Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Deena E. Grant on Exodus 32:10

  

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)