Canter Bridge

When Moses ‘undertook to expound’ the Law that the Pentateuchal narrative places into his hands by means of a private encounter with YHWH on Mount Horeb/Sinai, his first words provoke a movement towards risk-laden opportunity:

The LORD our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mountain.’

The destination is clear, promising, and potentially lethal:

Resume your journey, and go into the hill country of the Amorites as well as into the neighboring regions—the Arabah, the hill country, the Shephelah, the Negeb, and the seacoast—the land of the Canaanites and the Lebanon, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates. See, I have set the land before you; go in and take possession of the land that I swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their descendants after them.

The context for this collective recalling of the people’s history is both important and dramatic. Israel stands on ‘the plains of Moab’, on the cusp of entering into the land that YHWH had promised to them. Moses, the Lawgiver, now takes leave of his people. His role in the Israelites’ cowardice forty years earlier is now given without explication as the reason that YHWH will not allow Moses’ footsteps to fall on the land of promise. His last act of leadership over the tribes of the sons of Israel is to deliver a series of valedictory speeches that come into our hands as the book of Deuteronomy.

Moses’ retrospective fills in the colors of four decades of liberation turned to survival turned afresh to potentiality. Israel’s plight was not to be met, the people’s history not to be forged, by sitting tight before Horeb while their leader practiced shuttle diplomacy as the interlocutor between YHWH and his people-in-the-making. Rather, ‘you have stayed long enough before Horeb.’ It was the moment for these refugees from Egypt to set out in the direction of their promised but still somewhat incredible future.

Often Israel’s vocation would only be realized as she stepped into risk-filled obedience to a directive from YHWH that had every appearance of arbitrariness and nonsense. With good reason some of the prophets would look back on this time of national infancy and adolescence as a time of pure trust. Their idyllic descriptions of the nation’s early days are selective, but they do not fail to capture a kind of simplicity of which the complexities of settlement and its constant compromises know very little.

Get up and go. This rough exhortation, complemented by the promise that YHWH would go with them and that therefore there is really nothing to fear, lies close to the roots of biblical faith.

It might have been a reasonable decision to remain settled in Horeb’s shadow, negotiating the good-bad proximity of YHWH on his mountain. But they had stayed enough days there. It was time to shuffle towards risk and promise.