Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Francesca Stavrakopoulou on Deuteronomy 34 and the Death and Burial of Moses


Commenting on the burial of Moses by the Lord in Deut 34:1-8, Francesca Stavrakopoulou wrote:

. . . this burial story is not simply concerned with attributing an extraordinarily prestigious burial to such an elevated a figure; the lost tomb tradition also serves several related functions.

First, it renders Moses’ burial a paradox: the lost tomb marks both the continual presence and continued absence of his corpse; the precise yet loose location of his burial hides the specific place of his grave; and the burial itself is performed by the very deity whose continued relationship with the living is supposedly marked by the necessity for the separation of the divine from the dead. Thus in death—as in life—Moses traverses the socially sanctioned ‘normative’ and ‘normalising’ boundaries both within and between the human and divine worlds. He is incomparably unique.

Second, the claimed existence of a lost tomb at once underlines the mortality of this ‘divine man’ (איש אלוהים) whom Yhwh knew ‘face to face’, and discourages (not altogether successfully) the belief that Moses was taken up to heaven. Possible motivations for this include Deuteronomy’s intolerance of other divine beings and their cults, and a perceived theological need to distance the revelatory and mediatory roles of Moses from the magico-ritual divination of the divine man Elijah, who ascends to heaven (2 Kgs 2:11) and the divine man Elisha, whose tomb is a source and locus of resurrective power (2 Kgs 13:21).

Third, the unknown location of the tomb theoretically robs localized groups of a territorial claim to Moses’ grave. Indeed, the likelihood that there were conflicting—and perhaps competing—stories about the place of Moses’ death might be indicated in Deut. 34:1. Here, the Moabite mountain from which Moses viewed the promised land and (implicitly, recalling 32:49-50) upon which he dies, in both Nebo and Pisgah, mountains which, in other texts, appear to be given separate locations. While this double designation may echo mythic conceptions of the twin-peaked, cosmic mountain, the indeterminacy concerning the place of Moses’ death allows for an uncertainty concerning the precise place of his burial. The unknown location of Moses’ tomb also discourages pilgrimages and other cultic activities which would undermine the idealized notion of centralized worship so highly prized in Deuteronomy (some post-biblical traditions attest to venerative cults of Moses at the site of his grace; see, for example, Berakhah 102). A tomb cult of Moses would likely attracted a particular sort of venerative attention given the tradition presenting the living Moses as the supreme mediator between the divine and human realms—how much more effective, then, would be Moses’ post-mortem mediation.

Finally, the lost tomb tradition might also reflect a concern that the scribal heart of Deuteronomic religion should not be overshadowed by a grave-cult of the figure from whom the archaic authority of Torah is derived. Indeed, citing an important work of Jean-Pierre Sonnet, Joachim Schaper comments:

Deuteronomy also tells us that the location of the grave of Moses is not known. This is in paradoxical contrast with the fact this his ספר is—or will be—known everywhere. Sonnet captures that when he writes: ‘The actual removal of Moses’ burial place from public knowledge (34:6, “and no one knows”) is, analogically, the reverse of the actual publication of his Torah “book” throughout time and space [ . . . ]’. On the one hand, thus, death brings oblivion, but on the other hand, it makes room for a new, permanent life for Moses. (J. Schaper, ‘The Living Word Engraved in Stone: The Interrelationship of the Oral and the Witten and the Culture of Memory in the Books of Deuteronomy and Joshua’, 230)

The memorializing function of the written Torah is an important subject to which the discussion will presently return, for it plays a key role in the imaging of Moses’ land legacy. But that legacy is also shaped by the absence of the biblical Moses—in life and in death—from the land promised to the people Israel. (Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims [Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 473; London: T&T Clark, 2010], 56-59)