Some scholars take this command at face value; God
forbids Moses to intervene because he is determined to destroy the people and
fulfill his still extant oath to the patriarchs through Moses’ seed alone.
However, if the point of the narrative were to demonstrate God’s intent to destroy
his people regardless of Moses’ behavior, Moses’ intervention would be
irrelevant, not forbidden. Thus, Samuel Balentine suggests that “Yahweh’s
command to be left alone paradoxically contains an invitation to intercede for
the sinful people.” (Widmer, Moses and the Dynamics of Intercessory Prayer,
95) God’s request is an “invitation by prohibition” that implicitly presents
Moses “with the option to stay and persuade Yahweh to avert his anger or leave
and allow Yahweh to destroy Israel in his anger.” (Samuel Balentine, Prayer
in the Hebrew Bible: The Problem of Divine-Human Dialogue [Overtures to
Biblical Theology; Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993], 136) Importantly, the
opportunity for Moses to intercede would exist only if God’s punishment could
be tempered.
The fact that God’s threat derives from his anger may
be a signal that he might refrain from destroying his people. Moses persuades God
to relent first, by contending that God does not want to destroy Israel in His
anger (32:11-12a) and the, by arguing that God must not destroy Israel
in his anger because he permanently bound himself to the people of Israel with
his oath to their patriarchs. Reminder of this oath immediately turns away divine
anger which suggests that the covenant is what stops God from destroying the
people in his anger (32:12b-14): . . . (Deena E. Grant, Divine Anger in the
Hebrew Bible [The Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 52; Eugene,
Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2014], 164)