Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is opposite Jericho. Yahweh showed him all the land of Gilead to Dan, and all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, to the Western Sea, and the south, and the Plain of the valley of Jericho the city of palm trees, to Zoar. Yahweh said to him, “This is the land which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your offspring.’ I have caused you to see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there.”
So Moses the servant of Yahweh died there in the land of Moab, according to Yahweh’s word. He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth Peor, but no man knows where his tomb is to this day. Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died. His eye was not dim, nor his strength gone. The children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days, until the days of weeping in the mourning for Moses were ended. Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him. The children of Israel listened to him, and did as Yahweh commanded Moses. Since then, there has not arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom Yahweh knew face to face, in all the signs and the wonders which Yahweh sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land, and in all the mighty hand, and in all the awesome deeds, which Moses did in the sight of all Israel.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 6, 9, 10, 12 Which was a part of mount Abarim, Num. 27:12.
Which was a part of mount Abarim, Num. 27:12.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv1–12 Deu 34:1 And Moses went up from the plains…
Deu 34:1 And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that [is] over against Jericho. And the LORD shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan,
Ver. 1. And Moses went up.] With as good a will to die, as ever he did to dine; for it was but (as that martyr said) winking a little, and he was in heaven immediately.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv1–11 Moses went up, in compliance with God’s will, that…
Moses went up, in compliance with God’s will, that he should then and there resign up his soul to God.
Of the mountain of Nebo, see Num 27:12; 32:38; Deu 32:49. Of the land of Gilead Moses had as yet seen and enjoyed but a small part. Of this land, see Gen 31:21; Num 32:1,19, &c.
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Unto Dan; to that city which after Moses’s death was called Dan, Jos 19:47; Jdg 18:29. So that here is an anticipation. But it seems most probable, and is commonly believed, that this chapter was not written by Moses, but by Eleazar, or Joshua, or Ezra, or some other man of God, directed herein by the Holy Ghost; this being no more impeachment to the Divine authority of this chapter, that the penman is unknown, which also is the lot of some other books of Scripture, than it is to the authority of the acts of the king or parliament, that they are written or printed by some unknown person.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On vv1, 5, 9 Here is, I. Moses climbing upwards towards heaven, as…
Here is, I. Moses climbing upwards towards heaven, as high as the top of Pisgah, there to die; for that was the place appointed, Deu 32:49, Deu 32:50. Israel lay encamped upon the flat grounds in the plains of Moab, and thence he went up, according to order, to the mountain of Nebo, to the highest point or ridge of that mountain, which was called Pisgah, Deu 32:1. Pisgah is an appellative name for all such eminences. It should seem, Moses went up alone to the top of Pisgah, alone without help - a sign that his natural force was not abated when on the last day of his life he could walk up to the top of a high hill without such supporters as once he had when his hands were heavy (Exo 17:12), alone without company. When he had made an end of blessing Israel, we may suppose, he solemnly took leave of Joshua, and Eleazar, and the rest of his friends, who probably brought him to the foot of the hill; but then he gave them such a charge as Abraham gave to his servants at the foot of another hill: Tarry you here while I go yonder and die: they must not see him die, because they must not know of his sepulchre. But, whether this were so or not, he went up to the top of Pisgah, 1. To show that he was willing to die. When he knew the place of his death, he was so far from avoiding it that he cheerfully mounted a steep hill to come at it. Note, Those that through grace are well acquainted with another world, and have been much conversant with it, need not be afraid to leave this. 2. To show that he looked upon death as his ascension. The soul of a man, of a good man, when it leaves the body, goes upwards (Ecc 3:21), in conformity to which motion of the soul, the body of Moses shall go along with it as far upwards as its earth will carry it. When God's servants are sent for out of the world, the summons runs thus, Go up and die.
II. Moses looking downward again towards this earth, to see the earthly Canaan into which he must never enter, but therein by faith looking forwards to the heavenly Canaan into which he should now immediately enter. God had threatened that he should not come into the possession of Canaan, and the threatening is fulfilled. But he had also promised that he should have a prospect of it, and the promise is here performed: The Lord showed him all that good land, v. 1. 1. If he went up alone to the top of Pisgah, yet he was not alone, for the Father was with him, Joh 16:32. If a man has any friends, he will have them about him when he lies a dying. But if, either through God's providence or their unkindness, it should so happen that we should then be alone, we need fear no evil if the great and good Shepherd be with us, Psa 23:4. 2. Though his sight was very good, and he had all the advantage of high ground that he could desire for the prospect, yet he could not have seen what he now saw, all Canaan from end to end (reckoned about fifty or sixty miles), if his sight had not been miraculously assisted and enlarged, and therefore it is said, The Lord showed it to him. Note, All the pleasant prospects we have of the better country we are beholden to the grace of God for; it is he that gives the spirit of wisdom as well as the spirit of revelation, the eye as well as the object. This sight which God here gave Moses of Canaan, probably, the devil designed to mimic, and pretended to out-do, when in an airy phantom he showed to our Saviour, whom he had placed like Moses upon an exceedingly high mountain, all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, not gradually, as here, first one country and then another, but all in a moment of time. 3. He saw it at a distance. Such a sight the Old Testament saints had of the kingdom of the Messiah; they saw it afar off. Thus Abraham, long before this, saw Christ's day; and, being fully persuaded of it, embraced it in the promise, leaving others to embrace it in the performance, Heb 11:13. Such a sight believers now have, through grace, of the bliss and glory of their future state. The word and ordinances are to them what Mount Pisgah was to Moses; from them they have comfortable prospects of the glory to be revealed, and rejoice in hope of it. 4. He saw it, but must never enjoy it. As God sometimes takes his people away from the evil to come, so at other times he takes them away from the good to come, that is, the good which shall be enjoyed by the church in the present world. Glorious things are spoken of the kingdom of Christ in the latter days, its advancement, enlargement, and flourishing state; we foresee it, but we are not likely to live to see it. Those that shall come after us, we hope will enter that promised land, which is a comfort to us when we find our own carcases falling in this wilderness. See Kg2 7:2. 5. He saw all this just before his death. Sometimes God reserves the brightest discoveries of his grace to his people to be the support of their dying moments. Canaan was Immanuel's land (Isa 8:8), so that in viewing it he had a view of the blessings we enjoy by Christ. It was a type of heaven (Heb 11:16), which faith is the substance and evidence of. Note, Those may leave this world with a great deal of cheerfulness that die in the faith of Christ, and in the hope of heaven, and with Canaan in their eye. Having thus seen the salvation of God, we may well say, Lord, now let thou thy servant depart in peace.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv1–12 And Moses went up from the plains of Moab,....…
And Moses went up from the plains of Moab,.... Where the Israelites had lain encamped for some time, and where Moses had repeated to them the law, and all that, is contained in this book of Deuteronomy; and after he had read to them the song in Deu 32:1; and had blessed the several tribes, as in the preceding chapter: at the command of God he went up from hence:
unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho; Nebo was one of the mountains of Abarim, which formed a ridge of them, and Pisgah was the highest point of Nebo, and this was over against Jericho on the other side Jordan, see Deu 32:49; hither Moses went, to the top of this high mountain, for aught appears, without any support or help, his natural force not being abated, though an hundred and twenty years old; and hither he seems to have gone alone, though Josephus (p) and the Samaritan Chronicle (q) say, Eleazar, Joshua, and the elders of Israel accompanied him:
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and the Lord showed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan; the Word of the Lord, as the Targum of Jonathan, who appeared to him in the bush, sent him to Egypt, wrought miracles by him there, led him and the people of Israel through the Red sea and wilderness, and brought them to the place where they now were: and though the eye of Moses was not become dim, as was usual at such an age he was of, yet it can hardly be thought it should be so strong as to take a distinct view of the whole land of Canaan, to the utmost borders of it: no doubt but his natural sight was wonderfully strengthened and increased by the Lord, by whom he was directed first to behold the land of Gilead on that side of Jordan where he was, and which was the possession of the two tribes of Reuben and Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh; and then he was directed to look forward to the land of Canaan beyond Jordan, to the northern part of it; for Dan is not the tribe of Dan, but a city of that name, formerly Leshem, which the Danites took, and lay the farthest north of the land, hence the phrase "from Dan to Beersheba", see Jos 19:47; this city is so called by anticipation: Aben Ezra thinks Joshua wrote this verse by a spirit of prophecy; and it is very likely the whole chapter was written by him, and not the eight last verses only, as say the Jewish writers: this view Moses had of the good land a little before his death may be an emblem of that sight believers have, by faith, of the heavenly glory, and which sometimes is the clearest when near to death; this sight they have not in the plains of Moab, in the low estate of nature, but in an exalted state of grace, upon and from off the rock of Christ, in the mountain of the church of God, the word and ordinances being often the means of it; it is a sight by faith, and is of the Lord, which he gives, strengthens, and increases, and sometimes grants more fully a little before death.
(p) Antiqu. l. 4. c. 8. sect. 48. (q) Apud Hottinger. Smegma, l. 1. c. 8. p. 456.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 Moses having finished his testimony, finishes his life. This…
Moses having finished his testimony, finishes his life. This chapter was probably added by Samuel, who wrote by divine authority what he found in the records of Joshua, and his successors the Judges. Here is, The view Moses had of the land, ver. 1-4. His death, burial, and age, ver. 5-7. Israel's mourning for him, ver. 8. His successor, ver. 9. His character, ver. 10-12.
And Moses went up - When he knew the place of his death he cheerfully mounted a steep hill to come to it. Those who are well acquainted with another world, are not afraid to leave this. When God's servants are sent for out of the world, the summons runs go up and die! Unto Daniel - To that city which after Moses's death was called so.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12 Moses goes up Mount Nebo to the top of…
CHAPTER XXXIV
Moses goes up Mount Nebo to the top of Pisgah, and God shews him
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the whole extent of the land which he promised to give to the
descendants of Abraham, 1-4.
There Moses died, and was so privately buried by the Lord that
his sepulchre was never discovered, 5, 6.
His age and strength of constitution, 7.
The people weep for him thirty days, 8.
Joshua being filled with the spirit of wisdom, the Israelites
hearken to him, as the Lord commanded them, 9.
The character of Moses as a prophet, and as a worker of the
most extraordinary miracles, both in the sight of the Egyptians,
and the people of Israel: conclusion of the Pentateuch, 10-12.
NOTES ON CHAP. XXXIV
Verse 1. And Moses went up] This chapter could not have been written by Moses. A man certainly cannot give an account of his own death and burial. We may therefore consider Moses's words as ending with the conclusion of the preceding chapter, as what follows could not possibly have been written by himself. To suppose that he anticipated these circumstances, or that they were shown to him by an especial revelation, is departing far from propriety and necessity, and involving the subject in absurdity; for God gives no prophetic intimations but such as are absolutely necessary to be made; but there is no necessity here, for the Spirit which inspired the writer of the following book, would naturally communicate the matter that concludes this. I believe, therefore, that Deut. xxxiv., should constitute the first chapter of the book of Joshua.
On this subject the following note from an intelligent Jew cannot be unacceptable to the reader: -
"Most commentators are of opinion that Ezra was the author of the last chapter of Deuteronomy; some think it was Joshua, and others the seventy elders, immediately after the death of Moses; adding, that the book of Deuteronomy originally ended with the prophetic blessing upon the twelve tribes: 'Happy art thou, O Israel! who is like unto thee, O people saved by the Lord,' c. and that what now makes the last chapter of Deuteronomy was formerly the first of Joshua, but was removed from thence and joined to the former by way of supplement. This opinion will not appear unnatural if it be considered that sections and other divisions, as well as points and pauses, were invented long since these books were written; for in those early ages several books were connected together, and followed each other on the same roll. The beginning of one book might therefore be easily transferred to the end of another, and in process of time be considered as its real conclusion, as in the case of Deuteronomy, especially as this supplemental chapter contains an account of the last transactions and death of the great author of the Pentateuch." - Alexander's Heb. and Eng. Pentateuch.
This seems to be a perfectly correct view of the subject. This chapter forms a very proper commencement to the book of Joshua, for of this last chapter of Deuteronomy the first chapter of Joshua is an evident continuation. If the subject be viewed in this light it will remove every appearance of absurdity and contradiction with which, on the common mode of interpretation, it stands sadly encumbered.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 Deu 34:1. Moses went up — When he knew…
Deu 34:1. Moses went up — When he knew the place of his death, he cheerfully mounted the hill to come to it. Those who are well acquainted with another world, are not afraid to leave this. When God’s servants are sent for out of the world, the summons runs, “Go up and die!” From the plains of Moab — In which was their last station before they entered into Canaan, Num 33:48. To the top of Pisgah — Which appears to have been the highest top of these mountains. And from hence God enabled him to take a particular view of the several quarters of the land of Canaan. Unto Dan — To that city, which after Moses’s death was called so. The mention of Dan in this verse, and the account of Moses’s death and burial, and of some particulars after he had left the world, (Deu 34:5-9,) show that this chapter was not written by Moses; but probably by Samuel, Ezra, or some other of the prophets who succeeded him.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 Dan - This can hardly be the Dan (Dan-Laish)…
Dan - This can hardly be the Dan (Dan-Laish) of Jdg 18:27 ff, which was not in Gilead. It is probably a town of this name which stood in the north of Peraea; perhaps the same as Dan-jaan, 2Sa 24:6; and the Dan of Gen 14:14.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv1–10 Phasga was the highest part of Nebo, which was…
Phasga was the highest part of Nebo, which was a summit of the Abarim mountains. --- Dan. All the conquered countries east of the Jordan, as far as the source of that river, chap. xxxiii. 22., and Genesis xiv. 14. (Calmet)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On v1 1And Moses went up from the plains [steppes] of…
DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES
Deu_34:1-12
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1And Moses went up from the plains [steppes] of Moab, unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho: and the Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Daniel , 2 And all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost [hindermost] sea, 3And the south [south land, Negeb], and the plain [circuit] of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm-trees, unto Zoar. 4And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither. 5So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according 6to the word [mouth, command] of the Lord. And he [they, one] buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Bethpeor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre1 7[burial, interment] unto this day. And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim [extinguished, weak-sighted], nor his natural force [freshness] abated. 8And the children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days: so the days of weeping and mourning for Moses were ended. 9And Joshua the son of Nun was full of [filled with] the spirit of wisdom; for Moses had laid his hands upon him: and the children of Israel hearkened unto him, and did as the Lord commanded Moses. 10And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, 11In all the signs and the wonders which the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land; 12And in all that mighty hand, and in all the great terror which Moses shewed in the sight of all Israel.
EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL
1. Deu_34:1-4. The plains of Moab.
Deu_34:1—as throughout in the book of Numbers is the locality in which the Israelites encamped after the victory over the Amorites. The transaction with Balaam occurred there, and this is the plain referred to in Deu_1:1 sq. That part of the Arabah lying contiguous to the northern side and end of the Dead Sea, and eastwards, is the Arboth Moab. Through the reception of this formula, usual in the book of Numbers, Deuteronomy is finally organically connected with it. Comp. besides upon Deu_32:49; Deu_3:27; Deu_3:17. (“The remarkable and strong desire of the dwellers in the desert for burial upon mountain heights is certainly primitive,” says Consul Dr. Wetzstein in his Travels in Hauran and Trachonitis, Berlin, 1860, p. 26, in reference to the mountain sepulchres. An Arabic poem introduces the dying Sheikh as saying, “Bury me not under the vine which would overshadow me, but upon a mountain, so that my eye can see you. Then pass by my grave and call your names, and my bones shall be quickened when they hear you call.”) The emphatic details in the following description of the view, rest upon the knowledge of the writer of the wide prospect which presents itself there. All the land is, because especially grateful to Moses, at first Gilead (the East-Jordan land) unto Dan—not Dan-Laish or Leschem, but as Gen_14:14, the neighboring Dan Jaan (2Sa_24:6). Comp. Hengstenberg, Beitrage III. p. 194. Looking around from the north to the south, the West-Jordan land is described Deu_34:2 in a way similar to the later Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. Comp. Deu_11:24. The naming of the districts, as they afterwards were assigned the different tribes, points to Joshua as the writer. Lastly, in Deu_34:3, the eye rests upon the warmer South, with which comp. Deu_1:7. הכּר is the circuit more closely defined through the following clause, the low plain of Jericho, thus the Jordan valley. How well the eye could repose here! A feeling of the same kind lies at the basis of the proverb: “See Naples and die.” The description of Jericho as the city of palm trees (the high, erect) brings this out more fully still. Sepp: “At the time of the crusades the oasis of Jericho rose again into a garden of Palestine; now a wretched sight, where balsam-trees once waved, and stately palms swayed their crowns. Of the renowned palm-groves, whence the name palm city is derived, only one stunted tree remains to-day.” Josephus asserts that the district is correctly called an earthly paradise. Ritter, XV. p. 500. צער, Gen_19:22; Gen_13:10; Gen_14:2, at the southern extremity of the Dead Sea. The description which the writer could thus give from his knowledge of the outlook from Nebo, he completes by an application in Deu_34:4 of the passage Num_27:12 sq.: “And see the land which I gave to the children of Israel” (comp. Deu_32:49) for the present case. Comp. further Gen_12:7; Deu_1:37. With thine eyes excludes as the testimony Deu_34:7, also every esctatic vision, still more any magical influence (Mat_4:8; Luk_4:5), but also, it seems clear, any miraculously elevated power of bodily vision for the purpose (Baumgarten, Keil). It was even a proof of his generally unimpaired strength of vision, which the soaring flight of winged faith rendered more penetrating.
2. Deu_34:5-8. After this introduction there follows now the death and burial of Moses, and the mourning for him. His death occurs upon Nebo, after this survey of the land granted to him in the room of an actual passage into it. Deu_34:5. עבד־יהוה here, in Deu_33:1, איש־האלהים. Essentially of the same import, although here the contrast to what is human could not be emphasized, since Moses dies even as all men must die. On the contrary, the emphasis rests upon יהוה, who sanctifies himself in his servant, when his servant failed to sanctify him at the proper place. If Deu_33:1 brings out more fully the official prophetic activity of Moses, so his official regal or theocratic activity is prominent here. In the land of Moab—i.e., not in the promised land. (Deu_17:11; Deu_1:26) על פי הוה does not mean that Moses died at the mouth, kiss of the Lord. [It means unquestionably that the death of Moses took place, not as a result of exhausted vital powers, but at the command of God—a command which came as a fruit of his sin, and as a punishment for it.—A. G.] Deu_34:6. ויקבר may be generally they, one, buried him; thus the Sept., De Wette, Ewald, Knobel, and others. The connection here does not require “an altogether peculiar kind of burial” (Kurtz), in the sense that Jehovah Himself must have buried him; the necessities of the case are met, if the burial was so secretly cared for by trusted, appointed ones, that the place where Moses was buried should be concealed from every one. But in the New Testament (Jude, Deu_34:9) we have an intimation of mysterious and super-earthly forces or agencies in reference to the “body of Moses” (comp. further Mat_17:3; Mar_9:4; Luk_9:30). This may be only a fittting regard for the Jewish tradition, which Jude assumes in those whom he addressed, in the interest of the controversy he was then carrying on with his opponents. But the Jewish tradition does not conform itself precisely to the letter of the Apostle (comp. upon that passage), and the connection here appears on the whole, from the foregoing Deu_34:4, to be in favor of regarding Jehovah as the subject. Ziegler: “Jude, Deu_34:9, intimates that God was not directly Himself, but indirectly, namely, through the Archangel Michael, who represents the Jewish people, the one who buried the body of Moses.” We may comp. upon this Dan_10:13; Dan_12:1 (Rev_12:7). קבר may signify primarily to bring together, collect, in agreement with Deu_32:50; but this supposition is not of such force that we should render: and Jehovah gathered him with his associates there in the valley; for although קְבוּרָה may signify “burial” (Jer_22:19), thus here; and no one knows how it occurred with his burial—whether he was really altogether buried; still the reference to the grave (Gen_35:20) is more obvious. There—not merely with גר (גוה, to compress; thus, valley, literally ravine, defile, בגי, is equivalent to, in some certain depression, hollow place,—so that it is not necessary to refer to Deu_3:29; Deu_4:46, but rather to Num_21:20, a high valley near the summit of Nebo (Hengstenberg, Hist. of Balaam), as Keil holds), but still so that the locality should be made prominent,—he was buried. Moses did not return from his so frequently repeated, and by Joshua declared, solitary death-journey to Nebo. They are no mere empty repetitions but designed and preparatory. His grave was not to be disclosed, so that there remains for the pious consciousness no other supposition than that of a peculiar divine arrangement in regard to the body of Moses (comp. Doct. and Eth. remarks), which a divine illumination raised to certain knowledge and conviction in the writer. We may observe that the case of Enoch, in his indeed peculiar manner of departure, was still ever received by Israel from Gen_5:24. (Aben Ezra explains אֹתוֹ according to Exo_5:19 : he buried himself, i.e. went into a cave and died there).—In the land of Moab, as in Deu_34:5. עד as in Deu_3:14. Since Moses, according to Deu_34:7, upon which Deu_34:1-4 rest, could have lived longer, so his death appears as a punishment, and the view of his grave and burial given above is confirmed. This view is to be maintained, as his grave and burial testify that he is truly dead. According to Jewish computation in the year of the world 2533, and B. C. 1458. Comp. further Deu_31:2. Aaron died somewhat older, Num_33:39. Moses did not die as Isaac, Gen_27:1.—Natural force, margin: moisture (freshness), mental and bodily soundness, full, vital energy. As the honoring of Moses, on the part of God, as to his death, so also the mourning, Deu_34:8, on the part of the people, corresponds to this divine preservation and blessing.—Thirty days, as with Aaron (Num_20:29), as with Jacob (after the forty days for the embalming were closed), Gen_1:3. In other cases seven days merely, Gen_1:10 sq.; 1Sa_31:13. The distinguishing feature here is the full celebration of this mourning (בכי and אבל, the two together for the sake of strength and emphasis), as this same people, Exo_32:1, had, instead of mourning for the absence of Moses, danced around the calf. Deuteronomy with the close of the time of mourning embraces a period of two months. Comp. Introd., p. 11.
3. Deu_34:9-12. Form the close of the supplement of Deuteronomy by Joshua, and give the point of union for the subsequent development of Israel and its characteristics, with the peculiar personality and official character of Moses (Introd., p. 4). Deu_34:9. Joshua personally, the Spirit of wisdom in its fulness really (חָכְמָה, “the power to perceive the nature in and through the appearances, σοφία, Delitzsch,” Isa_11:2); the latter bestowed upon the former officially “by the laying on of the hands, still customary in the New Testament” (Schultz). Comp. Act_6:6; Act_8:17; 2Ti_1:6, and thus the next subsequent time of Israel, comp. Num_27:18 sq., is introduced.—[חָכְמָה is used in varied applications in the Scriptures, from the lowest exercises of wisdom to its highest, when it becomes equivalent to piety. Here perhaps it is the practical wisdom, that which was necessary to his office as the leader of the people—A. G.]—The obedience of Israel legitimates the succession of Joshua as a matter of fact; but Moses ever remains the first. The wisdom of Joshua reveals itself still further, and therefore the wisdom of the author and writer of these supplements of Deuteronomy, in Deu_34:10, when the peculiar, fundamental character of the appearance of Moses for all subsequent time is at the very first distinctly recognized and stated. (“That Joshua should already make this remark is explained upon the ground that he had from his stand-point an insight into the course of the history of Israel.” Baumgarten.) Comp. Deu_18:15 sq.; Exo_33:11; Num_12:8.—[The words do not necessarily imply that a long series of prophets had risen up since Moses. They are plainly prophetic, grounded upon special insight into the future, upon the passages referred to, and upon the known position of Moses as the founder of the Old Covenant.—A. G.]—It is especially the personal nearness and the confidential, conversational manner of Jehovah with Moses which are alluded to (Baumgarten: “who knew him, Jehovah” (?)), while Joshua, e.g. is dependent upon the high-priestly office (Num_27:21). Upon this rests the “clear and all comprehensive revelation” (V. Gerlach), which fell to the lot of Moses. Comp. Doct. and Eth. upon chap, 32; from this arises also, Deu_34:11-12, the wonderful and mighty agency of Moses, of which all Israel is the witness. לכל, etc., must be taken in connection with ולא־קם. Deu_34:12. Mighty hand is equivalent to power shown and experienced, Deu_4:34; Deu_6:22; Deu_7:19; Deu_11:3; Deu_26:8; Deu_29:1-2.
DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL
1. The look of Moses over Canaan reminds us of Gen_13:14-15. Still, how different the end of Moses, and that of Abraham! Abraham died in a good old age, old and full of years; Moses dies under a divine judicial sentence, and it is remarkable, says Auberlen (Contributions to Christian Knowledge, p. 74), “that while the word faith never occurs expressly in the Pentateuch in reference to Moses, his unbelief as such is charged upon him, Num_20:12. There was nothing ever expressly blamed in Abraham; in the time of the law, God reproves and punishes sins more sharply. Thus the law-giver must experience the killing strength of the strict divine law. The man of promise and of faith receives a pleasant, peaceful departure out of this life; but there lies upon the death of the man of the law, somewhat of the curse of the law, something unatoned which calls so much the louder for the reconciliation in the New Covenant, for redemption from sin and death, Rom_4:15; Rom_3:20; 2Co_3:6.
2. “As Christ, the Mediator of the New Covenant, leaves His disciples before they were made partakers of the promise of the Holy Spirit, and were endowed with strength from on high for the new life, so Moses, the Mediator of the Old Covenant, must take his departure before the people in possession of the promised land saw the word of God fulfilled, and even were filled with it.” V. Gerlach.
3. “Moses saw the Holy Land from afar, as the saints of the Old Testament all the promises, Heb_11:13; he saw it as the shadow and outline of the true Canaan (Heb_11:16), into which he should immediately pass without having seen it beforehand.” Richter.
4. The vision of the promised land is on one side indeed a favor; but then it was likewise added: and thither thou shalt not come, and thus there is contained in it on the other side also the full severity of the sentence against Moses. So also the preservation of the vital strength of Moses is, on one hand, a proof of special grace, and on the other presents this Moses as a transgressor likewise, who has cast away his life, and was led to death in the midst of his days. That Moses, the servant of Jehovah, must suffer this sore death, is a fearful triumph of the power of death, at which all human nature must grow faint and despair. But Israel could not endure this victory of death over its head and its leader, and would fall into doubt past recovery, whether his redemption and his law could work, secure, even the least enduring salvation, if no ray of light should fall upon this power of death over Moses, and this consoling ray streams forth from the burial of Moses. Because some have failed to look into the whole depth of the death of Moses, they have failed also rightly to understand his burial.” Baumgarten.
5. “Wonderful in his childhood and in his whole life, so also now in his death. The man whom the Lord had so known heretofore that no prophet should arise henceforth like him in Israel, was after his whole manifestation so hidden in God that even his body was not buried by any human hand. His appearance is like the lightning-flash, which breaks forth suddenly from the darkness, shows a shining path before the people for a moment, and then immediately vanishes, even as to its material substance, to a place which no one can find.” Ziegler. Josephus relates that Moses, after he had embraced Joshua and Eleazar for the last time, while he was still speaking to them, was suddenly borne away by a cloud into a valley, and so vanished from their sight. It is interesting also in reference to his character as a legislator, in which he stands related to Moses, that even Calvin’s grave cannot be found.
6. The reason usually given since the time of Augustine why the burial of Moses was held and kept so secret is not as Ziegler formulates it: “probably for this reason, that thereby his body and grave should be kept from being regarded as relies of the dead, thus for the sake of the distant future, and before that future, to debar any possible superstition or idolatrous reverence for his grave.” Schultz says correctly: “The Israelites were never inclined to human idolatry. But if he actually stood in so clear a relation to God as the history in the Pentateuch represents, he could not so fall under the power of death and corruption that nothing of that earlier distinction should remain. It was not necessary for the sake of Israel that they should look upon that face laid in death which had once so shone from communion with God, that he had to put a veil upon it, as Jerome has already remarked.” Comp. Kurtz, Geshich. II., pp. 526 sq., who urges against the reason above mentioned the fact that every one knew where the grave of Abraham was, and then asserts that the burial of Moses was intended “to place him in the same category with Enoch and Elijah, not indeed as to an exemption from death, but most probably from corruption; the form of existence in the life beyond was similar to theirs; the way to it for him was different from that for them; but still not in a condition of absolute perfection and glorification of which Christ must be the first-fruits (1Co_15:20; 1Co_15:23), although not either in the condition of the dark Sheol-life,” etc.
7. The wonderful burial of Moses has also its decided prophetic element with reference to the burial of Christ; the discourse, however, cannot relate to the resurrection, as to this a veil lies upon the Old Covenant generally. “The fact that Jehovah notwithstanding Satan’s protest” (remarks Kurtz, Geshich. II., p. 529 sq.), “exempts the body of Moses from the general doom of the sinful human race, becomes a type and example of future endlessly greater and more glorious things. That the founder of the Old Covenant must die on account of sin is a testimony to the truth, that he is not the true mediator, and that the covenant introduced by him is not complete; that it, although לדרת עולם founded, needs still a completion through a second Mediator, who lives forevermore. The death of Moses was not like the death of the first Adam which issued in corruption; but neither was it like the death of the second Adam which issues in the resurrection; it was rather a middle form of death between the two, as Moses himself and his office occupied a middle position between the first and the second Adam, between the head of the sinful, dying humanity and the head of the humanity redeemed from sin and death. Since the death of Moses was indeed a real death, but still as to its natural progress restrained, and his condition therefore an imperfect one, still in suspense, which demands and awaits a completion, it becomes itself a prophecy of this completion. And if Moses who was entrusted with the whole house of God could not still bring the organization of the house of God to its absolute perfection, and therefore received the promise of a second prophet and mediator, so we are justified also in regarding his peculiar, unique death and burial as a memorable type of the death and burial of this future prophet like unto Moses.”
8. “Compare the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. In this at the same time personal and universal historical Pauline deduction, we have stated the ground of that strife between Satan and Michael about the body of Moses. The fact that the law through the sin already existing before it, “becomes an incitement, a cause and temptation to wider sin; that through it sin is first truly set in its full light, first becomes strong, living, even more and more powerful and exceedingly sinful; this is the ground for the apparent claim of right on the part of Satan to the body of Moses, which claim was so apparent and plausible, that Michael did not bring against him a railing accusation, etc. But the fact that the law, notwithstanding its working evil, through the corrupted state of the human conscience, through which it could even become an instrument in the hands of Satan, is holy, just, and good, and as it was given by God originally, tended only to life,—this was the ground of the real and legal claim on the part of Michael to the body of Moses.” [“When the Israel of God goes into the spiritual Canaan, under the command and leading of Jesus, the divine Joshua, then the law which is as it were the body of Moses, is buried; for we are become dead to the law, by the body of Christ, that we should be joined to another, Jesus,—even to Him who is raised from the dead, (Rom_7:1-4), and it is God only who can bury the body of Moses, because it is only God in Christ who could abolish its ordinances, and reclaim it from its curse (Rom_8:3; Gal_3:13; Col_2:14; Col_2:17; Heb_9:9-11; Heb_10:1-9); and now that it is buried, let no one seek to revive it as the Judaizers did, (Gal_4:9-11; Gal_5:4).” Wordsworth.—A. G.].
9. “The peculiar preservation” (Schultz upon Deu_34:7) of those who live more than others in the Lord, appears in another form; the outward eye is closed in order that the inward may see the more clearly; then arises a new world, and an inward life-energy unfolds itself, which is not less wonderful than the outward. But still for those whose mission concerns pre-eminently external things, Moses remains their permanent type.” Homer, on the other hand, is always represented as blind.
10. The personality of Moses at its beginning and close appears to be typical for the later prophetic order; at least in the first relation the calling of Jeremiah (Deu_1:6, comp. Exo_3:11), appears to be connected with that of Moses, and in the last we are reminded of the wonderful end of Elijah. Elisha as Joshua.
11. [“There is but One who is worthy of greater honor than Moses, namely, the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, who is placed as a Son over all the house of God, in which Moses was found faithful as a servant (comp. Heb_3:2-6 with Num_12:7), Jesus Christ, the founder and Mediator of the New and Everlasting Covenant.” Keil. Whom God not only knew face to face as He knew Moses, but who is in the bosom of the Father, (Joh_1:18), and in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom (Col_2:3), and all the fulness of the Godhead (Col_2:9), Wordsworth.—A. G.].
HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL
Deu_34:1 sq. Starke: “Pious Christians do not fear death, but look forward to it; and go to meet it with peace, Luk_2:29; Php_1:23; Gen_49:33.” Cramer: “Whoever will die blessed should refresh his faith in the ascension of Christ, and his hope that believers leaving the world follow him.” The God of peace has brought again from the dead, the great Shepherd of the sheep, etc., Heb_13:20.—Starke: “Faithful servants of God, who have borne great labor and care in their office, must often leave the world before they enjoy the fruits of their toil.—God does not permit His children to leave the world without consolation, but gives them a foretaste of future glory, Luk_2:29-30; Act_7:55-56.” Berl. Bib.: “God leads men inwardly also to a mountain, and shows them the throne of eternity, and as then the sweet drops of the heavenly Jerusalem fall upon their hearts, so they look into the promised land.”—But Satan also imitates God, and stands upon the heights, Matthew 4.
Deu_34:4. Starke: “With God there is no respect of persons, He punishes whoever sins, the high as well as the lowly.”
Deu_34:5. Be faithful unto death, Rev_2:10.—If the faithfulness of the Lord to us is our beginning and progress, our goal is our faithfulness to the Lord.—Starke: “The truest glory, and the most honorable title in death: a faithful servant of the Lord.”—Whether any one is faithful can first be said at the end.—Consider their conversation, end, Heb_13:7.—A good end places the crown upon a good life.—The last journey of Moses: may our end be that of this righteous one.—Florey: “The death of Moses a testimony, how the divine grace reveals itself to the faithful servants of God, even in their departure: 1) because the faithful servants of God have their departure in serene strength; 2) because they enjoy communion with God until their very end; 3) because they may in this life already have a view of the land of promise; 4) because they are blessed of the Lord with believing successors.” Berl. Bib.: “In the opinion of the Jews he died at the end of our February.—But the glory of the first covenant must cease, and it cannot bring ns to blessedness.”
Deu_34:6. We should not confound, as it concerns the guarding against possible idolatry, Moses with Mohammed.—Richter: “In the Ante-type, Christ, the angels also were active.” Lange: “At death the soul journeys upwards, but the body must come to the earth, the deep valley of its true humiliation.” Cramer: “Christ has buried Moses and silenced the curse of the law, (1Ti_1:15; Rom_6:14; Rom_8:1), therefore we do not fear in death.”—Starke: “The care of God for His own does not cease, neither in death nor after it.” Deu_34:7.—Zinzendorf: “In the world it occurs truly, that one grows so old that he is unable to do anything, and if he has been a great man some seventy years, still in his last days passes into oblivion. On the other hand, our verse is a testimony which is in part unique, that we do not come into rest, and obtain permission in weariness to lay aside our work before all His counsel has come to pass.” Lange: “The strength of Moses, even until his death, represents that his economy should remain in its full strength until the death of Christ. Until that occurred the disciples of Christ were bound by it,” Luk_17:14. Deu_34:8. Berlb. Bib.: “It is sad to separate from godly persons and guidance, especially if we through their service have seen and known much of the glory and power of God.” Deu_34:9. Wurth. Bib.: “Upon whom God imposes an office, him He qualifies with the necessary gifts for its duties.” Richter: “The cheerful obedience of Israel is confirmed through the book of Joshua. Moses brought the people to this, that it was obedient to Joshua; thus the law brings us to Christ, and remains our rule, if we will follow the true Joshua.” Deu_34:10 sq. Starke: “Pious, excellent people, may be held in honorable remembrance in funeral discourses, monumental inscriptions, and the like, Psa_112:6.” Auberlen: “The relation of the promise to the law, impresses itself even upon their representatives. But with this is connected the fact that the work of Moses is altogether different from that of Abraham. The one receives, the other gives. Naturally Moses gave only to the people what he had received from God; but his essential work is to introduce what he had received to the people; he is the mediator between God and the people (Gal_3:20). Abraham, on the other hand, has only to receive in faith what God offered him, and to preserve it; he had to mediate for no one besides his family, and especially the children of the promise (Gen_18:19), but this even in no essential respect different from that in which every father of a family, and even Moses himself must care for the religious instruction of his own. Thus Abraham’s calling in relation to God is entirely closed in faith; here also lie the difficulties, temptations, and thorns of his path; he is exclusively the religious hero. In Moses on the contrary, his relation to the people grows out of, and rests upon his relation to God; faith in him is, so to speak, a presupposition, under which he has a great work to do, love to exercise, since the liberation and leading of the people was given into his hands. From religious roots there grew up for him mighty moral labors. The difficulties in his pathway lay therefore in relation to the people, in this, that he had ever anew to bear and overcome the murmuring and obstinacy of the children of Israel. God made faith much easier to him than to Abraham. While God appears to Abraham only now and then, and after long intervals, Moses has constantly the divine presence a presence which is a revelation, in the pillar of cloud and fire, and was honored also with much oftener repeated, more lengthy, and more condescending, special revelations, etc. While still further Abraham in the revelations of God, was accustomed only to receive words from him, words of promise, which offer to him no present good, but point him to a most indefinite future, Moses saw in Egypt and the desert, the great deeds of God, his faith was strengthened by these mighty wonders, which have somewhat not only directly convincing, but overpowering in themselves. Moreover Moses himself is endowed with miraculous strength, and could thus feel the Divine strength present in his own person, (Exo_4:1 sq.), which was not the case with Abraham, since he did not have to deal with an unbelieving people. Lastly, Moses was prepared for his task with all the means of human science and culture (Act_7:22) while Abraham was a simple shepherd, and his wisdom doubtless purely the divine. Thus Moses has fulfilled his calling entirely, with the same faithfulness that Abraham manifested in his, although he has not attained the same measure with him in the life of faith. He is so good a shepherd (comp. Joh_10:11), that he not only, when Jehovah offered him, to make him as it were a new Abraham, declined the offer (Exo_32:11) but will suffer himself to be blotted out from the book of life, for an atonement for the sins of his people, (Deu_34:32). While he thus in self-denying love mediates for the people with God, he does not on the other hand grow weary in bearing their obstinacy and complaints. As therefore Abraham was renowned for the special charism of faith, so Moses was for that of patience (Num_12:3). Compare the connection of faith and patience, Rev_13:10. As therefore Abraham as the father of believers surpassed all his successors, in faith, so Moses is glorified, in the fact, that henceforth no prophet should arise in Israel like unto him, i.e., among all those who might have the same task with him, namely, to bring the word of God to the people, and to be through that word a leader and shepherd for it. Moses was, as in respect to time, so also in fact, as in the commencement of his calling, so in his faithfulness to it afterwards, the first and most prominent. Thus we recognize with a holy admiration how God adjusts so fitly their callings to His chosen, and measures to them with the same fitness the burdens and duties, the helps and alleviations. He is truly a God to whom one may safely entrust himself. But He will never permit heavy labors, temptations, and crushing sorrows, to fail any one of His servants; they all bear the cross, and must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.”
Footnotes:
[1][Deu_34:6. The A. V. is preferable to that suggested by Schroeder. It is the place of burial, not the fact, which is unknown.—A. G.]
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv5, 6, 8, 9, 10 Moses . . . died--After having governed the Israelites…
Moses . . . died--After having governed the Israelites forty years.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv1–10 DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES, Deu_34:1-8.
DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES, Deu_34:1-8.
Jehovah had said unto Moses, Behold, thy days approach that thou must die. Deu_31:14. Joshua was summoned to the tabernacle with Moses, and formally appointed his successor. The official life of the great leader and lawgiver closes. Another is to lead the people to their further victories; another is to cause them to possess the land. Moses completes the writing of the law and passes it to the Levites to be put within the ark of the covenant. Then the people assemble to hear the words of that matchless song of history, instruction, and warning, which forms so fitting a close to his ministry. On that same day Jehovah said to him, “Get thee up into this mountain Abarim, unto Mount Nebo,… and die in the mount.” Deu_32:49-50. He gives his farewell to the tribes, closing with the blessing, “Happy art thou, O Israel: who is like unto thee, O people saved by the Lord!” Deu_33:29.
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Moses leaves the camp, he ascends the mountain and looks over the goodly land which is to be the future home of his people. The writer of this supplementary chapter gives no details of the parting with the elders, with his successor, Joshua, nor with the people he had so long directed and so long loved. His farewell had been given in the blessing upon the tribes. Josephus, however, furnishes an account which does not seem improbable. “Amid the tears of the people, the women beating their breasts, and the children giving way to uncontrolled wailing, he withdrew. At a certain point in his ascent he made a sign to the weeping multitude to advance no further, taking with him only the elders, the high-priest, Eliezer, and the general, Joshua. At the top of the mountain he dismissed the elders, and then, as he was embracing Eliezer and Joshua, and still speaking to them, a cloud suddenly stood over him, and he vanished in a deep valley.”
1. The plains of Moab — That level tract north of the Dead Sea and east of the Jordan. Here the tribes were encamped preparing for the crossing of the Jordan and the conquest of the Promised Land.
Unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah — Pisgah was a range of the mountain system east of the Dead Sea and Jordan; Nebo one of the summits of this range. Recent travelers have found the ruins of a place bearing the name Nebbeh.
And the Lord showed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan — That is, the whole extent of the land east of the Jordan which Israel was to possess. Dan is not the place mentioned in Jdg_18:29, but the Dan in the north of Perea, the place to which Abraham pursued the confederate kings. Gen_14:14.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv1–11 1. Moses went up] As commanded, Deu_3:27, Deu_32:49.
1. Moses went up] As commanded, Deu_3:27, Deu_32:49.
plains of Moab] Heb. ‘arbôth Mo’ab, the parts of the ‘Arabah (see on Deu_1:1) reckoned as Moabite. The designation is peculiar to P, who gives it as Israel’s last camp before crossing Jordan, Num_33:48-50, cp. Num_22:1; Num_26:3; Num_26:63; Num_31:12; Num_35:1; Num_36:13, Jos_13:32, which place these ‘steppes’ on Jordan and opposite Jericho. According to Deu_3:24-29 Moses ascended Nebo from Israel’s immediately previous camp in the glen over against Beth-Pe‘or, which is above the Jordan valley. But ‘arbôth Mo’ab may have been loosely held to cover this higher hollow that debouches on the ‘Arabah.
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unto mount Nebo, the headland of the Pisgah] The former is P’s name for the mount (Deu_32:49), the latter that of E (Num_21:20; Num_23:14) and deuteron. writers, see on Deu_3:17. It is the headland which breaks from the plateau of Moab between Heshbon and Medaba under the name en-Nebâ (= ‘mountain-back,’ Dalman MNPDV, 1900, p. 23) or en-Nebâ, and runs out to the S. of the W. ‘Uyûn Musa upon the N. end of the Dead Sea. From the high edge of the Plateau it dips a little, and so loses the view to the E.—Israel’s desert horizons for 40 years—but the bulk of W. Palestine is in sight; only at first the nearer side of the Jordan valley is invisible, and N. and S. the view is hampered by the parallel headlands. Further W. however it rises somewhat into the Ras Siaghah, a promontory which, though lower than the Ras en-Nebâ, stands freer of the hills to N. and S. The whole of the ‘Arabah is now open from at least Engedi, and if the mist allows from still farther S., to where on the N. the hills of Gilead appear to meet those of Ephraim. The Jordan flows below, with Jericho visible beyond it. Over Gilead Hermon has been seen in fine weather. See further HGHL, 562 ff.
over against Jericho] Lit. against the face of, i.e. (by Semitic orientation) to the E. of.
all the Land—Gilead unto Dan, etc.] Not as in EVV. the land of Gilead. Dan itself, either Tell-el-Ḳadi, on one of the sources of Jordan, or more probably on the neighbouring spur of Ḥermon above Banias (see above Deu_33:22, and HGHL, 473, 481), is not visible, but Ḥermon above it is sometimes seen; and Dan is mentioned as the N. limit of the land.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 (1) Pisgah.—See Num_21:20. The word seems to mean a…
XXXIV.
DEATH OF MOSES.
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(1) Pisgah.—See Num_21:20. The word seems to mean a height.
(1, 2) The Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan, and all Naphtali . . . unto the utmost sea—that is, He showed him all the land which was to be given to these several tribes. Whether He then showed it to him under the names which are given here or not is a question we cannot answer. Many deeply interesting queries suggest themselves here. Did Moses go up alone? or did Joshua accompany him? Who wrote these particulars of what was shown to him, and how were the particulars known? I am disposed to believe that as Elijah and Elisha “still went on and talked,” until that chariot of fire appeared which “parted them both asunder,” so it was with Moses and Joshua—that Moses’ minister attended him until Jehovah withdrew him from his sight. But it speaks well for Joshua’s character—in fact, it is altogether characteristic of the man—that in this record of the death of the great lawgiver he should have concealed himself and every other figure from sight except Jehovah and His servant Moses. Rashi, in his comment on this scene, says that the Lord showed Moses not only the land, but what should happen therein, in every part. But of this we know nothing. We know that the spectacle was complete. Probably “the eye that was not dim” was enabled to see farther than human eye ever saw from such a height before. “The utmost sea” is full fifty miles away from that spot.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. H. Mackintosh 1880 · Public Domain On v1 Deuteronomy 34
Deuteronomy 34
This brief chapter forms an inspired postscript to the book of Deuteronomy. We are not told who was employed as the instrument in the hand of the inspiring Spirit; but this is a matter of no moment to the devout student of holy scripture. We are fully persuaded that the postscript is as truly inspired as the book, and the book as the Pentateuch; and the Pentateuch as the whole Volume of God.
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"And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top, of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho. And the Lord showed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan, and all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar. And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed; I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither. So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day."
In our studies on the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy, we have had occasion to dwell upon the very solemn and, we may truly add, soul subduing fact recorded in the above quotation. It will not therefore be needful to add many words in this our closing section. We would merely remind the reader that, if he would have a full understanding of the whole subject, he must look at Moses in a twofold aspect, namely, officially and personally.
Now, looking at this beloved and honoured man in his official capacity, it is very plain that it lay not in his province to conduct the congregation of Israel into the promised land. The wilderness was his sphere of action; it pertained not to him to lead the people across the river of death, into their destined inheritance. His ministry was connected with man’s responsibility under law and the government of God, and hence it never could lead the People into the enjoyment of the promise. It was reserved for his successor to do this. Joshua, a type of the risen Saviour, was God’s appointed instrument to lead His people across the Jordan, and plant them in their divinely given inheritance.
All this is plain and deeply interesting; but we must look at Moses personally as well as officially; and here, too, we must view him in a twofold aspect, as the subject of government and the object of grace. We must never lose sight of this most important distinction. It runs all through scripture, and is strikingly illustrated in the history of many of the Lord’s beloved people and of His most eminent servants. The subject of grace and government demands the reader’s most profound attention. We have dwelt upon it again and again, in the course of our studies; but no words of ours could adequately set forth its moral importance and immense practical value. We consider it one of the weightiest and most seasonable subjects that could possibly engage the attention of the Lord’s people, at the present moment.
It was the government of God which, with stern decision, forbade the entrance of Moses into the Promised land, much as he longed to do so. He spoke unadvisedly with his lips; he failed to glorify God in the eyes of the congregation at the waters of Meribah, and for this he was forbidden to cross the Jordan and plant his foot on the promised land.
Let us deeply ponder this, beloved Christian reader. Let us see that we fully apprehend its moral force and practical application. It is surely with the greatest tenderness and delicacy that we would refer to the failure of one of the most beloved and illustrious of the Lord’s servants; but it has been recorded for our learning and solemn admonition, and therefore we are bound to give earnest heed to it. We should ever remember that we, too, though under grace, are also the subjects of divine government. We are here on this earth, in the place of solemn responsibility, under a government which cannot be trifled with. True, we are children of the Father, loved with an infinite and everlasting love - loved even as Jesus is loved. We are members of the body of Christ, loved, cherished and nourished according to all the perfect love of His heart. There is no question of responsibility here, no possibility of failure; all is divinely settled, divinely sure; but we are the subjects of divine government also. Let us never, for one moment, lose sight of this. Let us beware of one-sided and pernicious notions of grace. The very fact of our being objects of divine favour and love, children of God, members of Christ, should lead us to yield all the more reverent attention to the divine government.
To use an illustration drawn from human affairs, her Majesty’s children should, above all others, just because they are her children, respect her government; and were they, in any way, to transgress her laws, the dignity of government would be strikingly illustrated by their being made to pay the penalty. If they, because of being the queen’s children, were to be allowed to transgress with impunity the enactments of her Majesty’s government, it would be simply exposing the government to public contempt, and affording a warrant to all her subjects to do the same. And if it be thus in the case of a human government, how much more in the government of God! "You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore will I punish you for your iniquities." "The time is come that judgement must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God? And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?" Solemn fact! Solemn inquiry! May we ponder them deeply.
But, as we have said, Moses was the subject of grace, as well as of government; and truly that grace shines with special lustre on the top of Pisgah. There the venerable servant of God was permitted to stand in his Master’s presence, and, with undimmed eye, survey the land of promise, in all its fair proportions. He was permitted to see it from a divine stand-point - see it, not merely as possessed by Israel, but as given by God.
And what then? He fell asleep and was gathered to his people. He died, not as a withered and feeble old man, but in all the freshness and vigour of matured manhood. "And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated." Striking testimony! Rare fact in the annals of our fallen race! The life of Moses was divided into three important and strongly marked periods of forty years each. He spent forty years in the house of Pharaoh; forty years "at the backside of the desert;" and forty years in the wilderness. Marvellous life! Eventful history! How instructive! How suggestive! How rich in its lessons from first to last! How profoundly interesting the study of such a life! To trace him from the river’s brink where he lay a helpless babe, up to the top of Pisgah where he stood, in company with his Lord, to gaze with undimmed vision upon the fair inheritance of the Israel of God; and to see him again on the mount of Transfiguration in company with his honoured fellow-servant Elias, "talking with Jesus" on the grandest theme that could possibly engage the attention of men or angels. Highly favoured man! Blessed servant! Marvellous vessel!
And then let us hearken to the divine testimony to this most beloved man Of God. "And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, in all the signs and the wonders which the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land, and in all that mighty hand, and in all the great terror which Moses showed in the sight Of all Israel."
May the Lord, in His infinite goodness, bless our study of the book of Deuteronomy! May its precious lessons be engraved upon the tablets of our hearts with the eternal pen of the Holy Ghost, and produce their proper result in forming our character, governing our conduct and shaping our way through this world! May we earnestly seek to tread with a humble spirit and firm step, the narrow path of obedience, till travelling days are done! C. H. M.
C. H. Mackintosh, Notes on the Pentateuch — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 After blessing the people, Moses, in obedience to the…
DEATH, BURIAL, AND ENCOMIUM OF MOSES.
After blessing the people, Moses, in obedience to the Divine command, ascended Mount Nebo, the highest peak of the Pisgah range, and thence surveyed the whole land of Canaan, from north to south, and from east to west, as well as the district on the east of the Jordan, not included in Canaan proper.
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Unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah; rather, unto Mount Nebo, the summit of Pisgah. Gilead unto Dan. Not Dan Laish, near the central source of the Jordan, which was not in Gilead, but another Dan in Northern Perea, the site of which has not yet been discovered. (cf. Gen_14:14)
Vers. 1-9. The last journey.
(For other aspects of the death of Moses, (see Homily on Deu_32:48-52) We have come at last to the closing scene. It is evidently recorded by other hands; for "Dan" (ver. 2) did not exist by that name till a much later period (see Judy. 18:1, 27-29). Vers. 10-12 indicate, moreover, a period later still; very possibly, it may have been as far on as the time of Ezra when those verses were added. And whoever will make use of the formula, authorship, late editorship," as applicable to the Book of Deuteronomy, will have in his hands a key which will enable him to unlock many of the intricacies with which unbelieving writers seek to worry us. In all probability there was an ample supply of men in the later schools of the prophets who would be quite equal to editorial work; and most assuredly, Ezra would not be lacking in fitness for such service. It is altogether gratuitous and unnecessary to attempt to lower the value of the book in the eyes of others on account of the manifest touches of a later age. The revision of an ancient book, freeing it from archaisms, and, as we should say, "posting it up to date," would increase, not diminish its value.
By whomsoever written, this closing chapter is a fitting appendix to the words of the lawgiver himself. For homiletic use it is exceedingly suggestive.
I MOSES HAS TO TAKE A REMARKABLE JOURNEY. (Vers. 1, 50 He has to go up and die. In one sense this is true of us all. We are all on a pilgrimage, at the close of which, on its earthly side, there must be the act of dying. But in two respects there is a notable element in the journey of the aged lawgiver: in one of these it was unique.
1. His act of dying was, as much as his acts in life, one of conscious and intentional obedience to the will of God. He knew that he held his life absolutely at the disposal of another, and he would not, if he could, have prolonged it beyond its appointed time. In this respect believers now are in full sympathy and accord with him. For them to live is Christ. Their supreme desire is that Christ may be magnified in their body, whether by life or by death. They desire to honor their Savior in their dying as well as in their living work. "Whether" they "live" they "live unto the Lord; and whether" they "die" they "die unto the Lord; whether" they "live therefore or die," they "are the Lord"s.
2. Moses, however, takes a journey, knowing just when and where he should die. It is not easy for us to enter into his feelings then. The time and place of our death are entirely unknown to us. How could we bear it if it were otherwise? Or if we could, how could our fondest ones on earth? We are often glad to throw ourselves anew on God, in thankfulness at the uncertainty which shrouds the future. We cheerfully say
Lord, it belongs not to our care Whether we die or live.
But what a pall would seem to be thrown over the home, if it were disclosed when we should be called away! The holier and more beautiful the life, the more painful would the thought of parting with it be.
II ERE HE DEPARTS, VISIONS OF GLORY ARE VOUCHSAFED. (Ver. 2.) "The Lord showed him all the land." The vision was in part physical, but that which faith beheld in the glorious future which was assured to the people of God, was by far the most precious part of the sight incomparably so. Thus the Lord was merciful to Moses, in that, though his joy in death was checked by the sense of his own defect and failures, he would, on the other hand, be borne up by the thought that God never had failed, and never would. The future, from which he was cut off, would assuredly develop gloriously under the care and grace of Israel"s covenant God. Even so, when God"s heroes sink in death, they know that, though they die, God"s Church will live on, and that the promised inheritance will yet be theirs. And many, many a believer has had a vision, in death, akin to that of Stephen, and, though appalled at his own shortcomings, has been borne up by a sight of Jesus, as "mighty to save," and as the Captain of salvation, who will bring the Church onward to the fullness of redemption.
III WHEN THESE DEATH-SCENES ARE WITNESSED THE SOUL WILL BE ABSOLUTELY ALONE WITH GOD. Moses lay himself down to die, without any attendant by his side. However many there might have been around, between himself and God no one could possibly come. He must die alone; so must we. Alone must we pass through "death"s iron gate," save as we can use the words in Psa_23:4. There is but One whose real presence can comfort us then.
IV THE BODIES OF GOD"S SAINTS ARE NOT OVERLOOKED BY HIM. (Ver. 6.) "The Lord buried him," says the editor, "and no man knoweth of his sepulcher unto this day." Some have assigned it as a reason for the concealment of the body of Moses, "that his tomb might not become the occasion of idolatry or superstition." Others, rejecting this as inconsistent with the known fact that in the eye of the Hebrews every dead body was unclean, have sought for a reason by comparing Jud_1:9 with Mt 17. They deem it not improbable that there might be some change in the body of Moses in death, which would account for his appearing in the Transfiguration scene with another, who was taken up to heaven without dying, and also for the mysterious conflict over the body, of which Jude informs us. This may have been, but we can go no further than the text takes us by the hand. It suffices to know that God oared for Moses" body as well as for him. The body of believers is now the temple of the Holy Ghost. Christ is "the Savior of the body." The Spirit who dwells in us will quicken the mortal body at the resurrection.
V THE WORK WHICH MOSES HAS DONE IS ONE WHICH WILL FIND NO PARALLEL TO IT. (Ver. 10.) (See next Homily.) Every worker for God has his own distinctive work, which only he can do.
VI GOD HAS ALREADY RAISED UP ONE TO CARRY ON THE WORK OF MOSES, SO THAT IT WILL NOT FALL TO PIECES WREN HE DIES. (Ver. 9.) Joshua is ready. So that there are no chasms in the service.
VII THE INCOMPLETENESS OF MOSES" WORK IS NOT ONLY A HISTORICAL BUT A SYMBOLIC FACT. It is not a lawgiver alone who can had the Church on to Canaan, but a Joshua Jesus, a Savior. "The Law was given by Moses, but the grace and the truth came by Jesus Christ." Moses had propounded truth in his legislative precept and teachings. He had taught God"s grace in the institutions of sacrifice, and in the ordinances of worship, prayer, and praise. But the truth he disclosed, the grace he declared, were brought in by another, long ages after, for whose work he was intended to prepare the way. "The Law was a child-guide until Christ." Happy are they whose life-work is in harmony with the plan of him who seeth the end from the beginning! Happy they, whether in more prominent or more obscure positions, who are in their Lord"s own appointed way workers together with him!
HOMILIES BY R.M. EDGAR. Vers. 1-12. The death and burial of Moses.
We have in this concluding chapter the remarkable account of the death and burial of Moses. He had, as we have seen, blessed the tribes; he had laid his hands on Joshua (ver. 9), and thus ordained him, so to speak, to the leadership; he had given his manuscripts to the priests to be deposited in the ark; and now all that remains for him to do is to take the course God indicated to the mountain-top, see the Promised Land, and die. It has suggested some noble sermons, to which we would at once refer before proceeding with a few observations suggested by the history.
I LET US NOTICE THE VIEW OF CANAAN AND OF LIFE FROM THE MOUNTAIN-TOP. It is evident, we think, that Moses went up the mountain without an escort. He was going up to hold high communion with God, as he had done on Sinai. Mountain-tops are favorite places for communion with God in the case of busy men like Moses and our Savior. (Luk_9:28) It was a sublime solitude, filled with the presence of God. Sooner or later, God draws his servants upwards out of the bustle of life to have special communion with him and finish their course with joy. Moses, moreover, had an undimmed eye at this time, and his natural force was in no wise abated. His outlook was consequently clear. The land of promise lay out before him in all its attractiveness, and he could have wished to cross the Jordan and see it, and the goodly mountain, Lebanon. But the view of it, clear and glorious, is all that in the present life he is to receive. Now, it is sometimes insinuated that saintly, self-denying men, whose lives according to worldly notions have been incomplete and unsuccessful, are unable to form a proper judgment about their careers, and must regret them. But as a rule, God gives in life"s last hours the "undimmed eye," and his servants are enabled to see life"s relations clearly, and the land of promise under the sunset glow. They regret their incomplete lives as little as Moses did his from the mountain-top.
Jonathan Edwards notices, in his "Notes on the Bible," that "God ordered that Aaron and Moses should go up to the tops of mountains to die, to signify that the death of godly men is but an entrance into a heavenly state;" and Baumgarten has made a similar remark regarding the death of Aaron. "The circumstance that it was expressly fixed that Aaron should die upon a mountain, and so upon a place which through its very nature points to heaven, the seat of Jehovah, throws into the darkness of his death a ray (Strahl) of hope." The mountain-tops to these great brothers were indeed the gate of heaven, whence clear views of life and of the hereafter were obtained.
II THE CIRCUMSTANTIALS OF THE DEATH OF MOSES ARE UNIQUE IN THEIR SIMPLE MAJESTY. It has been said that the presence of Moses on the mount of Transfiguration must have suggested a contrast between his death on the top of Pisgah and our Lord"s approaching death amid the mocking crowds at Jerusalem. And what a contrast there is between the two departures! In the one case, the servant of God dies amid the solemn grandeur of the hills, with the sunset glow around him dies, as some Jewish doctors say, "of the kiss of the Eternal;" in the other case, our Lord dies amid the ribaldry and scoffing of overcrowded Jerusalem. There may have been an clement of sadness in Moses dying on the threshold of the Promised Land; but there was an element of glory in the death-bed among the mountains.
III GOD IN HIS LOVE NOT ONLY TOOK CHARGE OF THE DYING BUT ALSO OF THE DEAD.
He died with God; and God buried him. No wonder the poetess calls it "the grandest funeral that ever passed on earth.
And had he not high honor? The hill-side for his pall; To lie in state, while angels wait With stars for tapers tall;
And the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes, Over his bier to wave; And God"s own hand, in that lonely land, To lay him in the grave!
This disposal of the body, as well as of the departed spirit, was surely a significant act on the part of God. He took the matter as completely out of the hands of Israel, as in the Resurrection our Lord"s body was taken out of the keeping of the Roman guard. Was it not to indicate that the body as well as the soul is to share in the redeeming care of God, and so far an earnest of the resurrection?
IV THE PRIVACY OF THE TOMB IS ALSO INSTRUCTIVE. Manifestly all Israel saw was the retirement of Moses to the mount; for the rest, his death and his Divine burial, they were dependent upon faith they believed him when he told them he was going away by death, and that they need make no preparations for him, as God would bury him. Had it not been for his prophetic notice, they might have concluded he was translated. It was a matter of faith entirely , and no searching could bring it within the range of sight. The privacy of the tomb compelled them to take the funeral and burial on trust. The mourning and weeping for a month arose really from faith; Moses was not God took him; but they had only Moses" word for it that he was to die with God, and be buried by him.
And God"s dealing with our dead must remain still a matter of faith to us, though of fruition unto them. We believe the very dust of the saints is dear to God, but we have to put their remains in a coffin, and deposit them amid common clay. We believe their spirits are in his safekeeping, but they send no messages and make no sign. If sense is the measure of our knowledge, then assuredly we may put Christian hope into the realm of beautiful dreams, of which there is as little sensible evidence as of Moses" tomb. But there are "foundations of faith" as strong as those of sense and sight. In such assurance, we believe that God took charge of Moses, body and soul, and will take as real and as faithful charge of us. R.M.E.
HOMILIES BY D. DAVIES Vers. 1-8. The calm sunset of an eventful day.
A man"s death is in keeping with a man"s life. You cannot have a tropical sunset in an arctic zone. It is vain to live the life of the voluptuous, and desire "the death of the righteous." Enoch"s death corresponded with Enoch"s life. The spirit of Elijah was characterized by heavenly fire: he ruled men with burning words of truth; it was, therefore, meet that he should depart as a king, "in a chariot of flame." Our Lord"s whole life was a crucifixion sublime self-sacrifice; it was fitting, then, that he should die upon a cross. Moses was transcendently great; in native grandeur he towered like a mountain above his brethren. To be in the society of God was his delight; hence there was a propriety that he should die alone, and upon the mount with God.
I THE DEATH OF A GOOD MAN HAS MANY GRACIOUS MITIGATIONS. It is not un-mingled sorrow. The evil in it is reduced to an infinitesimal point. It is a passing cloud, while the sun in its strength shines on the other side, and often penetrates the thin vapor. It is not the valley of humiliation, but the mount of communion. Visions denied to us before are vouchsafed to us now. God is nearer to us than ever yet; and though earthly friends cannot accompany us along the mystic path, strong angels are at our side to bear us on their wings to the glory-land.
The chamber where the good man meets his fate Is privileged above the common walks of life; Almost upon the very verge of heaven.
II DEATH OFTEN REVEALS TO US WHAT WE MIGHT HAVE ATTAINED. In the hour of dissolution, Moses saw what he might have enjoyed if he had neglected no opportunity in the past. That faulty past is irrecoverable. We may obtain pardon the most ample and complete; but we cannot regain lost ground. Well for us if, on our deathbeds, we have only one fault to bemoan; and yet one fault may entail immeasurable loss. When we stand face to face with death, we shall see the value of life as we have never seen it yet; we shall lament our negligence"s as we have never lamented them before. What illustrious characters we might have acquired! What conquests of good we might have won! What service for God we might have wrought! Alas! some well-meant purpose still remains immature!
III DEATH TO A GOOD MAN IS NEEDFUL FOR FULL POSSESSION. The land which God had sworn to give to Abraham and his seed, Moses was permitted to see, and in part to possess. Yet, had he gone over Jordan and endured the fatigues of battle and dwelt in the land, his soul would not have been satisfied therewith. As his powers of soul matured and ripened, he would have desired a better inheritance than Canaan could yield. The old yearning would have come back again, "I beseech thee, show me thy glory." The soul yearns for knowledge which earth does not permit. We long to pass the barriers of darkness and tread the plains of everlasting light. Impatiently the spirit beats against the bars of this fleshly cage, and longs to find her proper wings. We must pass through the dark gateway of death ere the soul can enter upon the full "inheritance of the saints.
IV THE DEATH OF A GOOD MAN IS IN PART THE PROCESS OF NATURAL LAW, IN PART THE PENALTY OF MORAL LAW. So far as man partakes of animal life, so far he is under the law, which rules animal natures. In every animal species we discern the stages of birth, growth, maturity, decay, death. But man is endowed with regal powers, which give him, in some measure, dominion over his animal nature. Yet, as a fact, men die before their physical powers have decayed. In earlier ages of human history, human life reached to centuries, while now barely to four score years. Moses was called to die, but "his eye was not dim, nor had his natural force abated." In his case we are authoritatively informed that his premature decease was due to guilt. The moral conduct of men does operate, then, in modifying the laws of nature. There is an unseen law a law of God which interlaces the laws and forces of the visible world, just as the system of nerves interlaces and animates the muscles of human flesh. The time and the mode of the believer"s death are not the outcome of natural law; they are fixed by the wisdom and the kindness of our personal God.
V THE LIFELESS BODIES OF THE SAINTS ARE THE ESPECIAL CARE OF GOD. "God buried him in a valley in the land of Moab." There is a secrecy and a mystery about Moses" burial, which it would be profanity to attempt to penetrate. On a later page of Scripture we read that, respecting this body of Moses, Michael had a serious dispute with the devil. We feel bound to connect this mysterious disposal of Moses" lifeless body with the appearance of the same glorified body on the Mount of Transfiguration. But the point which concerns us at present is this; God has manifested in various ways his tender regard for the mortal remains of his servants. The elementary particles may dissolve, but the personal organization shall survive. "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." Yet, by the conserving power of Deity, it is a body still, though fitted more completely in the future as a vehicle for perception, intercourse, motion, and free activity. We can be well content to entrust every interest we have in life with him "who counts the very hairs of our head.
VI THE DEATH OF A GOOD MAN IS AN OCCASION FOR EXTENSIVE SORROW. "The children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days." Although he had often severely censured them, exposed faithfully their faults, and denounced their vices, they knew they had lost a genuine friend. Never would they look upon their noble leader"s face again. His fatherly interest in them could never be replaced. Not till he was gone did they learn what a fount of blessing he had been. Had this coming event been steadily kept before them, they would have treated him with more generous esteem, and would have rendered to his counsels a more loyal respect. Now they lash themselves with just remorse. A good man"s departure leaves a great vacancy in the Church and in the social circle. Shall we be thus missed when death hath laid us low?
Yet the days of mourning even for a good man must cease. There are sterner duties in life demanding unceasing care, and our sorrow for the departed ought to qualify us for future service. D.
HOMILIES BY J. ORR
Vers. 1-4. Moses" vision.
The end of Moses, viewing the land to which he had so long and so painfully been leading the people, yet not permitted to enter it-dying on the threshold of the accomplishment of all his hopes, and leaving Canaan to be won by his subordinate minister, Joshua, has often been likened to the common fate of the highest characters in history, "removed from this earthly scene before their work has been appreciated, and when it will be carried on, not by themselves, but by others." (See the development of the thought in Stanley"s "Jewish Church," vol. 1. p. 175, with the application to Lord Bacon by Macaulay.) Often, also, it has been likened to the visions of the "land beyond the flood" received through faith by dying Christians. They, however, see a land into which they are soon to enter; Moses looked on one from which he was debarred. This vision was
I A COMPENSATION FOR A GREAT LOSS. Not permitted to enter Canaan, Moses was yet permitted to see it. His eyes were strengthened to take in the vision of its goodliness from north to south, from east to west. How his spirit must have feasted on the widespread prospect! This compensation, we remember, was won from God by prayer. (De 3) We cannot always gain reversal of our punishment of loss; no, though we seek it carefully, with tears. (Heb_12:17) But, while the losses remain, they may be sanctified to us, and, in answer to prayer, gracious compensations and mitigations granted.
II A PERFECTING OF HOLY RESIGNATION. Then, no doubt, while looking on that good land, and feeling that he could not enter it, would Moses have his last struggle, and conquer his last lingering wish to have it otherwise than as God willed. We know how sore the struggle in his mind had been, how earnestly he had wrestled with God to have the sentence reversed. (Deu_3:23-29) But it was not to be, and Moses must learn to say, as the Greater than Moses said long after, "Not my will, but thine be done!". (Luk_22:42) Who doubts but that the sacrifice was made? that Moses was brought to the point of perfect acquiescence before he died? And that in truth was a greater compensation than the other. The achieving so great a spiritual victory was well worth the surrender of the land. That victory, too, would take the sting of the trial away. The worst part of a trial nearly all that is bitter in it is past, when we are brought to the point of embracing the Divine will in it.
III A TRANSITION TO A HIGHER HOPE. Is it possible to think that Moses, in laying down his life on that mountain summit, believed that he was laying it down forever? Could he believe, after all the relations of friendship which had subsisted between him and Jehovah, in view of that land of promise from which he was debarred, and at this very moment of his greatest spiritual triumph, that his death ended all? that there was no hereafter? that there was no compensation beyond? We may rather believe that, in this very perfecting of his soul in its holy acquiescence in the Divine will, there would spring up in his mind a holier hope a trust and assurance that all he now surrendered would be made up to him in some better form in heaven. What we part with on earth for Christ"s sake are our ultimate gains. J.O.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv1, 5, 6 The Lord shewed him all the land.
Deu_34:1-4
The Lord shewed him all the land.
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Unrealised visions
The great parable of Israels wanderings has one of its profoundest applications in the death of its two great leaders: men above all others entitled to enter the land of promise; neither falling in battle nor dying a natural death; both doomed to die by the sentence of Jehovah whom they served, and under whom they were leading the people.
I. The unrealised hope of human life. Every life is a pilgrimage seeking its goal in some Canaan of rest. We picture it, struggle for it, and sometimes seem on the verge of realising it. We see it with our eyes; but, in the mysterious providence of life, are forbidden to go over. Our purposes are broken off, we are disappointed, and resent if faith prevent not. Learn--
1. Success is not the chief nobility of life.
2. The chief blessedness of life is capability of service.
3. It is a blessed thing to die when the work has been so far done that it justifies the worker, demonstrates his character, vindicates his nobleness; so that he is not ashamed to leave it for completion; so that his friends are proud of its unfinished fragments.
4. The formal denial of our hopes may be the means of perfecting our character.
5. If in our service we have sinned against right methods and tempers of service, sinned against Him whom we serve, it is well that His disapproval of our sin should be manifested.
6. The prohibition comes with manifest mitigations.
(1) What greater grace wrought in a man than acquiescence in such a mandate?
(2) Moses is permitted to prepare for departure.
(3) He is permitted to see his successor.
7. God honours His faithful servant by Himself preparing his sepulchre.
8. God fulfilled His promises and the hopes of His servant in a deeper and higher way than he anticipated.
II. The visions which may inspire human life, its unrealised hopes notwithstanding. To men who live greatly, God gives visions through this very idealism of life, which are glorious inspirations and strength; visions of a great faith and a bright hope; of rest through the toil, of triumph while they fight, of heavenly perfection and blessedness. Many glorious visions had been given to Moses. Who knows, but to his lofty soul Canaan would have been a disenchantment. Many of our realised hopes are. In the better country, no shortcoming, no disappointment. Canaan may suffice for a suggestive prophecy; only Gods heaven can be a satisfactory fulfilment. A great thing for faith to climb on heights to survey the heritage of God. And the nearer Jordan, the more glorious the prospect. The goodly land is revealed. All earthly lights pale before the great glory, all things here seem little and unimportant in that great blessedness. (H. Allon, D. D.)
Pisgah; or, a picture of a life
I. Life ending in the midst of labour. The farmer leaves his field half ploughed; the artist dies with unformed figures on the canvas; the tradesman is cut down in the midst of his merchandise; the statesman is arrested with great political measures on his hand; and ministers depart with many schemes of instructive thought and plans of spiritual usefulness undeveloped.
1. There should be cautiousness as to the work pursued. A sad thing to die in the midst of unholy labour.
2. Earnestness in the prosecution of our calling. Time short.
3. Attention to the moral influence of our labour, both on ourselves and others. We should make our daily labour a means of grace; every secular act should express and strengthen those moral principles over which death has no power. All labour should have but one spirit--the spirit of goodness.
II. Life ending in the midst of earthly prospects. If men die amidst prospects of good they never realise, then--
1. Human aspirations after the earthly should be moderated.
2. Human aspirations after the spiritual should be supreme.
III. Life ending in the midst of physical strength.
1. Death at any time is painful--painful when the physical machinery has worn itself out; when the senses are deadened, the limbs palsied, and the current of life flows coldly and tardily in the veins. But far more so, when it comes in the midst of manly vigour and a strong zest for a prolonged existence.
2. Does not this view of life--ending in the midst of important labour, bright earthly prospects, and manly strength--predict a higher state of being for humanity beyond the grave? (H. P. Bowen.)
The top of Pisgah
Moses, the servant of the Lord, now takes his last journey. He has been more or less a pilgrim all his life, and his last journey is in perfect harmony with all his previous ones, for it is taken at the commandment of the Lord. Throughout his life the society of his God had been his delight. To dwell with God had been the refreshment of his life; and God seems to say to him, That which has been your joy and refreshment in life, shall be your peculiar privilege in death. I have known you face to face in life; and now you shall die alone with Me, face to face with your God. This thought holds good in another respect. Everything in the career of Moses had been done in absolute obedience to God. The whole life of Moses was a carrying out of the Divine commands. So is it now. God says to him, Go up and die; so, characteristically, he went up and died. His act of dying was one of intentional obedience. But before he died God granted him a marvellous sight. The Lord showed him. His eye had not become dim, but, may be, God gave extra power to the old eye that had been looking for one hundred and twenty years, and such power that he could look north, south, east, and west, and view the whole land. And what a panorama stretched out before him. He saw the smiling green meadows at his feet, between which the Jordan swiftly flowed, and to the right his eye glanced along the valleys and woods, and the bright waving cornfields, that stretched away into the dim distance where rose the purple snow-crowned hills of Lebanon. To his left he saw the mountains swelling like mighty billows of the sea all struck into stillness. And perhaps, as he looked upon them, some angel voice whispered in his ear, There will stand Jerusalem the city of peace. There shall be the temple where, for ages and ages, Jehovah shall be worshipped. And see, yonder among the hills on that little speck in the landscape, a Cross shall one day stand, and the Son of God shall die to save the world. And across the beautiful land he might perhaps catch some dim sight of the blue Mediterranean, or at least have discovered where the white mists hung above its waters. And then, sweetly emblematical as it seems to me, beneath were the sullen waters of the Dead Sea. Oh, when God takes a man to the top of Pisgah he looks down upon the waters of death. This was the vision that greeted the eyes that had not yet become dim. Then, having had this view of the land, Moses the servant of the Lord died according to the word of the Lord, or, as the Rabbis say, at His mouth. God took the old man, wrinkled with age but simple in spirit as a child, and sang his lullaby and kissed him to sleep. What followed has never yet been fully revealed. A veil hangs thickly over the scene of the burial of Moses, but there is the fact recorded that God buried him. Oh, you say, what a quiet funeral. Yes, the more the honour of it. I believe that, as the vision of Canaan melted away, the vision of Gods face appeared, and he who had known his Lord face to face now knows what it is to behold His glory without a veil between. There you have the setting of our little text. Pisgah was at once the climax and the close of a character and a career. In one sense it is terribly sad, and concerning Pisgahs top it may be said, Behold the severity of God. He who has high honour put on him by God shall find that there is something in the other scale. Just because of the perilous position of honour to which God had raised Moses, that sin of his, when, in a moment of impatience, he struck the rock twice, is visited with the severe sentence, Thou Moses, shalt not pass over the Jordan into the land. Pisgahs top has also, I believe, dispensational teaching in it. It was absolutely necessary that Moses should not cross over Jordan. Had he done so the whole allegory of Scripture would have broken down.
I. Pisgahs top makes a beautiful illustration of spiritual life. What was Pisgah? It was an eminence in the wilderness from which might be seen the full extent of the salvation of God. When God brought His people out of Egypt, He did so in order to bring them into Canaan; and I believe that Canaan is intended to represent the life of the believer on earth, with all its privileges and all its joys and all its combats too. It is for the child of God to get a full view of the good land into which God brings him, a birds-eye view of the whole of Gods grand salvation. But how is this to be done? This is a most important question. I believe that there are two absolute essentials, and the first is this: if you would see the whole of the land you must get up on to the heights of Scripture. If your Bible is a neglected book you cannot see the whole length and breadth of the land. It is Gods Pisgah, and you must get up to the top. One half hour with God and His Book, and the power of the Holy Ghost will give you a grander view of Gods salvation than all the experience that you can hear. And the second absolute necessity is solitude with God. Moses did not get the vision when he was in a mob. He got it when he was alone. It is not enough for us to have a critical knowledge of Scripture. Spiritual wisdom is needed. I would sooner accept the interpretation of some pauper woman in the workhouse, if she is full of the Holy Ghost, than the interpretation of the ablest critic who has not the spiritual wisdom. We need revelation as well as elevation. It is not enough for us simply to be on Pisgahs top. God must do for us what He did for Moses. And the Lord showed him.
II. Do you not also think that Pisgah may serve as a prophecy of the dying hour? Moses was lost to the camp. I hear them say one to another, He is going; he is going. He has got beyond our reach now. They cannot see him. He is high up there. Have you known what it is to stand by the side of a dying one who has got so far that he cannot speak to you? He has become unconscious of all surroundings. As far as you are concerned, he has gone. Yes, and perhaps Israel was saying, Poor Moses! We pity him in having thus to die; and whilst they were pitying him he was seeing visions of God. I dare not speak dogmatically, but I do say that there is a consensus of evidence that cannot be put on one side that the dying very often do see far more than the living. We often say of a departing one, Oh, he is practically dead now, for he is unconscious. Yes, he may be unconscious to those standing round the bedside, but oh, how conscious of God. Oh, how conscious of a spiritual environment! I do not know whether Moses had a thought about the camp which he had left. I do not suppose that he had. He was looking at that which God showed him. The spiritual world is not a mere unsubstantial dream. No, it is real, and round about us all are the hosts of heaven. After all, Pisgahs top was only the starting point for the upward flight. It seems high up to us because we are dwelling down in the plain of Moab. But when Moses was on the top of Pisgah he was only just on the departure platform, not the arrival. From Pisgahs top I view my home, then take my flight. The sight of Canaan did not long linger on his eyes. Lebanon melts away. The Dead Sea becomes a mist. The rolling fields of golden corn become indistinct. Canaan vanishes. Another vision comes; and the man of God is face to face with his Lord. O child of God, so shall it be with thee. If thou diest in the Lords embrace, thy head on His breast, thou mayest see much in that dying hour. But thou shalt see more afterwards. (A. G. Brown.)
The frontier of the promised land
Each of us is a Moses, not as regards mission, glory, or virtue, but as regards this last feature of his career. We are all standing on the frontier of a promised land which we shall not enter.
I. Yes; we are on the frontier, on the threshold, at the very door of a land of promise, and we shall die before entering it. Reason is made for truth, and seeks it; but who is there that knows all he would know? Ignorance has reached this point: in its instinctive regrets it stands still, gazing mournfully upon mysteries which it cannot penetrate, upon depths of knowledge of which it has an instinctive perception, but which it cannot fathom. Science has reached this point: all science ends in a final effort which it fails to accomplish, in a final secret which it is inefficient to discover, in a final word which it is unable to utter. Unbelief has reached this point. Remember the sceptical astronomer who endeavoured daily to explain the first movement of the planets without admitting that they had been set in motion by a Divine hand, and, who dismissed his pupils day after day, bidding them come again tomorrow! Faith, too, has reached this point. Faith which knows that it cannot be changed into sight, and that no man hath seen God, that none knoweth the Father but the Son, that great is the mystery of godliness, that even the angels tremble as they look into it. Yes; reason and faith behold a promised, land stretching out before their eyes, but ever do they hear the stern and mighty voice saying, Thou shalt not go over thither.
II. And what of happiness? Is it not true that we are always on its limits? The desire for happiness is natural; more than this, it is lawful, it is religious. Every individual entertains it, notwithstanding his experience of life. We see it sometimes near, oftener at a distance; but this world is so fashioned that we are unable to cross the border and enter it.
III. Without peace there can be no true happiness. Who is there that has not dreamed of a life of peace, harmony, and love? But no; the machinery of life seizes upon us; competition lays a barrier across our path; we have rights which we must defend, for the sake of those we love, if not for our own; we must adopt as ours the maxim of Paul: If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. In the very domain of religion, we are called to defend our faith, to stand out against the calumnies of intolerance; we would gladly pray and communicate with all, but we are repulsed; we long for an asylum of peace and rest, and the terrible voice is heard, Thou shalt not enter into it!
IV. This state of things influences the whole of our existence, the progress of our soul, the entire labour of our life. Where is the man who brings all his enterprises to a successful issue, or realists all his plans? Where is the man who attains a perfect equilibrium in his desires, faculties, sentiments, and duties? Where is the man who, in a moral and Christian sense, realises his ideal? How many unfinished tasks! The world is full of them. Death comes and prevents their completion. When we examine ourselves, how far we are from sanctification! Alas! the perfect fulfilment of the plans of life, and of the progress of the soul, is a promised land, concerning which each of us is told, Thou shalt not go over thither! Who is He that, of all the human race, alone has entered His promised land? Who? Jesus. In Jesus Christ we are enabled to march towards the goal, to increase in knowledge and faith, in happiness and peace, to achieve greater works, and to progress on our way until the last stage of the journey be reached--eternity. (A. Coquerel.)
I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.
Comfort amid failure of hopes
There must have been in Moses mind, when he thought over his life, a strong consciousness of the opportunities of inward and spiritual culture which God had opened to him even in and through the failure of his plan of life. In his repentance and confession of personal sin he had come nearer to Jehovah than ever before, and now, as the result of all, a patient, loving confidence in God; a deep distrust of himself; a craving for inner purity more than for any outward glory; a pure, deep love overrunning with gratitude for forgiveness, which had deepened with every deepening appreciation of the sin,--all this was filling his heart as he went forth with God, pondering the failure of his life. And this same richness of comfort has come to many a man out of the failure of his hopes. You come up to the certainty that you are not going to accomplish that which you once meant to do, that you might have done if you had not wilfully sinned. You take your last fond look on the Canaan of accomplishment which you are not to enter. You say, I shall never do what I dreamed of doing, but at the same time there rises up in you another strong assurance,--God has done In me what I do not see how He could have done except out of my broken hopes and foiled endeavours. You are not glad that you have sinned; you are sure all the time that, if you could have stood sinless, some nobler character would have been trained in you, but you never can think of your sin without feeling alongside of it all that God has done for you through it. The culture of penitence is there, the dearer, nearer sense of God, which has come from so often going to Him with a broken heart, the yearning for an hourly dependence on Him, the craving, almost agonising knowledge of the goodness of holiness, which only came to you when you lost it, the value of spiritual life above all visible and physical delight or comfort, and a gratitude for forgiveness which has turned the whole life into a psalm of praise or a labour of consecration,--these are the cultures by which God bears witness of Himself to numberless lives that have failed of their full achievement. But take another thought. The whole question of how much Moses knew of immortality is very indistinct, but it is impossible to think that in this supreme moment his great soul did not attain to the great universal human hope. It must have come to him that this which seemed like an end was not an end; that while the current of the Jewish history swept on without him, for him, too, there was a future, a life to live, a work to do somewhere, with the God who took him by the hand and led him away. And here must always be the final explanation, the complete and satisfying explanation of human failures. Without this truth of another life there can be no clearness; all is dreary darkness. A man has failed in all the purposes of his life. What is there left for him? He dwells upon the culture which has come to him in and from his failure; but what of him,--this precious human being, this single personal existence, the soul, with all its life and loves? Is that indeed, just thrown aside like a dead cinder, out of which all the power has been burnt? Then comes Christs troth of immortality. Not so! This failure is not final. The life that has so fallen short is not yet done. It has been tried and found wanting. But by its own consciousness of weakness it is made ready for a new trial in a higher strength. (Bp. Phillips Brooks.)
Moses and the promised land
There are in history few characters whose grandeur equals that of Moses, and I know not whether the Old Testament contains an account more sublime or more touching than that of his death. Nearly a century had passed since, in the palace of Pharaoh, where he had grown up in the midst of the delights of Egypt and of royal splendour, the thought of the oppression of his people had seized upon his soul to give him no more repose. At last he reached the goal, so long desired, of all his thoughts. The promised land was there before him, and the waves of Jordan alone separated him from it. The promised land! Oh, how often he called for and contemplated it beforehand in his solitary dreams during the long nights of the desert, when, under the starry heaven, he conversed with Jehovah! From the silent summit of Mount Nebo the overworked old man directs his eager looks before him and in every direction: he sees all the country from Gilead to Dan; there stretches out Jericho, the city of palm trees; there the rich palms of Naphtali, of Ephraim, and of Manasseh; there Judah; there, beyond, towards the distant horizon, the Mediterranean Sea. Yes, it is certainly the Promised Land; but--he is forbidden to enter it! For a moment his heart bends under its load of anguish; but, losing sight of himself, he thinks of the future of Israel; he contemplates with emotion those places in which God will establish His sanctuary, those valleys from whence there will issue one day the salvation of the world; on the north the distant mountains of Galilee; on the south, Bethlehem, Moriah, and the hill where the Cross in which we glory was to be erected. Then, having embraced with one last look that land, so long desired, Moses bows his head and dies. From this grand scene there flows for us a grand lesson. Whoever you may be, have you not dreamed here below of a promised land; have you not desired it, have you not thought to reach it, and has not a voice been heard telling you also: Thou shalt not enter it at all! I want to inquire today why God refuses us what we ask on earth; I want to plead His cause, and justify His ways. Yes, we all dream here below of a promised land. There is not one of us who has not expected much of life, and not one whom life has satisfied. Do not trust appearance, do not depend on the outward joy, the absence of care painted on so many countenances. All that is the mask--underneath is the real being, who, if he is sincere, will tell you what he seeks and what he suffers. Is the promised land which you seek that renewed earth where righteousness will dwell? Is it the reign of the Lord realised among men? Is it God loved, adored, holding the first place in hearts and minds? Is it the Gospel accepted, the Church raised up again, souls converted, the Cross victorious? Well! need I say it to you? You will not possess that promised land here below, although in the ardour of your faith you had thought to enter it. You had thought by some certain signs to discover in our epoch a time of renovation; you had seen the shaken nations throw off their sleep of death, the Church rise up at the voice of God, and awake to the feeling of its magnificent destinies; you had seen the Holy Spirit descending, as on the day of Pentecost, and inflaming hearts. Thus, in the primitive Church, believers expected on the ruins of the heathen world the triumphant return of Christ. Yes, it was there that the promised land was. Alas! the world has continued its progress, the kingdom of God does not come with show, the work of the Spirit proceeds mysteriously and in secret, and, whilst that brilliant vision of a renewed earth moves before your troubled eyes, a voice murmurs in your ear: Thou shalt not enter it! Yes, let us not flatter ourselves. Those are seldom met with in our days who, devoured by hungering for truth and righteousness, long ardently after the reign of God. You had dreamed of a grand and beautiful existence on earth, for it was not towards vile pleasures that your nature carried you. God had given you talents, brilliant faculties, the knowledge of everything that is noble and fair. With what joy you bounded forth on your career! How all good causes appealed to you! Every day was to render you both better and stronger. To know, to love, to act, was your aim. All those enchanted ways opened before you, covered with that haze of the morning through which one predicts in spring the serene clearness and the heat of a fine day. The promised land was there in your eyes; you contemplated it with eager looks, you were going to enter it. All at once misfortune came, disease broke your strength, your property vanished from you, you were obliged to begin to gain by the sweat of your brow your daily bread; crushing cares have come to overwhelm your heart and blight your hopes; selfishness and the harshness of men have given you bitter and cruel surprises, and whilst others got before you in the race and ran towards the prospects of happiness which remained closed to you, the austere voice of trial murmured in your ear: Thou shalt not enter it! You had, my sister, dreamed on earth of the happiness of shared affections; the course of life appeared to you pleasant to follow, supported on a manly arm and a loyal heart. What joy to be able every day to pour your thoughts and your affections into a soul which would comprehend yours! The promised land was there to you; and now, you are widowed, and you go, a solitary one, in that path, the asperities of which no one smooths in your case. Or, what is much worse still, you have seen infidelity, falseness, and, perhaps, a cold indifference penetrate between you and the heart of him whose name you bear. To others God has spared that trial. You have seen a joyous family circle form around you--you have prepared for life the children whom God gave you. With what happiness have you followed the first intimations of intelligence in them, with what anxiety their temptations and their sufferings, with what gratitude their victories and their progress! At last you had almost attained your object. They were ready for the struggles of life; all that a vigilant love could sow in their hearts you had shed abroad. It was to you the promised land. Alas! how lately was it true. But a day came--a day of anxiety and fearful forebodings, ending in a reality still more frightful. From your desolated abode a funeral procession has passed, and today it is in Heaven that your wavering faith has to seek an image which floats before your troubled eyes. Shall I remind you of those works--long pursued with self-denial, with love--at the end of which you gathered unsuccess and ingratitude, and have seen your best intentions misunderstood and calumniated? Vain desires! barren illusions! the world cries to us, and in the name of its selfish philosophy it preaches to us forgetfulness and dissipation. But do you desire that forgetfulness? No, it is better still to suffer and to have known these desires, these affections, these hopes; it is better to bear about with one these holy images and sacred recollections; the torment of a soul which believes, and of a heart which loves, is better than the stupid and base frivolity of the world. It is better, O Moses! after forty years of fatigue and of suffering, to die in view of the coasts of Canaan than to lead in the palaces of Egypt the stupid and shameful servitude of pleasure and of sin! And yet before that rigorous law, which closes to us here below the promised land, our troubled heart turns trembling to God; we ask Him, that God of love, the secret of His ways which astonish us and now and then confound us. Why? we say to Him, why? We shall never here below fully know the cause of the ways of God. There are, particularly in suffering, mysteries which go beyond all our explanations. Nevertheless it is written that the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him. Let us try then to explain something of it. If Moses does not enter into the promised land, it is certainly, in the first place, because Moses sinned. What! you will tell me, could God not forget the faults of His servant? So long as Moses remains on earth he will undergo the visible consequences of his transgression in former times. As he sinned in presence of the people, it is in presence also of the people that he will be smitten. Now, that is what we have a difficulty in comprehending today. Today the sentiment of Gods holiness is effaced. God is love, we say with the Gospel, and forget that the Gospel never separates His love and His holiness! We forget it in face of Gethsemane, in face of Calvary, in face of those sorrows, without name, which remind us that pardon does not annihilate justice, and that Divine righteousness demands an expiation. Yes, God is love; but have you reflected on this, that what God loves before everything else is that which is good? Can God love His creatures more than He loves goodness? That is the question. Our age resolves it in the sense which pleases its feebleness. God, it tells us, loves before everything His creatures; and saying that, the whole Gospel is reversed; for it is evident that if God loves His creatures more than He loves what is good, He will save them, be their corruption and their incredulity what they may. Then heaven is assured to all--to the impenitent, to the proud, to the rebellious, as well as to penitent and broken hearts. This is not all. If God can thus place what is good in the second rank, can He not put it there always? What becomes, then, of holiness? What are we told of His law, since that law gives way when He chooses? I go further. What are we told of redemption, and what does the Cross of Calvary say to us, if you efface the idea of a sacrifice demanded by Divine justice? But admit, on the contrary, with Scripture, that God loves what is good before everything; that holiness is His very essence; and you will see that, if face to face with sinners, His name is love, face to face with sin, His name is justice; that suffering willed by Him is inseparably united with evil. You asked why life did not keep its promises to you--why your dreams, your plans of happiness were pitilessly destroyed--why, in presence of the promised land, an inexorable voice came to you: Thou shalt not enter it! Scripture answers you--because you are sinners; because this earth, which evil has defiled, cannot be for you the land of repose and of happiness; because God would warn you and prepare you to meet Him. You asked, O ye redeemed by the Gospel, why after having believed the pardon of God, His love, and His promises, you were treated by Him with rigour which confounds you? Ah it is because God, who made you His children, would further make you partakers of His holiness; it is because He would that the suffering attached to your earthly life should remind you every day of what you formerly were, and of what you would be without Him. Thus, at all times, God acts towards those very ones who have most loved Him. Ask Moses why he does not enter Canaan. Does he murmur? does he complain? does he accuse Divine justice? No; he bows his head and adores. Ask Jacob why his hoary hairs go down with sorrow to the grave. Does he accuse God? No; he remember, his deceits of a former time, his conduct towards Isaac, his perfidy towards Esau. Thus He accomplishes the word, that judgment commences at His own house. Thus God reminds those whom He has pardoned and saved, that if they are the children of a God of love, they ought to become the children of a holy God. But in refusing us, as Moses, admission here to the promised land, God has yet another aim--that of strengthening our faith. Let us suppose that it had been given us to realise our desires on earth, to see our designs accomplished, our sacrifices recompensed, to gather here, in a word, all that we have sowed. What would soon happen? That we should walk by sight and no longer by faith--pleasant and easy course, where every effort would be followed with its result, every sacrifice with its recompense. Who would not like to be a Christian at that price? Who would not seek that near and visible blessing? Ah! do you not see that the selfish spirit of the mercenary would come, like a cold poison, to mingle with our obedience? Do you not see that our hearts, drawn to earth by all the weight of our happiness, would soon forget the invisible world and their true, their eternal destiny? What would the life of faith then become; that heroic struggle of the soul which tears itself from the world of sight in order to attach itself to God? What would that noble heritage become, which all believers of the past have transmitted to us? Now, God expects from us better things. That is why He refuses you here below the repose, and the peace, and the sweet security of heart, and those joys in which you would like to rest; and why, when the world has caused to pass before you that promised land of happiness which enchants and attracts you, His inexorable voice says to you: Thou shalt not enter it. But, know well, He does not deceive you, for true repose and true happiness still await you. Ah! better to die on Mount Nebo, for God has reserved for thee a better heritage, a promised land into which thou shalt enter in peace. There, sin is no more; there, pure voices proclaim the glory of the Lord; there, His sanctuary is reared in light ineffable and in an ideal beauty; there, repose on the bosom of Infinite Love all those who, like thyself, have combated for righteousness; there, God reigns, surrounded with the multitude without number of His worshippers. Close thine eyes, O wearied pilgrim, thou wilt open them again in light, in the celestial Canaan, on the holy Sion, in the heavenly Jerusalem! Lastly, if God refuse us, as He did Moses, what we should have liked to possess on earth, it is that our heart may belong to Him, and be given to Hint forever. I think I hear your protestations. You answer me: Yes, faith and holiness can be taught in that rude school; but is it right that God should obtain love in this way? And you add: Should we have loved Him less if He had left us those treasures which His jealous hand so soon carried off from us Should we have loved less if our heart, instead of falling back sadly upon itself, had been able to bloom and breathe freely in all the confidence of happiness? Less! ah, we are witnesses to it. Today, if what we have lost could be returned to us; if our youth, our life, our hopes could be born again today, there would not be words in the language of men to testify to Him our gratitude and our love. I understand you; but take care, you have said, today, and you are right; for yesterday, alas!--for formerly--when you possessed those treasures, when your life was happy, where was that gratitude, that love, which should have overflowed? On that earth, blessed and decked with all your joys, did you think God Himself was misunderstood and treated as a stranger? Did you reflect that His cause was forgotten, His Gospel attacked, His Church feeble and divided? Did you think of those thousands of souls groaning under the burden of ignorance, of misery, and of Sin Did you ask for the earth where righteousness dwells? No; in order to reveal all that to you there was need of sorrow. We have seen how God educates us; we have seen how He prepares us for the promised land, which is not here below but in heaven. Happy the one who does not wait for the blows of trial in order to steer his course to it; but, happy, also, the one whose bonds trial has broken, and who has entered upon the journey home. (E. Bersier, D. D.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On v1 CRITICAL NOTES.—This chapter, written after death of Moses, once…
CRITICAL NOTES.—This chapter, written after death of Moses, once formed an introduction to book of Joshua.
Deu_34:1-4. Hoses ascends Nebo. Pisgah height, of which Nebo a peak; from which extensive prospect of land east of Jordan to Dan. Not Laish-Dan (Jdg_18:27) which was not in Gilead. Probably a town in north of Peræa. Utmost sea, Mediterranean, beyond which no land. Zoar, southern extremity of Dead sea (cf. Gen_19:22). See, really with the naked eyes miraculously strengthened.
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Deu_34:5-6. Death and Burial of Moses. Word, lit. at the mouth of the Lord. “The sense clear from Gen_45:21. Vu’g. correctly “jubente Domino.” It denotes that Moses died, not because his vital powers were exhausted, but at the sentence of God, and as a punishment for his sin, of Deu_32:51.—(Speak. Com.) Buried. God buried him, an honour perhaps designed to sustain the authority of Moses, which might have been impaired through punishment. Sepulchre. Not merely lest he should become an object of superstitious honour, for Jews not prone to this particular form of error. But, bearing in mind the appearance at Transfiguration (Mat_17:1-10) and what is said by Luk_5:9, we may conjecture that Moses after death passed into same state with Enoch and Elijah; and that his sepulchre could not be found, because shortly translated from it (Speak. Com.)
Deu_34:10-12. The character of Moses. Joshua filled with the spirit (Deu_34:9) of practical wisdom in manifold action (Isa_11:2); but not like Moses, gifted with power to work signs and miracles, to found a kingdom and create a nation. None equalled him (except Jesus) in official dignity, holy character and intimate friendship with God Knew God freely and familiarly conversed with him. This made him eminent above all prophets (cf. Num_12:8).
UNREALISED VISIONS.—Deu_34:1-8
The great parable of the wanderings of Israel in the wilderness has one of its profoundest applications in the death of the two great leaders, Moses and Aaron. Men above all others entitled to enter the land of promise; neither falling in battle nor dying a natural death, both doomed to die by the sentence of Jehovah whom they served, and under whom they were leading the people. This startles into a recognition of the tragedy of life and the impress of reality. Aaron, the high priest of God, though infirm, a noble and saintly man; in character and service second only to his brother, led by Moses and his son out of the midst of the wondering, weeping people to die in priestly robes, on the lonely summit of the Mount in Edom. Moses must die on Nebo, but die alone; neither son nor brother to close his dying eyes or receive his last words. Yet in its romantic incidents and tragic crisis, his death a fitting close of his great heroic life. The command to climb Nebo and die after such a vision, seems a penal infliction wantonly aggravated. Imagination can scarcely enhance the mystery and the awe, terrible in deliberateness and conditions. Only sublimest faith could implicitly obey such a mandate. It is a twofold parable. First, of the unrealised hope of human life.
1. The unrealised hopes of human life; the frequent disappointments, the unfulfilled purposes which so often characterise it; and which, to the affections and the philosophy of life, are so mysterious and painful. Every life a pilgrimage seeking its goal in some Canaan of rest. We picture it, struggle for it and sometimes on verge of realizing it. We “see it with our eyes;” but in mysterious providence of life, forbidden “to go over.” “Our purposes are broken off,” we are disappointed, and resent if faith prevent not. Mark conditions under which Moses died.
(1) While as yet his physical strength was undiminished, “His eye not dim,” etc.
(2) While as yet there seemed a great work for him to do, Jordan to cross, Jericho to conquer, Canaanites to drive out, etc.
(3) He died just when bright prospects filled his eye, when all the hope of his life was about to be fulfilled. What explains this mystery or justifies the ways of God to man? Cannot always judge, but learn: Success is not the chief nobility of life.
2. The chief blessedness of life is capability of service.
3. It is a blessed thing to die when the work has been so far done that it justifies the worker, demonstrates his character, vindicates his nobleness; so that he is not ashamed to leave it for completion; so that his friends are proud of its unfinished fragments. This not always given, but the faithful servants accepts the conditions.
4. The formal denial of our hopes may be the means of perfecting our character.
5. If in our service we have sinned against right methods and tempers of service, sinned against Him whom we serve, it is well that his disapproval of our sin should be manifest.
6. The prohibition comes with gracious mitigations. The sting of death extracted.
(1) What greater grace wrought in a man than acquiescence in such a mandate.
(2) Moses is permitted to prepare for departure.
3. He is permitted to see his successor.
7. God honours his faithful servant by Himself preparing his sepulchre.
8. God fulfilled His promises and the hopes of his servant in a deeper and higher way than he anticipated.
Second, of the visions which may inspire human life, its unrealised hopes notwithstanding. To men who live greatly God gives visions through this very idealism of life, which are glorious inspiration and strength; visions of a great faith and a bright hope; of rest through the toil, of triumph while they fight, of heavenly perfection and blessedness. Many glorious visions had been given to Moses. Who knows but to the lofty soul of this man of God, Canaan would have been a disenchantment. Many of our realised hopes are. In the better country no shortcoming, no disappointment. Canaan may suffice for a suggestive prophecy; only God’s heaven can be a satisfactory fulfilment. A great thing for faith to climb and stand on heights to survey the heritage of God. And the nearer Jordan, the more glorious the prospect. The goodly land is revealed. All earthly lights pale before the great glory, all things here seem little and unimportant in that great blessedness. “The sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared, etc.” Thus Moses disappears from sight and God buries him. One more glimpse of him vouchsafed on “the Holy Mount.” The prayer, “show me thy glory,” was finally answered. “When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, we also shall appear with Him in glory.” “Such honour have all the saints.”—Dr. Allon’s Vision of God.
THE BURIAL OF MOSES—ITS LESSONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Strange and singular that the greatest of all Old Testament prophets should find a resting place in the earth and no man able to point it out. Sepulchres of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob among the groves of Hebron, Joseph’s bones rest in Shechem, sepulchre of David by Jerusalem, the home of his heart. Neglect of the people did not leave the spot unmarked. Not what a Jew wished or what popular history would have framed, this death and burial, fitted to be a source of fruitful reflection.
I. God will have no one, living or dead, to stand between His creatures and Himself. II. God wishes men to see something more left of His servants than the outward shrine. III. God takes the honour of His servants into His own keeping. IV. God would teach men that He has a relation to His servants which extends beyond their death. V. God would teach men from the very first that His regard is not confined to any chosen soil. VI. There is one concluding lesson which has been reserved for us in its fulness, and which could be seen only partially by the Jews—that the seeming failure in a true life may have at least a complete compensation. Under the gospel this view clear. As God forgave the sin we see that long since he made up the loss. This a comfort to many who feel immeasurably distant from Moses, as if our nature were all broken by failure and flaw. A true purpose in life shall reach a perfect close one day, its shortcomings completed, its errors rectified, its visions realised. One greater than Moses ended life in what appeared utter failure, with His followers scattered, His mission rejected and He Himself betrayed to a death of agony and shame. But He cried, “It is finished,” achieved success and secured it for all who take up the cross and follow Him. There is full compensation for failure in every true life, and the highest where struggle and loss have been deepest. Most comforting of all these is reversal of consequences of sin in contrition and faith. The shadow on earth’s dial-plate is turned back when eternal life is gained and the sun no more goes down. Like Moses we shall rise to have heart’s desire, to look on the land and on Him who is the glory of it.
Rev. John Ker.
THE DEATH OF MOSES
I. The greatest of men are but instruments in God’s hands, and He can afford to lay them aside when He chooses. Moses seemed indispensable. None of similar ability and character to carry on work, yet God determined to move him. Paul, Luther, Wesley, and great reformers removed, yet truth survives, progresses and triumphs.
1. Let this dispel fears for future of the Church of God.
2. Abate personal pride, and—
3. Calm our fears for loved ones. “God, the husband of the widow,” etc. II. The time and the manner of each man’s removal from earth are fixed by God. III. When God removes His servants from earth, it is that He may take them to Heaven. IV. Until God calls us away, let us be diligent in doing good. V. God frequently gives intimation that He is about to call them to Himself. VI. God will remove all difficulties away in our heavenward journey. Adapted from Vol. II. Preachers’ Monthly.
“In His bless’d life,
I see the path, and, in His death, the price,
And in His great ascent, the proof supreme
Of immortality.”—Young.
THE CHARMING PROSPECT.—Deu_34:1-4
“The plains of Moab,” the last station before entrance to Canaan (Num_33:48). The prospect from Pisgah, charming in beauty and extent. About 160 miles in length and 50 or 60 in breadth. We borrow many of the following hints from an American Sunday School Journal.
I. The method of discerning it. He glanced before, not below him. In clear atmosphere, he saw verdure, sunshine and “the glory of all lands.” How?
1. With the naked eye. “His eye not dim.” Beauty everywhere if only an eye to see. An artist’s eye; a poet’s eye. Culture and communion with God help to discern and appreciate landscapes.
2. With the help of God. “The Lord showed him.” Indicated direction, gave supernatural strength to follow it. The eye and the object from God. To him are we indebted for a spirit of wisdom and revelation. Natural and spiritual vision, “the hearing ear and the seeing eye the Lord hath made.”
II. The summit from which it was viewed. Moses went up from the plains to the mount. Clouds and conflict below. We must rise higher and higher for rest, intercourse with God and heaven. The celestial city viewed from the delectable mountains. On the Mount of Transfiguration we see the glory of Christ. From Pisgah we discern Canaan. “In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen.”
III. The hopes which were realised by it. Moses had written of places which he had never seen. Memory would sweeten this prospect.
1. The land was secured to the people. Promised and were about to possess it.
2. “He was reaping the recompense of reward.” Not overwhelmed with grief, because excluded from earthly inheritance. “He desired a better country, that is a heavenly.” He saw the type, but taken up to the reality. “In the death of a good man eternity is seen looking through time.”—Goethe. When we see the salvation of God we may pray, “Lord now let thy servant depart in peace.”
THE SLEEPING SAINT.—Deu_34:5-7
“Moses, the servant of the Lord, died,” and rests from his labours.
I. Moses died by command of God. But his change more like sleep than death. Lazarus slept. Believers “fall asleep in Christ.” God put him to rest as you gently lay a child to sleep. “The Jewish doctors so expound this text, as though God did indeed take away his soul with a kiss (the loving mother is seen to kiss the child and then lay it down to sleep); and so of their 903 kinds of death, this they say is the easiest. God bade Moses go lie down and sleep (Deu_31:16), and he accordingly went to bed when his Father bade”—Trapp. “Thou shalt sleep with thy fathers.”
II. Moses was buried by the hand of God. God himself, or Michael at command of God “buried him.” “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.” He cares for soul and body. “No man knoweth of His sepulchre unto this day.” We shall not speculate or discuss about it. “The grave is not deep; it is the shining tread of an angel that seeks us.”—Richter.
O, lonely tomb in Moab’s land!
O, dark Bethpeor’s hill!
Speak to these anxious hearts of ours
And teach them to be still.
God hath his mysteries of grace,
Ways that we cannot tell;
He hides them deep like the sacred sleep
Of him he loved so well.
—D. M. Moir.
HOMILETIC HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS
Deu_34:1. Moses went up. Climbing mountains. An address for children.
1. It is itself a picture: the old, clearvisioned, vigorous man, climbing the rugged and lofty mountains east of Canaan. His life a series of historical pictures the most impressive and instructive. The lesson is a picture of Canaan the most beautiful.
2. Climbing mountains! What boy or girl will not be interested in that?
3. The thoughts that may have entered Moses’ mind as he looked out on hills, plains, valleys, and river below, and the sea beyond!
Moses a Man of Mountains.
1. Mountain of conflict (Exo_17:10).
2. Of the law (Exo_19:20).
3. Of communion with God (Exo_24:15-18).
4. Of bereavement (Num_20:23-29).
5. Of vision and of death (Deu_34:6).
6. Of transfiguration (Mat_17:7). Mount Zion (Heb_12:22-24).—S. S. Journal.
Went up.
1. A good man’s life an ascent. At God’s command, and by God’s help, in knowledge, strength, and meetness for heaven.
2. A good man’s death an ascent. May be in the valley, but guided through and lifted up. “God ordered that Aaron and Moses should go up to the tops of mountains to die,” says J. Edwards, “to signify that the death of a godly man is but an entrance into a heavenly state.” “Death is to the good an ascension.”
Deu_34:4. The Lord showed him. God gave Moses that day
(1) a lesson in eye-teaching.
2. A lesson in geography.
3. A lesson in prophecy—tribes not yet located. God showed him where He would locate them.
4. A lesson in history. “I sware unto Abraham,” etc. Deu_34:4.—S. S. Journal.
Deu_34:5-6. “Moses died according to the word of the Lord.” What occurred in this case, occurs in that of every Christian. All three—time, place, and manner—are fixed in the word of the Lord. Here a higher power interposes and disposes of man’s existence upon earth. The death of Moses was solemn, sudden, and though a chastisement—a public visitation for sin in the eye of all the hosts of Israel—yet in some respect an honourable one.—Dr. cumming.
Thoughts on the death of Moses. I. The best must die: “the servant of the Lord.” II. The best may die in the zenith of their greatness. III. The best may die when apparently indispensible. IV. The best may die where they little expect. V. But all die when and where God decrees.—R. A. Griffin.
A WEEPING PEOPLE.—Deu_34:8
Seven days the usual time of mourning, for persons of rank and eminence, thirty (Gen_50:3; Gen_50:10; Num_20:29). Moses absent when he died, was not carried in public procession, hence hitter mourning (see Josephus Ant. Bk. iv. chap. 8, sect. 48). I. Bereaved by a mysterious event. Families robbed of heads, Christian churches of best workers, nations of leaders. We lose their counsels, influence and prayers, “the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof.” We cry at the departure of every leader, “Help, Lord, for the godly man ceaseth, for the faithful fail from among the children of men.” II. Punished for strange ingratitude. Israel often complained and rebelled against Moses, did not treat him kindly. Now missed, and murmurers are mourners. “It is infamy to die and not be missed.”—(Wilcox). III. Taught by a wise providence. The justice, truth and firmness of God must be known (Deu_32:49-52). They must be taught that God depends not upon any of his creatures, and that the best, most holy and most useful must die. “The fathers where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever!”
When some men die, a nation feels;
When others fall, the world is moved.
A WORTHY SUCCESSOR.—Deu_34:9
Anxiety of parents to be succeeded in business and profession by children, of noblemen by heirs, of monarchs by princes. Joshua a worthy successor.
I. He was introduced by Moses. “Moses had laid his hands upon him,” and thus designated the person and conferred the power (Num_27:18; Num_27:23). No breaks, no vacancies in God’s service. One goes, another comes; one finishes what another leaves incomplete. A leader succeeds a lawgiver. “The law,” says Bp. Wordsworth, “led men to see the promises afar off, and to embrace them (rather to see and greet the promises from afar, Heb_11:13), and it brought them to the borders of Canaan, but could not bring them into it; that was reserved for Joshua, the type of Jesus.”
II. He was qualified by special endowments. “Full of the spirit of wisdom.” Intimacy with Moses and training under his care not enough. He had faith (Num_14:6-9), and experience (Exo_17:8-13); but required Divine gifts and graces to fit him to govern. The disciples had been with Jesus, but not equipped until the spirit given. Friendship and education, patronage and office, were shreds of honour. “The Spirit needed” as a spirit of wisdom, counsel, and might (Isa_2:2).
III. He was successful in his work. “The children of Israel hearkened unto him,” etc. Gifted men admired. The presence and authority of God with His servants will secure the affection and obedience of the people. Joshua owned as leader and prosperous in undertaking. By strength of character, and superlative wisdom, men rise to honour and success; wield an influence after death, and become saviours and kings in society. “On that day the Lord magnified Joshua in the sight of all Israel; and they feared him, as they feared Moses, all the days of his life” (Jos_4:14; Jos_3:7; Jos_1:5).
THE INFLUENCE OF A HOLT LIFE.—Deu_34:10-12
Moses here commended for character official position and privilege. Unique in greatness and honour. “There arose not a prophet,” etc.
I. The source from which the influence came. Fellowship with God,” whom the Lord knew,” conversed with “face to face” (Num_12:8). Intercourse with God gives power with man. None great and successful without this (Jacob, Joshua, Daniel and Luther). Retirement most requisite, most seasonable in our pressing and incessant duties. Moses in Midian (Exo_2:15; Exo_3:1); John the Baptist in the desert (Luk_1:30); Jesus in Nazareth (Mat_2:23). “Learn to live alone,” said Dr. Paley, when recommending to the younger clergy, communion with God. “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place.”
II. The method by which the influence was acquired. “The Lord sent” him and he went “in the land of Egypt” to deliver the people. Obedient to God he was endowed with the power of God. Entire consecration of time and talents brings its reward. In the words of the apostle, we have the influence of devout life upon ministerial success. “We will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (Act_6:4). “The hand of the Lord was with them; and a great number believed and turned unto the Lord.”
III. The ages through which the influence lasted. None like Moses in the days of Israel, and after intervening centuries he was still considered “Mighty in words and deeds” (Act_7:22. The power of such a life not destroyed by one failure. Memory survives death, and deeds never pass into o livion and the tomb. Myriads crowd the lower walks of life, removed and no more missed than atoms from the base of a lofty pyramid. But men conspicuous for virtues and holy deeds will live in name and influence and act upon the race till the end of time. “The righteous had in everlasting remembrance.”
“To hew his name out upon time
As on a rock; there in immortalness
To stand on time as on A pedestal.”
HOMILETIC HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS
Deu_34:9. Joshua chosen. All spiritual endowments from the Holy Ghost. The spirit of wisdom, courage and the fear of God specially needed for well-qualified leaders of men. Admire the goodness of God in raising up such men. If one burning and shining light is extinguished “the Father of lights” can kindle another.
Deu_34:10-12. Not a prophet like Moses. Unequalled.
1. In rank.
2. In faithfulness to duty (Num_12:7; Heb_3:1-6).
3. In legislative Wisdom ,
4. In divine authority, displayed (a.) in signs to the enemy (b) in terror to Israel. Moses was warrior, states-man, poet, philosoper, hero and saint. No man has rivalled him, nor robbed him of his honour. “A prophet who stood by himself in his greatness in relation to men and to God. To be the leader of a nation in such peculiar circumstances for 40 years was in itself a position without a parallel; but to have led them out of Egypt against the will of their enslavers, to have been at their head during a whole generation of which every day witnessed a stupendous miracle, to have been the founder of their laws and their religion, was a work such as far outshone the deeds of any one man from the beginning of history, and such as still remains unique.”—Blunt.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 34
Deu_34:1-4. Showed. “My work is done; I have nothing to do but to go to my Father;” said the Countess of Huntingdon. “I am on the bright side of seventy—bright side, because nearer to the everlasting glory.” Top of Pisgah. The loneliness of death. Ordinarily when men die, there are friends to gather round their bed, with tender ministries of love and prayer. Sometimes in the case of men like Moses, a nation will hush its footsteps and wait the issue with agonising suspense. Shut us up to die alone, with no hand that our weakness may clasp, no tear that may soothe our love, no prayer that may wing our hope, and how appalling death becomes. What pathos there is in the shrinking wail of Pascal—“I shall die alone!”—Dr. Allon.
Went up. What a contrast to a former Divine summons, to ascend Sinai to commune with Jehovah, to receive from Him comfort and strength and a renewed commission of service! Yet he evinces none of the trembling awe with which he ascended Sinai. Without remonstrance, without hesitancy save for a moment, he calmly obeys the stern injunction. “A good man knows how to die” (Dr. Allon). “Death cannot come to him untimely who is fit to die” (Milman).
Climb the ascent of being
And approach for ever nearer to the life divine.
Deu_34:5. The servant of the Lord died. A man of God has fallen to-day.
Deu_34:8. Weeping. When Augustus died the Romans wished that either he had never been born or had never died.
Deu_34:10. Not a prophet since. Moses was one that exceeded all men that ever were in understanding, and made the best use of what that understanding suggested to him.—Josephus.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime, etc.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Sermon Bible 1900 · Public Domain On v1 Deu 34:1-8
Deu 34:1-8
The death of Moses is a twofold parable:—
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I. Of the unrealised hopes of human life, the frequent disappointments, the unfulfilled purposes, which so often characterise it, and which to the affections and to the philosophy of life are so mysterious and painful.
Mark the conditions under which death came to Moses. (1) He died while as yet his physical strength was undiminished. "His eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated." (2) Moses died while as yet there seemed a great work for him to do—the Jordan to be passed, Jericho to be conquered, the Canaanites driven out, the tribes led to their inheritance, the social, legislative, and religious organisation of the people to be completed. (3) Moses died just when bright prospects of realisation filled his eye; when all the hope of his life was about to be fulfilled, the cup was dashed from his lips, just as it was lifted that he might drink.
We learn from this: (1) Success is not the chief nobility of life. (2) The chief blessedness of life is capability of service. (3) It is a blessed thing to die when the work has been so far done that it justifies the worker, demonstrates his character, vindicates his nobleness, for then he is not ashamed to leave it for completion. (4) The formal denial of our hopes may be the means of perfecting pur character. (5) If in our service we have sinned against right methods and tempers of service, it is well that God’s disapproval of our sin should be manifested. (6) The prohibition comes with gracious mitigations. Even though a sentence of death, everything that gives death a sting is extracted. (a) What greater grace can be wrought in a man than acquiescence in such a mandate? There is no blessedness like the blessedness of submitting ourselves to the wiser will of the heavenly Father, even though it be to drink a Gethsemane cup or to die upon a bitter cross. (b) Moses is permitted to prepare for his departure. (c) He is permitted to see his successor. (7) God honoured His faithful servant by Himself preparing his sepulchre. (8) God fulfilled His promises and the hopes of His servant in a deeper and higher way than he anticipated.
II. The second parable is of the visions which may inspire human life, its unrealised hopes notwithstanding. To men who live greatly God gives visions through this very idealism of life which are a glorious inspiration and strength, visions of a great faith and of a bright hope, of rest though they toil, of triumph while they fight, of heavenly perfection and blessedness, the failures and disappointments of earthly life notwithstanding. All men have visions, even the meanest and the worst; but there are no visions of life so great and inspiring as those of religious faith.
H. Allon, The Vision of God, p. 207.
References: Deu 34:2.—Parker, vol. ii., p. 287. Deu 34:5, Deu 34:7.—H. Wonnacott, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xii., p. 107.
Deu 34:1
We belong to two worlds. Neither the one nor the other completes our life. It is the action and reaction of their influences, the intermingling of their currents, which ministers to our vital progress. Man is strongly beset by the temptation to divide himself, and give himself part to one, part to the other, world; to let the daily round, the common task, have the share which they claim of his time and energy, in dull submission to the inevitable, and then to live what he calls his life in another—it may be a higher, but, alas! it tends terribly to become a lower—world. It is the daily round which makes life, and God will have us live. Therefore He keeps us there. The daily, hourly repetition of heavenly acts and efforts is training us for the life of heaven.
I. To Moses was entrusted the noblest, but at the same time the weariest, life-task ever committed to the hand of man. The burden of his people he bore through life; never for one instant was he permitted to lay it down. And to him were visions vouchsafed of Diviner brightness than meaner men could look upon. For him, as for many a faithful pilgrim, the brightest and most blessed vision was the last, from the last mountain summit which lies on the hither side of the river of death.
II. The visions cluster most thickly around death, because those who know what it is to live must die to realise their dreams. Like Moses, they may see the land, but they must die to inherit it,—die with the vision before their spirits, which fades for the moment as they die, but when they pass it is heaven.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Soul’s Exodus and Pilgrimage, p. 334.
References: Deu 34:1.—Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. xii., p. 274. Deu 34:1-5.—E. Bersier, Homiletic Magazine, vol. viii., p. 1. Deu 34:1-7. —H. Batchelor, The Incarnation of God, p. 193. Deu 34:1-8.—H. Allon, The Vision of God, p. 225 (see also Sunday Magazine, 1875, p. 486). Deu 34:1-12.—W. M. Taylor, Moses the Lawgiver, p. 434. Deu 34:4.—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. vii., p. 293; J. M. Neale, Sermons in Sackville College, vol. i., p. 160; Bishop Woodford, Sermons on Subjects from the Old Testament, p. 27; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. x., p. 339; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. ii., p. 447; Deu 34:5.—A. Scott, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xx., p. 3.
Deu 34:5-6
The great feature of the record contained in the words before us is the incompleteness of the life of Moses. He died before the people entered the land. This fact suggests two truths: (1) the meaning of unfulfilled purposes in life, and (2) the encouragement to men who die with their earthly purposes unattained. Moses died with his life’s purpose apparently unfulfilled. It is evident that he felt this as one of the saddest aspects of his departure. One thought had given meaning to his history for eighty years—the thought of guiding the nation into the land promised to his forefathers. Why must Moses see his own hope fade and vanish, and feel that life had no reward? What was the meaning of his death at that time?
I. The great purpose of the life of Moses was not permitted to be carried out because of his sin. One act of rebellion in striking the rock had prevented its accomplishment. If we ask why that single and apparently trifling act of disobedience unfitted him to lead the people into the land, while men far more rebellious and with less temptation afterwards became their rulers, it is scarcely possible to find an adequate reply. It may be that God would show how one act may darken the whole of man’s earthly hopes, how the subtle influence of one act of disobedience—because in disobedience lies the germ of all sin—may pervade with its gloom the whole of a man’s history, and cause his holiest efforts to fail just when they seemed about to succeed.
II. But we want to know more than that. We must ask whether life is really so incomplete as it seems. Is it so profound a failure? The history before us gives the answer. The purpose that Moses might not carry out was to be accomplished by Joshua, his successor. His life therefore had not failed, for his labour had inspired a man who had caught his spirit and was to finish the work he had begun. We see here the universal law that there is a spiritual connection between men. Age is joined by bonds of influence to age. Man is thus bound for ever to future generations.
III. But the question comes, Is that the only manner in which life’s highest purposes find their fulfilment? To that the history before us gives no reply, but by looking at the question in the light of Christianity we may confidently answer the inquiry. Christ redeemed all life; He glorified it all: therefore we may believe that no earnest efforts of this life are ever for the man himself really unfulfilled; all great aims are realised in the end.
E. L. Hull, Sermons, 3rd series, p. 119.
References: Deu 34:5, Deu 34:6.—C. Kingsley, The Gospel of the Pentateuch, p. 222; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. v., p. 274. Deu 34:5-7.—J. Hamilton, Works, vol. v., p. 313.
Deu 34:6
We shall take the account of the death and burial of Moses, and seek to show how it was fitted to be a source of fruitful reflection to the Old Testament Church.
I. God will have no one, living or dead, to stand between His creatures and Himself. The first great lesson which the Jewish people were to be taught was the supremacy of the one true God. It was the lifelong work of Moses to fix this truth of God’s sovereignty on the people’s minds. And yet what he had done for them made it not unlikely that their reverence for him might prove their snare, and that they might be tempted to give him the place he desired to secure for God. Moses died apart, and was buried in secret, where his grave could be dishonoured by no pilgrimage and where no false veneration could rear altars to his memory. And this first lesson did not fail. The nation worshipped many strange deities, but it never gave the place of God to His prophets.
II. God wishes men to see something more left of His servants than the outward shrine. In the history of the greatest and best, the tomb is often remembered and the life forgotten. It is an easier thing to revere the dust than to follow the example. God takes away the grave of Moses that the people may have before them, in full and undisturbed relief, the man himself. The sepulchre of the greater Prophet than Moses is equally unknown. God has made the march of armies and the desolation of centuries do for the sepulchre of Christ what His own hand did for the grave of Moses.
III. God takes the honour of His servants into His own keeping. "The Lord buried him." There is a higher honour conferred upon him than if all Israel had met to weep and lament, or the world assembled to his obsequies.
IV. God would teach men that He has a relation to His servants which extends beyond their death. The great truths of life and immortality must surely have begun to stir in the hearts of thoughtful men when they knew this, that "the Lord had buried him."
V. God would teach men from the very first that His regard is not confined to any chosen soil. The death of Christ has consecrated the soil of the world. Wherever men kneel with a pure heart they find God’s mercy-seat, and wherever they are buried they are in holy ground.
VI. The seeming failure in a true life may at last have a complete compensation.
J. Ker. Sermons, p. 153.
References: Deu 34:6.—Bishop Harvey Goodwin, Cambridge Lent Sermons, 1864, p. 253. Deu 34:7.—G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount, p. 58. Deu 34:9.—S. A. Brooke, The Unity of God and Man, p. 110. Deu 34:10.—J. H. Jellett, The Elder Son, and Other Sermons, p. 77. Deu 34:10-12.—W. M. Taylor, Moses the Lawgiver, p. 451. Deut 34—Parker, vol. iv., p. 400; Expositor, 3rd series, vol. ii., p. 289.
The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On v5 Deu 34:5 - Deu 34:6.
Deuteronomy
A DEATH IN THE DESERT
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Deu 34:5 - Deu 34:6.
A fitting end to such a life! The great law-giver and leader had been all his days a lonely man; and now, surrounded by a new generation, and all the old familiar faces vanished, he is more solitary than ever. He had lived alone with God, and it was fitting that alone with God he should die.
How the silent congregation must have watched, as, alone, with ‘natural strength unabated,’ he breasted the mountain, and went up to be seen no more! With dignified reticence our chapter tells us no details. He ‘died there,’ in that dreary solitude, and in some cleft he was buried, and no man knows where. The lessons of that solitary death and unknown tomb may best be learned by contrast with another death and another grave-those of the Leader of the New Covenant, the Law-giver and Deliverer from a worse bondage, and Guide into a better Canaan, the Son who was faithful over His own house, as Moses was ‘faithful in all his house, as a servant.’ That lonely and forgotten grave among the savage cliffs was in keeping with the whole character and work of him who lay there.
‘Here,-here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects;
Loftily lying,
Leave him-still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.’
Contrast that grave with the sepulchre in the garden where Jesus lay, close by a city wall, guarded by foes, haunted by troops of weeping friends, visited by a great light of angel faces. The one was hidden and solitary, as teaching the loneliness and mystery of death; the other revealed light in the darkness, and companionship in the loneliness. The one faded from men’s memory because it was nothing to any man; no impulses, nor hopes, nor gifts, could come from it. The other forever draws hearts and memories, because in it was wrought out the victory in which all our hopes are rooted. An endured cross, an empty grave, an occupied throne, are as the threefold cord on which all our hopes hang. Moses was solitary as God’s servant in life and death, and oblivion covered his mountain grave. Christ’s ‘delights were with the sons of men.’ He lived among them, and all men ‘know his sepulchre to this day.’
I. Note, then, first, as a lesson gathered from this lonely death, the penalty of transgression.
One of the great truths which the old law and ordinances given by Moses were intended to burn in on the conscience of the Jew, and through him on the conscience of the world, was that indissoluble connection between evil done and evil suffered, which reaches its highest exemplification in the death which is the ‘wages of sin.’ And just as some men that have invented instruments for capital punishment have themselves had to prove the sharpness of their own axe, so the lawgiver, whose message it had been to declare, ‘the soul that sinneth it shall die,’ had himself to go up alone to the mountain-top to receive in his own person the exemplification of the law that had been spoken by his own lips. He sinned when, in a moment of passion {with many palliations and excuses}, he smote the rock that he was bidden to address, and forgot therein, and in his angry words to the rebels, that he was only an instrument in the divine hand. It was a momentary wavering in a hundred and twenty years of obedience. It was one failure in a life of self-abnegation and suppression. The stern sentence came.
People say, ‘A heavy penalty for a small offence.’ Yes; but an offence of Moses could not be a small offence.’ Noblesse oblige! The higher a man rises in communion with God, and the more glorious the message and office which are put into his hands, the more intolerable in him is the slightest deflection from the loftiest level. A splash of mud, that would never be seen on a navvy’s clothes, stains the white satin of a bride or the embroidered garment of a noble. And so a little sin done by a loftily endowed and inspired man ceases to be small.
Nor are we to regard that momentary lapse only from the outside and the surface. One little mark under the armpit of a plague-sufferer tells the physician that the fatal disease is there. A tiny leaf above ground may tell that, deep below, lurks the root of a poison plant. That little deflection, coming as it did at the beginning of the resumption of his functions by the Lawgiver after seven-and-thirty years of comparative abeyance, and on his first encounter with the new generation that he had to lead, was a very significant indication that his character had begun to yield and suffer from the strain that had been put upon it; and that, in fact, he was scarcely fit for the responsibilities that the new circumstances brought. So the penalty was not so disproportionate to the fault as it may seem.
And was the penalty such a very great one? Do you think that a man who had been toiling for eighty years at a very thankless task would consider it a very severe punishment to be told, ‘Go home and take your wages’? It did not mean the withdrawal of the divine favour. ‘Moses and Aaron among his priests. . . . Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though Thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.’ The penalty of a forgiven sin is never hard to bear, and the penalty of a forgiven sin is very often punctually and mercifully exacted.
But still we are not to ignore the fact that this lonely death, with which we are now concerned, is of the nature of a penal infliction. And so it stands forth in consonance with the whole tone of the Mosaic teaching. I admit, of course, that the mere physical fact of the separation between body and spirit is simply the result of natural law. But that is not the death that you and I know. Death as we know it, the ugly thing that flings its long shadows across all life, and that comes armed with terrors for conscience and spirit, is ‘the wages of sin,’ and is only experienced by men who have transgressed the law of God. So far Moses in his life and in his death carries us-that no transgression escapes the appropriate punishment; that the smallest sin has in it the seeds of mortal consequences; that the loftiest saint does not escape the law of retribution.
And no further does Moses with his Law and his death carry us. But we turn to the other death. And there we find the confirmation, in an eminent degree, of that Law, and yet the repeal of it. It is confirmed and exhausted in Jesus Christ. His death was ‘the wages of sin.’ Whose? Not His. Mine, yours, every man’s. And because He died, surrounded by men, outside the old city wall, pure and sinless in Himself, He therein both said ‘Amen’ to the Law of Moses, and swept it away. For all the sins of the world were laid upon His head, He bore the curse for us all, and has emptied the bitter cup which men’s transgressions have mingled. Therefore the solitary death in the desert proclaims ‘the wages of sin’; that death outside the city wall proclaims ‘the gift of God,’ which is ‘eternal life.’
II. Another of the lessons of our incident is the withdrawal, by a hard fate, of the worker on the very eve of the completion of his work.
For all these forty years there had gleamed before the fixed and steadfast spirit of the sorely tried leader one hope that he never abandoned, and that was that he might look upon and enter into the blessed land which God had promised. And now he stands on the heights of Moab. Half a dozen miles onwards, as the crow flies, and his feet would tread its soil. He lifts his eyes, and away up yonder, in the far north, he sees the rolling uplands of Gilead, and across the deep gash where the Jordan runs, he catches a glimpse of the blue hills of Naphtali or of Galilee, and the central mountain masses of Ephraim and Manasseh, where Ebal and Gerizim lift their heads; and then, further south, the stony summits of the Judaean hills, where Jerusalem and Bethlehem lie, and, through some gap in the mountains, a gleam as of sunshine upon armour tells where the ocean is. And then his eye falls upon the waterless plateau of the South, and at his feet the fertile valley of Jordan, with Jericho glittering amongst its palm trees like a diamond set in emeralds, and on some spur of the lower hill bounding the plain, the little Zoar. This was the land which the Lord had promised to the fathers, for which he had been yearning, and to which all his work had been directed all these years; and now he is to die, as my text puts it, with such pathetic emphasis, ‘there in Moab,’ and to have no part in the fair inheritance.
It is the lot of all epoch-making men, of all great constructive and reforming geniuses, whether in the Church or in the world, that they should toil at a task, the full issues of which will not be known until their heads are laid low in the dust. But if, on the one hand, that seems hard, on the other hand there is the compensation of ‘the vision of the future and all the wonder that shall be,’ which is granted many a time to the faithful worker ere he closes his eyes. But that is not the fate of epoch-making and great men only; it is the law for our little lives. If these are worth anything, they are constructed on a scale too large to bring out all their results here and now. It is easy for a man to secure immediate consequences of an earthly kind; easy enough for him to make certain that he shall have the fruit of his toil. But quick returns mean small profits; and an unfinished life that succeeds in nothing may be far better than a completed one, that has realised all its shabby purposes and accomplished all its petty desires. Do you, my brother, live for the far-off; and seek not for the immediate issues and fruits that the world can give, but be contented to be of those whose toil waits for eternity to disclose its significance. Better a half-finished temple than a finished pigstye or huckster’s shop. Better a life, the beginning of much and the completion of nothing, than a life directed to and hitting an earthly aim. ‘He that soweth to the spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting,’ and his harvest and garner are beyond the grave.
III. Again, notice here the lesson of the solitude and mystery of death.
Moses dies alone, with no hand to clasp his, none to close his eyes; but God’s finger does it. The outward form of his death is but putting into symbol and visibility the awful characteristics of that last moment for us all. However closely we have been twined with others, each of us has to unclasp dear hands, and make that journey through the narrow, dark tunnel by himself. We live alone in a very real sense, but we each have to die as if there were not another human being in the whole universe but only ourselves. But the solitude may be a solitude with God. Up there, alone with the stars and the sky and the everlasting rocks and menacing death, Moses had for companion the supporting God. That awful path is not too desolate and lonely to be trodden if we tread it with Him.
Moses’ lonely death leads to a society yonder. If you refer to the thirty-second chapter you will find that, when he was summoned to the mountain, God said to him, ‘Die in the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered to thy people.’ He was to be buried there, up amongst the rocks of Moab, and no man was ever to visit his sepulchre to drop a tear over it. How, then, was he ‘gathered to his people’? Surely only thus, that, dying in the desert alone, he opened his eyes in ‘the City,’ surrounded by ‘solemn troops and sweet societies’ of those to whom he was kindred. So the solitude of a moment leads on to blessed and eternal companionship.
So far the death of Moses carries us. What does the other death say? Moses had none but God with him when he died. There is a drearier desolation than that, and Jesus Christ proved it when He cried, ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ That was solitude indeed, and in that hour of mysterious, and to us unfathomable, desertion and misery, the lonely Christ sounded a depth, of which the lawgiver in His death but skimmed the surface. Christ was parted from God in His death, because He bore on Him the sins that separate us from our Father, and in order that none of us may ever need to tread that dark passage alone, but may be able to say, ‘I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me’-Thou, who hast trodden every step in its rough and dreary path, uncheered by the presence which cheers us and millions more. Christ died that we might live. He died alone that, when we come to die, we may hold His hand and the solitude may vanish.
Then, again, our incident teaches us the mystery that wrapped death to that ancient world, of which we may regard that unknown and forgotten sepulchre as the visible symbol. Deep darkness lies over the Old Testament in reference to what is beyond the grave, broken by gleams of light, when the religious consciousness asserted its indestructibility, in spite of all appearance to the contrary; but never growing to the brightness of serene and continuous assurance of immortal life and resurrection. We may conceive that mysteriousness as set forth for us by that grave that was hidden away in the defiles of Moab, unvisited and uncared for by any.
We turn to the other grave, and there, as the stone is rolled away, and the rising sunshine of the Easter morning pours into it, we have a visible symbol of the life and immortality which Jesus Christ then brought to light by His Gospel. The buried grave speaks of the inscrutable mystery that wrapped the future: the open sepulchre proclaims the risen Lord of life, and the sunlight certainty of future blessedness which we owe to Him. Death is solitary no more, though it be lonely as far as human companionship is concerned; and a mystery no more, though what is beyond is hidden from our view, and none but Christ has ever returned to tell the tale, and He has told us little but the fact that we shall live with Him.
We rejoice that we have not to turn to a grave hid amongst the hills where our dead Leader lies, but to an open sepulchre by the city wall in the sunshine, from whence has come forth the ever-living ‘Captain of our salvation.’
IV. The last lesson is the uselessness of a dead leader to a generation with new conflicts.
Commentators have spent a great deal of ingenuity in trying to assign reasons why God concealed the grave of Moses. The text does not say that God concealed it at all. The ignorance of the place of his sepulchre does not seem to have been part of the divine design, but simply a consequence of the circumstances of his death, and of the fact that he lay in an enemy’s land, and that they had had something else to do than go to look for the grave of a dead commander. They had to conquer the land, and a living Joshua was what they wanted, not a dead Moses.
So we may learn from this how easily the gaps fill. ‘Thirty days’ mourning,’ and says my text, with almost a bitter touch,’ so the days of mourning for Moses were ended.’ A month of it, that was all; and then everybody turned to the new man that was appointed for the new work. God has many tools in His tool-chest, and He needs them all before the work is done. Joshua could no more have wielded Moses’ rod than Moses could have wielded Joshua’s sword. The one did his work, and was laid aside. New circumstances required a new type of character-the smaller man better fitted for the rougher work. And so it always is. Each generation, each period, has its own men that do some little part of the work which has to be done, and then drop it and hand over the task to others. The division of labour is the multiplication of joy at the end, and ‘he that soweth and he that reapeth rejoice together.’ But whilst the one grave tells us, ‘This man served his generation by the will of God, and was laid asleep and saw corruption,’ the other grave proclaims One whom all generations need, whose work is comprehensive and complete, who dies never. ‘He liveth and was dead, and is alive for evermore.’ Christ, and Christ alone, can never be antiquated. This day requires Him, and has in Him as complete an answer to all its necessities as if no other generation had ever possessed Him. He liveth for ever, and for ever is the Shepherd of men.
So Aaron dies and is buried on Hor, and Moses dies and is buried on Pisgah, and Joshua steps into his place, and, in turn, he disappears. The one eternal Word of God worked through them all, and came at last Himself in human flesh to be the Everlasting Deliverer, Redeemer, Founder of the Covenant, Lawgiver, Guide through the wilderness, Captain of the warfare, and all that the world or a single soul can need until the last generation has crossed the flood, and the wandering pilgrims are gathered in the land of their inheritance. The dead Moses pre-supposes and points to the living Christ. Let us take Him for our all-sufficing and eternal Guide.
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. R. Dummelow 1909 · Public Domain On v1 The Death of Moses
The Death of Moses
In obedience to the divine command (Deu_32:48-52) Moses ascends to the top of Mt. Nebo, whence he views the Land of Promise. Thereafter he dies and God buries him. No man knows of his sepulcher.
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1-4. Dan is used to indicate the extreme N., as in the phrase 'from Dan to Beersheba,' though it was not till the time of the Judges that the Danites settled in that district: see Jdg_18:28, Jdg_18:29. The utmost sea (lit. 'hinder, i.e. western, sea': see on Deu_11:24) is the Mediterranean. The south is the Negeb: see on Num_13:17; Zoar lay at the SE. end of the Dead Sea. There is no need to suppose that there was anything miraculous in this vision of the whole land. From the mountains of Moab travellers tell us that they can see the entire valley of the Jordan with Mt. Hermon at the extreme N. Lebanon and Carmel are visible, and the Mediterranean, 50 m. distant, can be seen like a silver streak in the glittering sunshine. Such extensive views are favoured by the exceptional clearness of the atmosphere in Palestine: see on Deu_27:11-13.
5. It is implied here that Moses was alone. But Josephus says that he was accompanied to the top of the hill by 'the senate, and Eleazar, and Joshua.' After viewing the land Moses dismissed the senate, and 'as he was about to embrace Eleazar and Joshua was still discoursing with them a cloud stood over him on a sudden and he disappeared in a certain valley.' With this compare the departure of Elijah, 2Ki_2:11. Jewish writers take literally the words at the end of this v., according to the word of the Lord, and say that God 'kissed him and he slept.'
6. He buried him] i.e. God buried him. This probably means no more than what is expressed in the second half of the v. that his sepulchre was never known. God alone knew where His servant was buried. Fuller quaintly says that God not only buried Moses, but buried his sepulchre also lest it should become a shrine of idol-worship to future generations.
Later Jewish legend says that Michael, who Was supposed to be the angel who conducted pious souls to Paradise, came into conflict with Satan as to the disposal of the body of Moses. "Whether Satan was regarded as trying to prevent the body of Moses being honoured, or as seeking to seduce the people into paying too much honour to it, is uncertain. The legend is referred to in the Epistle of Jude, Deu_34:9, and the quotation there is made from a Jewish history called 'The Assumption of Moses.' A great many legends about Moses are circulated among the Mohammedans. The words unto this day indicate that the writer of this account of the death of Moses lived long after its occurrence.
7. An hundred and twenty years old] see on Exo_2:21.
8. The usual period of mourning seems to have been thirty days: see Num_20:29; Gen_50:3, and cp. Deu_21:13. Of these the first seven were more stringently observed: see Gen_50:10. In addition to the natural manifestations of grief, mourning in the East was, and still is, accompanied with a great deal of ceremony: see e.g. Jer_9:17-18; Jer_16:6-8; Eze_24:16-17; Mat_9:23. The mourning for Moses was doubtless very genuine. Like many another great person, he was better appreciated after his death than during his lifetime. In his life he was much tried by the murmuring, disobedience, and jealousy of those for whom he lived, but these same people made great lamentation for him when he was dead.
9. 'God buries the workman but carries on the work.' See on Num_27:18-23.
10-12. R V 'There hath not arisen a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses': cp. Num_12:6-8. The words point to a time considerably later than the death of Moses (cp. Deu_34:6, 'unto this day'), when his real greatness could be appreciated and his superiority to all the great prophets and leaders who succeeded him could be rightly estimated.
J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Arno C. Gaebelein 1922 · Public Domain On v1 4. The Death of Moses
4. The Death of Moses
CHAPTER 34
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1. The death and burial of Moses (Deu 34:1-7)
2. The mourning of the people (Deu 34:8)
3. The conclusion of the book (Deu 34:9-12)
This chapter was not written by Moses, but is an addition by another chosen instrument.
The home-going of this great man of God is beyond description. What a scene it must have been when he ascended Nebo to the top of Pisgah! And the Lord met him there and showed him the land and said: “This is the land, which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed. I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.” What vision it must have been! What peace and joy must have filled the heart of the servant of God! Then he died. Jewish tradition has woven many stories around this event. One, however, is so beautiful that we must mention it. “At God’s command Moses crossed his hands over his breast and closed his eyes; and God took away his soul with a kiss. Then heaven and earth and the starry world began to weep for Moses.”
And the Lord buried Moses. How and where is unrevealed. Jude informs us that Michael, the archangel, contended with the devil about the body of Moses. No doubt Satan tried to bring the buried body to light and to seduce Israel to worship the body of their departed leader. What honor Jehovah put after all upon His servant! He is the only one who was buried by the Lord, and he appeared on the Mount of Transfiguration with the Lord. And the beautiful testimony concerning him by the Spirit of God at the end of this book! “And there arose not a prophet since in Israel whom the LORD knew face to face.”
May it please God to bless this book and its many lessons to our hearts. May He grant unto us to live and walk dependent upon and obedient to His Word.
1. It has been stated Luk 23:43 is this Old Testament idiom in the New Testament, as if our Lord meant to say: “Verily I say unto thee today, thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.” However, this is positively wrong. It is the argument advanced by the teachers of the soul-sleep. The same hint is made in the Companion Bible. The comma does not belong after “today” but after “thee” as we have it in the English Bible.
2. “The taking off of the shoe was an ancient custom also, adopted, according to Rth 4:7, in cases of redemption and exchange, for the purpose of confirming commercial transactions. The usage arose from the fact, that when any one took possession of landed property, he did so by treading upon the soil, and asserting his right of possession by standing upon it in his shoes. In this way the taking off of the shoe and handing it to another became a symbol of the renunciation of a man’s position and property.”
3. Reuben (behold a son’); Simeon (hearing); Levi (joined); Judah (praise). This is the order of the sons of Jacob according to their birth. It tells out the gospel. In the blessing of Moses the order is: Reuben (behold a son!); Judah (praise); Levi (joined). Simeon (hearing) is left out. When the Lord comes Israel will behold Him as the Son and will break out in praise and worship and become joined to Him. No “hearing” is needed then. We pass this on to our readers for consideration. We have nowhere seen this application.
Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv1, 10 Moses Dies and is Buried by God
Moses Dies and is Buried by God
v. 1. And Moses went up from the Plains of Moab, where the children of Israel were still encamped, unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is, to its very summit, that is over against Jericho. Cf Deu 32:48-51. And the Lord showed him all the land of Gilead, on the eastern side of Jordan, unto Dan, a town in Northern Perea,
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v. 2. and all Naphtali, later the land of Galilee, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, in the approximate center of Canaan, and all the land of Judah, directly opposite his station, unto the utmost sea, the Mediterranean Sea,
v. 3. and the south, the plains beyond the Dead Sea, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm-trees, for these grew in the lowlands of Jericho, unto Zoar, at the extreme southern end of the Dead Sea. This viewing of the entire country was a "proof of his generally unimpaired strength of vision, which the soaring flight of faith rendered more penetrating. "
v. 4. And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed, Gen 12:7; Gen 15:18; Gen 28:13; I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, it was a last favor which the Lord granted to His faithful servant, but thou shalt not go over thither.
v. 5. So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, namely, on Mount Nebo, according to the word of the Lord, Deu 32:50.
v. 6. And he, the Lord, buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor, in some mountain valley not far from Nebo; but no man knoweth of his sepulcher unto this day, its exact location was not revealed. From the letter of Jude,
v. 9. we know that the archangel Michael contended with the devil for the body of Moses. Thus God, through His angel, saved the body of Moses from the last consequence of death under the control of Satan, from corruption. The body of Moses was taken to heaven after his burial and there changed to a spiritual body. Thus it was possible for Moses to appear with Elijah at the transfiguration of Christ. This fact gives us a strong guarantee for the final fulfillment of our hope, of the resurrection of the body.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 4, 7, 9, 10 Mount Nebo
Mount Nebo
This is the highest point of Mount Pisgah which is in the northern part of the Abarim mountain range. See how you translated this in Deuteronomy 32:49.
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Pisgah
See how you translated this in Deuteronomy 3:17.
the City of Palms
This is another name for Jericho. (See: How to Translate Names)
translationWords
Moses
Moab
Jericho
Yahweh
Gilead
Dan
Naphtali
Ephraim
Manasseh
Judah
the sea
Negev
Zoar
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12 34:1-12 Moses fell short of entry into the land…
34:1-12 Moses fell short of entry into the land of promise (see study note on 32:51), but God did permit him to share a moment of glory in the land at Jesus’ transfiguration (Luke 9:28-36).
34:1 Mount Nebo is a high elevation in the Abarim hills east of the Jordan River. Virtually the whole land west of the Jordan can be seen from this vantage point (32:49). • Nebo was part of Pisgah Peak (see study note on 3:17). • Gilead as far as Dan was the northernmost part of the land. The Sea of Galilee and Mount Hermon lie straight north from Nebo. Gilead is just east of the sea, and Dan (Laish; Judg 18:29) was south and west of Hermon.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.