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)
