Exodus 30:11-34:35
Not Speaking with God
The episode of the Golden Calf in this week’s reading is hard to justify. God had just finished telling the Israelites in the Ten Commandments not to make any statues or idols for worship, and here they go and do exactly that! Well, people sometimes do the worst things—and, in this case, the Israelites paid dearly for their misdeed (Exod 32:35). But there is a follow-up conversation to this episode that is often missed.
God tells Moses to “depart from here,” that is, from Sinai, along with the Israelites, and go up to the land that He had promised to Israel’s ancestors, adding “I will send an angel in front of you” (Exod 33:2), apparently to guide Moses and the people on their journey and dispose of their enemies. But then God adds that “I will not be going with you, since you are a stiff-necked people, and I might have to destroy you along the way” (Exod 33:3).
This is terrible news—so terrible that Moses, intentionally or otherwise, seems not to have understood:
Moses said to the Lord, “See, You’re telling me to lead this people up [to Canaan], but You haven’t told me who [or what] You’re going to send along with me.” (Exod 33:12)
Actually, God had just said He was going to send an angel, while He would remain at Mount Sinai. But Moses politely persists: “You did say that You know me by name and that I have found favor with You. So now, if I have indeed found favor with You, let me know Your ways, so that I will know how to [continue to] find favor with You.”
God’s answer is often mistranslated: “My Face [apparently the name of a specific angel or divine manifestation] will be going, but I am leaving you here.” (Instead of this, most translations read: “I will lighten your burden,” or “I will give you rest,” but such translations do not fit the words.) What God is really saying is a restatement of what He had said earlier: He will send His angel (“My Face”) but He Himself will remain at Sinai.
To this Moses answers: “If Your Face is not going, don’t make us depart from here. But how can it be shown that I have found favor with You—I and Your people, that is—if not by Your going with us, so that we may be singled out, I and Your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?” Apparently persuaded by this argument, God agrees: “I will do what you have asked,” He tells Moses, “since you have found favor with Me.”
Any reasonable person might happily have left things at that. But Moses presses on. He has a further request: “Show me Your kavod” (this word, sometimes translated as God’s glory, refers to His visible being or presence). Moses’ request to see God’s kavod is intended as a follow-up to God’s agreement to go up to Canaan with the Israelites: “Show me Your kavod” would be a demonstration of God’s sealing the deal.
But God cannot allow Moses to see His kavod, so He responds with a kind of compromise solution: “I can make all My goodness pass in front of you” (as He goes on to do in Exod 34:6-7, reciting His merciful traits to Moses out loud) “and I can proclaim the name ‘the Lord’ in front of you” (as He also does there). Both of these ought to be enough to seal the deal for Moses and make it clear that God will indeed “go in our midst” (Exod 34:9). But then God adds that He will not go any further than that: “I will be gracious and merciful to whomever I wish”—in other words, even you, Moses, cannot find out everything about Me. Fair enough.
But it is at this point that Moses takes advantage of another feature of biblical rhetoric. Normally, when two people are conversing in the Bible, A says this and B answers that. But sometimes, B doesn’t respond. For some reason, B is dissatisfied with what A has just said, but—perhaps because B is A’s inferior—he can’t really argue with A, so he just maintains a stony silence. In those cases, A usually follows up on B’s silence by saying something else.
That’s exactly what happens in this exchange. Moses first says, “Show me Your kavod,” and God explains why this is impossible. Then Moses says absolutely nothing. This leads God to add a further explanation of why it’s impossible: “You cannot see My face; no one can see Me and keep on living.” To this Moses again responds with silence. So powerful is his silence that God at last offers another compromise: “You can’t exactly see My face, but I will hide you behind this rock and cover you with My hand to protect you, and then you can see Me from behind as I pass by.” Which He does. Once again, Moses’ skill at speaking, or in this case not speaking, has gotten him almost everything he wanted.