Canter Bridge

It is not obvious in most of the biblical layers whether having God close is a good thing.

Indeed, such proximity can be crazy-making, sickening, even lethal. Biblical language calls this ‘curse’ and opposes it to ‘blessing’. Things can go just as wrong when God is near as when he is absent, a critical factor usually lost to popular religion. Better to imagine there is no god at all than to have him close and in a bad mood.

‘Mood’, however, hardly comes close to what the Bible intends to say. Intertwined with other conventions of a therapeutic culture, the word ‘mood’ evokes a narcissist’s passing emotional season, sometimes crowning each one with self-justifying canonicity. Such focus upon the human self is, at least in the book of Exodus, not under consideration, indeed hardly possible to imagine.

Yet divine presence, these pages instruct, does depend upon the state in which YHWH discloses his influential personality amid the company of women and men, to say nothing for the moment of the children and flocks who depend upon them for life in a dry place.

Moses, lawgiver and midwife to a people, is different from that people in this essential: he wishes YHWH to go with them into the desert after the paradigmatic turning of the Sinai experience. The people most emphatically do not, preferring the company of inert, YHWH-representing, golden bullocks to one shrouded in clouds whose wishes for them seem impossible to predict.

Though its profile is low, its outline blurred by the narrative flow of which it is a piece, Exodus 33.15-16 is arguably one of the five or six most critical statements of Hebrew identity in the Bible. Locked in a precariously forceful dialogue with the deity, Moses counters YHWH’s reluctance to accompany Moses’ asinine tribe with this ultimatum:

If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?

YHWH bends to the forceful proposal Moses has tabled on a reluctant people’s behalf. But let us linger over his argument rather than the divine response. Moses asserts that the entire project of liberation is worthless if YHWH is not dangerously present with those who have known release. Further, he marks this divine accompaniment as the element that distinguishes and makes remarkable one people over against all others.

The biblical text offers us the word ‘immanu’—a pregnant Hebrew term meaning ‘with us’ that will resonate in very different ways on into the prophet Isaiah and the problematic identify of Jesus—thus linking Sinai’s Word-Speaker and the Hebrew people irremediably in a common destiny.

Confronted with the penetrating reality of Moses’ observation, YHWH the Omnipotent, the All-knowing, the Mysterious, changes his mind.