Moses: A God like Jesus?
- samshmn
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
In Exodus, God tells Moses that he would make him as God to both Aaron and Pharoah, with Aaron functioning as his mouthpiece/spokesperson and prophet:
“Aaron will speak to the people for you. He will be your spokesman, and you will be like Elohim.” Exodus 4:16 Names of God Bible (NOG)
“Yahweh answered Moses, ‘I have made you a god (elohim) to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron is your prophet.’” Exodus 7:1 NOG
In an early Jewish pseudepigraphal work, Moses sees a dream where God vacates his throne in order to allow Moses to sit on it:
Moses
|69| which was up to the folds of heaven,
|71| who possessed a crown and a great scepter in his hand,
|72| specifically his left. And with his right, to me
|73| he beckoned. And I stood before his throne;49
|74| and he handed over the scepter to me, and upon the great throne
|75| he said to sit. And he gave to me the royal
|76| crown and he departed from the throne.
|77| And I saw the entire round world
|78| and beneath the earth and above the heavens,
|79| and before me, a plethora of stars toward my knees
|80| fell, and I numbered them all.
|81| And they were led (before me) akin to a battalion of men.
|82| Then, I awoke from my slumber and was afraid.
[Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 9.28.6]
Raguel (Jethro)
|83| Oh stranger, God (has given) you this good sign.
|84| And may I be alive, whenever these things come to pass.50
|85| Certainly you will ascend to a great throne
|86| and you yourself will become a judge and become a leader of men.
|87| And your vision of the whole earth and those who inhabit it,
|88| both the world below and above God’s heaven;
|89| you will see the things that are, that were, and those that will be.51
As the readers can see, the text does not deify Moses since the explanation of the dream shows that no deification is taking place. As the interpretation provided by Moses’ father-in-law shows, the dream predicts that God will appoint Moses to become the judge and leader of Israel.
We know from the Bible that Israel is often likened to the stars of heaven. We also know that God permits or even authorizes that obeisance or reverence be given to those whom YHWH has appointed to some particular role or task:
“Then behold, the word of Yahweh came to him, saying, ‘This one will not be your heir; but one who will come forth from your own body, he shall be your heir.’ And He brought him outside and said, ‘Now look toward the heavens, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.’ And He said to him, ‘So shall your seed be.’ Then he believed in Yahweh; and He counted it to him as righteousness.” Genesis 15:4-6
“Then the angel of Yahweh called to Abraham a second time from heaven, and said, ‘By Myself I have sworn, declares Yahweh, because you have done this thing and have not spared your son, your only one, indeed I will greatly bless you, and I will greatly multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens and as the sand which is on the seashore; and your seed shall possess the gate of his enemies. In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have listened to My voice.’” Genesis 22:15-18
“And I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and I will give your seed all these lands; and by your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed;” Genesis 26:4
“Then his father Isaac said to him, ‘Please come near and kiss me, my son.’ So he came near and kissed him; and he smelled the smell of his garments, and then he blessed him and said, ‘See, the smell of my son Is like the smell of a field which Yahweh has blessed; Now may God give you of the dew of heaven, And of the fatness of the earth, And an abundance of grain and new wine; May peoples serve you, And nations bow down to you; Be master of your brothers, And may your mother’s sons bow down to you. Cursed be those who curse you, And blessed be those who bless you.’” Genesis 27:26-29
“Then Joseph had a dream, and he told it to his brothers; so they hated him even more. And he said to them, ‘Please listen to this dream which I have had: Indeed, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf rose up and also stood upright; and behold, your sheaves gathered around and bowed down to my sheaf.’ Then his brothers said to him, ‘Are you really going to reign over us? Or are you really going to rule over us?’ So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words. Then he had still another dream and recounted it to his brothers and said, ‘Behold, I have had still another dream; and behold, the sun and the moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.’ And he recounted it to his father and to his brothers; and his father rebuked him and said to him, ‘What is this dream that you have had? Shall I and your mother and your brothers really come to bow ourselves down before you to the ground?’ And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the saying in mind.” Genesis 37:5-11
“Judah, as for you, your brothers shall praise you; Your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies; Your father’s sons shall bow down to you. Judah is a lion’s whelp; From the prey, my son, you have gone up. He crouches, he lies down as a lion, And as a lioness, who dares rouse him up? The scepter shall not depart from Judah, Nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, Until Shiloh comes, And to him shall be the obedience of the peoples. He ties his foal to the vine, And his donkey’s colt to the choice vine; He washes his garments in wine, And his robes in the blood of grapes. His eyes are dark from wine, And his teeth white from milk.” Genesis 49:8-12
“But David did not take up a count of those twenty years of age and under, because Yahweh had said He would multiply Israel as the stars of heaven.” 1 Chronicles 27:23
“Then David said to all the assembly, ‘Now bless Yahweh your God.’ And all the assembly blessed Yahweh, the God of their fathers, and bowed low and prostrated themselves to Yahweh and to the king.” 1 Chronicles 29:20
“You made their sons numerous as the stars of heaven, And You brought them into the land Which You had said for their fathers to enter and possess.” Nehemiah 9:23
“Of Solomon. O God, give the king Your judgments, And Your righteousness to the king’s son… May he also have dominion from sea to sea And from the River to the ends of the earth. Let the desert creatures kneel before him, And his enemies lick the dust. Let the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands bring a present; The kings of Sheba and Seba offer tribute. And let all kings bow down to him, All nations serve him.” Psalm 72:1, 8-11
With the foregoing in perspective, it is clear that the stars that Moses saw before his knees are the Israelites, whom he was sent to lead and rule over:
“This Moses whom they disowned, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge?’ is the one whom God sent to be both a ruler and a deliverer with the help of the angel who appeared to him in the bush. This man led them out, doing wonders and signs in the land of Egypt and in the Red Sea and in the wilderness for forty years. This is the Moses who said to the sons of Israel, ‘God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers.’ This is the one who, in the congregation in the wilderness, was with the angel who was speaking to him on Mount Sinai and with our fathers; the one who received living oracles to pass on to you.” Acts 7:35-38
In both Exodus and the Exagogue Moses is not God or divine in an ontological sense (i.e., in essence and nature), but merely in a functional and representational sense. Since Moses stands in the place of God he therefore speaks for God and is invested with God’s authority. In other words, Moses is God functionally, not ontologically.
Therefore, the Exagogue provides no support for Moses becoming a divine being, or for his actually ruling on God’s heavenly throne since the literal interpretation would have God relinquishing his rule for Moses to do so!
As the following Evangelical scholars put it:
In The Exagoge [i.e., Exodus] of Ezekiel, thought to have been written in the second century BC, Moses dreams about a throne on Mount Sinai that reaches up into the sky. Sitting on the throne is “a noble man,” evidently representing God (as in Ezek. 1:26–28). The figure steps aside and has Moses sit on the throne in his place. Moses looks all around at the earth, sees “a host of stars” that kneeled before him, and then wakes up from his dream. His father-in-law Jethro tells him that the dream means that Moses “will raise up a great throne” from which he will “judge and lead humankind,” with the ability to “see things present, past, and future.”84
P. W. van der Horst and David Aune both assert that the dream “implies a deification of Moses,” and they are hardly alone.85 However, as Hengel points out, such an interpretation implies that God abdicates his throne, which of course is unlikely to have been the meaning of the story.86 Jethro’s interpretation, in fact, suggests that Moses does not sit on God’s throne, since he “raises up” a throne. The kneeling of the stars before Moses probably symbolizes the submission of the countless descendants of Israel to the law of Moses, since the imagery of stars frequently refers in Genesis to the seed of Israel (Gen. 15:5; 22:17; 26:4; and especially 37:9; cf. 1 Chron. 27:23; Neh. 9:23; see also Gen. 27:29).87 Moses’ ability to see things present, past, and future most likely refers to the fact that as the author of the Pentateuch (according to the traditional view), Moses was able to produce narratives of Israel’s prehistory from creation through the patriarchs (Genesis) and to prophesy the future history of Israel (the focus of most of Deuteronomy 28–33). Bauckham rightly says that Jethro’s interpretation “clearly refers to the common Jewish understanding of Moses as an inspired prophet, who wrote in the Torah not only of things present but also of the past and of the future.”88 Thus, we disagree that the text implies that Moses himself possessed omniscience.89
All in all, we see little basis for the claim that the work teaches a deification of Moses. “Moses may have been revered as an extraordinary human being, but his alleged divinity has no devotional consequences in any extant writing.”90 There was no Jewish tradition of worshiping Moses. Nor, of course, was Moses credited with the array of divine works (creation, providence, etc.) that are basic to the identity of God. Rather, the text gives a visionary, symbolic picture of the significance of Moses’ ministry in leading Israel out of Egypt and giving them the law. As Darrell Bock puts it, “What Moses is pictured as becoming in heaven is what Moses is to be in his ministry on earth, namely, God’s vice regent.”91
Richard Bauckham, noting that in the vision Moses sits on God’s throne in his place (not with him), concludes, “Thus the dream depicts Moses quite literally as God, but the meaning of the dream is not its literal meaning.”92 Thus, in his dream Moses has God’s attribute of omniscience, receives God’s honor of worship, and occupies God’s seat on the divine throne, but when he wakes up, Moses is still just another human servant of God.
84. As quoted in Eskola, Messiah and the Throne, 87–88. There is some dispute about the word translated “raise up” (exanistēmi), which some interpreters think could mean “remove” or “overthrow.”
85. Pieter W. van der Horst, “Moses’ Throne Vision in Ezekiel the Dramatist,” JJS 34 (1983): 25, reprinted in Pieter W. van der Horst, Essays of the Jewish World of Early Christianity, NTOA 14 (Fribourg: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 67; David Aune, Revelation 1–5, 262; likewise Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 164–65; and others.
86. Hengel, Studies in Early Christology, 191.
87. See also 1 Enoch 43:1–4, where stars are part of a parabolic vision representing the holy ones who live on the earth and believe in the Lord of Spirits.
88. Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 167 (citing Jub. 1:4).
89. Contra, e.g., Eskola, Messiah and the Throne, 88.
90. Eskola, Messiah and the Throne, 366; cf. 90.
91. Bock, Blasphemy and Exaltation in Judaism, 144; see his discussion on 141–44.
92. Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 168. (Robert M. Bowman Jr. & J. Ed Komoszewski, The Incarnate Christ and His Critics: A Biblical Defense [Kregel Academic, Grand Rapids, MI, 2024], Part 5: The Lamb upon His Throne: Jesus’ Divine Seat, Chapter 37: The Coming of the Son of Man, pp. 724-725; emphasis mine)
In the next installment, I will show that this is unlike the New Testament depiction of Jesus, since Christ is not presented as God merely in a representational and functional sense. Rather, the NT writers portray Jesus as being fully God in essence and who literally sits enthroned in heaven with God the Father.
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