Jacob Chanikuzhy

Fyodor Dostoevsky writes, “Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.” It is very true when we look at the major prophets of Israel. All of them suffered a brutal death at the hands of their opponents. Prophet Isaiah was said to have been hiding in the trunk of a tree when the soldiers of King Manasseh of Judah found him. He was then sawed with a wooden saw into two along with the tree in which he was hiding. Prophet Jeremiah escaped several attempts at his life and finally he was stoned to death by his own people. Likewise, Prophet Ezekiel was reportedly killed by the leader of the exiles from Israel. However, the greatest prophet in the Jewish tradition was none of them. Neither the miracle working Elijah and Elisha nor the social critic like Amos nor even the first prophet Patriarch Abraham nor the first prophetess Sarah was accorded this highest honour. It was in the meek Moses that Judaism recognized its greatest prophet. It was neither because he performed wonderful miracles nor because he led Israel to military victories, but because of his unique relationship to Yahweh that he was considered as “the Prophet.”

Moses’ unique relationship to God is attested in the Bible in the statements like, “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face” (Exodus 33:11). God himself affirms his special relationship to Moses in another text in Numbers (Numbers 12:6-8). It seems that Moses alone had the singular privilege of speaking to God face to face. Bu the idea that Moses saw the face of God flies in the face of the Jewish conviction that no one can see God’s face and live (Ex 33:20). They believed that once you see the face of God, you will die. Only the dead can comfortably look at the face of God! Then how is it that Moses supposedly saw the face of God and lived?

The literal understanding that Moses could talk to God looking at His face is not unchallenged in the Bible itself. In the same chapter where Moses is said to have been speaking to God face to face, another story of Moses’ encounter with God is recorded (Ex 33:17-23). In this story Moses pleads with God for a glimpse of God’s glory. God agrees and places Moses in the cleft of a rock and God passes by Moses. When God passes by he covers Moses’ face with his hand so that Moses cannot see the face of God. What Moses saw was only the back of God. How come the Moses who regularly conversed with God face to face was now not allowed to see His face!? The answer, perhaps, is that we should not understand the phrase “face to face” literally. The phrase points to Moses’ unparalleled relationship to God, his intense divine experiences, his deepest experience of the divine presence. He was so fully engulfed by the sense of the divine as if he was seeing God face to face.

The idea that Moses was not allowed to see the face of God is also very remarkable. Face is one’s unique feature. We recognize people by seeing their face. Face stands for one’s unique identity. That God hid His face from Moses means that no one can fully understand the unique identity of God; it is not possible for human beings to understand God as he really is. Even Moses who had such an intimate relationship to God could see only the back of God. This incident highlights the truth that however holy we are, our knowledge of God is still limited; we see only some aspects of God, not His full nature. It is true that in Jesus we have the fullness of revelation about God. It does not mean that we know God entirely as he is; it means only that in Jesus we come to the maximum knowledge of God that is possible for us, the finite human beings. God still remains a mystery and that should make us as meek as Moses. The more we grow in the knowledge of God, the more meek we become.