an ape of God’s own city — a peace, unified under a god-king, producing miracles. As we look to build the postliberal city, we should continue to learn from the Scriptures, which demand that we reject any social structure which would make gods out of men.
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This is part four of a series plucking at a “postliberal” thread running the length of the Scriptures. Read part one, and donate or subscribe to Postliberal Thought, that the series may continue.
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[1] The Pharaohs would commission victory monuments which reveal this method of god-making. They show Pharaoh as a divine being, single-handedly vanquishing enemy hordes. The armies that actually achieved this effect are dissolved into his person, which appears divine as a result. Joachim Śliwa, “Some Remarks concerning Victorious Ruler Representations in Egyptian Art,” Forschungen und Berichte, Bd. 16, Archäologische Beiträge (1974), pp. 97-117.
[2] A Jewish tradition insists that, after Joseph had died, his skill of technological management was concretized into his person, and his bones were “placed into a metal casket and cast into the Nile River by the Egyptians who felt that his presence would bless the waters of the Nile upon which their entire agricultural system depended” (Sotah 13a, The William Davidson digital edition of the Koren Noé Talmud).
[3] Rashi on Exodus 14:15, Sefaria’s Digital Edition.
[4] See Numbers 11:29. Similarly, the book of Numbers shows that Moses rejects the accumulation of power into his person that was the source of deification for the Egyptian pharaoh. After his father-in-law Jethro rightly assigns divinity and salvific power to the LORD “who has delivered [the Israelites] out of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of Pharaoh,” Moses accepts his advice to distribute the task of judging the Israelites into the hands of “able men from all the people, such as fear God.” As Exodus emphasizes Moses' refusal to accumulate juridical power and the power of providing food, Numbers emphasizes Moses' decision not to cull and keep spiritual authority unto himself, as when Eldad and Medad prophesy in the camp, and Moses says, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the LORD’s people were prophets.”
[5] Rashi on Numbers 14:4.
[6] Cited in Gregory K. Beale’s We Become What We Worship: a Biblical Theology of Idolatry, which is a very good source documenting ancient god-kingship.
[7] Most of my information on this topic is contained in J. M. Philpot’s 2013 dissertation: “The shining face of Moses: The interpretation of Exodus 34:29–35 and its use in the Old and New Testaments.”
[8] Sasson, Jack M., “Bovine Symbolism in the Exodus Narrative,” Vetus Testamentum Vol. 18, Fasc. 3 (Jul., 1968), pp. 380-387.
[9] Philpot, pg. 89.
[10] Beale, pg. 81.
[11] Philpot, pg. 84.
[12] Ibid.
[13] The law serves as a veil on the face of the leader-idolatrously-seen-as-a-god, for instance, in its proscription against any king who would amass power and property and “lift his heart above his brethren” (Deuteronomy 17:14-20). God allows his people an idolatrous institution, kingship, but veils it in the law, and thus prevents a sinful people from engaging in idolatry.
[14] Rashi on Numbers 20:12.