Commentaria in Deuteronomium
MOSES THE SERVANT OF THE LORD.—This is the eulogy and as it were sepulchral title of Moses, which embraces all the rest. “Servant” therefore is the same as legate, leader, lawgiver, most illustrious prophet “of the Lord.” It is a great dignity to be the servant of the Lord of lords. Hear Ambrose, book On Paradise iv: “Religious servitude, subject to the word of God, is much better than the liberty of the world.” Hear Philo, book On the Cherubim: “To serve God is the greatest glory, not only greater than liberty, but more precious also than riches, and than rule, and than all things which we mortals admire.” Hence St. Paul glories that he is the servant of Christ. Hence St. Agatha to the tyrant: “Much more precious,” she says, “is Christian humility and servitude than the wealth and pride of kings,” namely, “to serve God is to reign.” And as St. Ambrose says: “It is a dignity to be the servant of the powerful.” Let us say therefore with Cassiodorus: “To thee, O Lord, it is nobler to serve than to take the kingdoms of the world; deservedly, since from servants we are made sons, from the impious just, from captives set free.” Alexander the Great said to a captain, who was also called Alexander: “Do things worthy of thy name, worthy of Alexander;” and let us do things worthy of so great a name, worthy of a servant of God.
AT THE MOUTH OF THE LORD,—that is, as Vatablus, at the word of the Lord, or by the sentence of the Lord. Our version best renders, by the commandment of the Lord. God had commanded him, chap. xxxii, verse 49, saying: “Go up into this mountain Abarim, etc., and die on the mountain.” There God passed sentence of death on Moses, that he should die on this mountain: here he executes it. God therefore, as he had first given the soul to Moses, so here demands it back from him, and separates it from the body. Whence we read nothing here of the sickness of Moses, nay on the contrary it is said, verse 7, that to the last he was so sound and strong that his eyes were not dim, nor his teeth moved; God therefore took his soul from him. Whence the Septuagint and Chaldee render, Moses died by the word of the Lord: for the word and command of God is efficacious, as if to anyone he say: Die, he forthwith dies by force of his command. Some, followers of new conceits, expound “at the mouth of the Lord,” as if to say “in the kiss of the Lord,” as if to say: As a mother is wont to lay down in the bed her infant sleeping on her bosom with mouth applied to mouth, so God laid Moses, like a sleeping infant, by a kiss and embrace, in the bosom of Abraham as in a little bed; so Viegas on Apocalypse xiv, comment. 2, sect. 3. This is elegant and pious rather than genuine. For “the mouth of the Lord” signifies nothing other than the word and command of the Lord, as the Septuagint, St. Jerome, the Chaldee, Vatablus, Oleaster and all Interpreters expound.
AND HE BURIED HIM IN THE VALLEY.—Moses therefore did not bury himself, as some Rabbis will have it; nor Josue, as St. Ephrem says; but God buried him by the ministry of angels, the devil resisting in vain.
Hence St. Jude in his epistle says: “When Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil, contended about the body of Moses, he durst not bring against him a judgment of railing speech (to rail at him, to revile him); but said: The Lord rebuke thee.”
Where Oecumenius writes: “Michael is said to have offered his ministry in burying Moses; this the devil would not bear, but brought an accusation, that Moses was unworthy of burial, because he had killed the Egyptian, and buried him in the sand: and on this account he did not permit that he should obtain honourable burial; when in this controversy Michael had occasion to curse the devil on account of his impudence, he did not do so, but only brought against him: God rebuke thee, O devil.” Others assign other causes of this altercation, which our Serarius sets out at length on the epistle of Jude.
There existed once a book inscribed: The Assumption of Moses, the ascent, namely, into mount Nebo, in which the colloquies of Moses, now about to die, with God, and his sepulchre, dug by hands of angels in a hidden place, and the dispute also of Michael and the devil, are recounted; from which Origen, book III Periarchon, chap. ii, and Clement, book VI Stromata, think St. Jude took these things, where from the same place he relates that Moses was seen by Josue and by Caleb, when he was taken up in glory among the angels.
But St. Athanasius in the Synopsis of Holy Scripture rejects this Ascension of Moses, together with another writing entitled the Testament of Moses, among the apocrypha.
IN THE VALLEY OF THE LAND OF MOAB, OVER AGAINST PHOGOR.—Hence and from verse 1 it is plain that Moses died on mount Nebo, but thence his body was carried by angels, and buried in the valley of Moab, that is, which borders on Moab, but is in the very lot of the tribe of Gad, or rather Ruben.
OVER AGAINST PHOGOR.—Serarius, on the epistle of St. Jude, not improbably thinks that the cause of the devil’s altercation with Michael was among others that the devil was worshipped in Phogor, and therefore did not bear that the body of so holy a man as Moses was should be laid near him, and feared lest by him he should either be driven from the place or compelled to be silent.
The moral cause was that in this valley, Phogor, or Priapus, the Hebrews had worshipped, fornicating with the Moabite girls, Numbers xxv, 1; that God therefore might make a fitting medicine for this wound, he willed Moses to be buried there, that by the memory of death, and the presence of a sepulchre, they might be called away from the allurements and pleasures of the flesh. For nothing so lulls and extinguishes them as the sight or consideration of death and a corpse. So that holy man in the Lives of the Fathers, tempted by love of a girl, occupying himself with beholding and smelling her corpse, now dead, and its worms, plainly mortified this temptation. For the same cause we read that others dwelt in sepulchres.
AND NO MAN HATH KNOWN OF HIS SEPULCHRE.—Why? I answer first, because in honour of so great a man it was fitting that he should be buried not by men, but by angels, in a place unknown to men. So Epiphanius, Heresy 9, Oecumenius on the epistle of Jude, Abulensis here, Question III, and Philo, who says that Moses was buried in a sepulchre so wonderful that no man was ever worthy to behold it. Secondly, lest the Hebrews should worship his body, as of their leader and lawgiver, as a god or something divine. So Theodoret, Procopius here, and Chrysostom, homily 4 on Matthew. Especially because it is very credible that the body of Moses, though dead, still preserved the splendour and beauty of countenance which it had before, as happened to many of the Saints, says Bellarmine, book III On the Relics of the Saints, chap. iv. And that this was the chief cause of the altercation of Michael with the devil, namely that the devil wished the body and sepulchre of Moses to lie open and be known to the Jews, but Michael would not, lest it should be to them an occasion of idolatry, both ancient and recent Interpreters of the epistle of St. Jude commonly teach. For the Jews were then prone to idolatry: whence the danger of it then was great, such as is not among Christians when they venerate the relics of the Saints: therefore heretics wrongly twist this against them. Add that God here honoured the relics of Moses, in that He hid them from men, and willed them to be handled and buried decently only by angels; and so by His example taught us how we ought to venerate the Saints and their relics.
So also St. Antony, about to die, charged his disciples: “Let no one,” he said, “carry my relics into Egypt, lest the body be kept with vain honour, lest rites condemned by me, as you know, be kept around me; for on account of this chiefly I have come back hither, that no one besides you may know the place of my tomb. I trust in the Lord that at the time of the resurrection this little body will of necessity rise incorrupt.” The disciples therefore, as he had commanded, wrapped the body and covered it with earth: and no one meanwhile to this day, except them, knows where it is laid, says St. Athanasius.
It is likely, as Josephus teaches, namely that Moses, accompanied by Josue, Eleazar and other chief men, ascended Nebo; and there before them, as Cajetan says, or some of them, departed this life; then that his body, the same looking on, was carried by angels through the air and translated into the valley of Moab, and there buried, although the determinate place of the valley in which he was buried Josue and these onlookers could not discern and note, as is here said: thus far Cajetan. Moses was 120 years old when he died: Moses therefore died in the year of the world 2493, from the deluge 836, before Christ 1456. This rapture of Moses Romulus wished to imitate, or certainly the Romans feigned something like it to him; for he, either slain by the senators or snatched away, did not appear. Hence the patrician Julius Proculus feigned that Romulus appeared to him, and being asked what had happened to him, answered: “To the gods, O Julius, from whom I came, it so seemed good, that I should be for a time with men, and found a city whose empire and glory should be greatest, and then again dwell in heaven: farewell, and tell the Romans that if they cultivate temperance and fortitude, they will surpass all mortals in power. And I, a God, will be propitious to you as Quirinus,” as Plutarch relates in Romulus. So also Apollonius of Tyana, the magician and impostor of the world, sending away his disciple Damis to the Emperor Nerva, lest he should be witness of his last end, met a hidden death in the year of Christ 99, that he might be believed to have been translated immortal to heaven: witness Philostratus in his Life. These were as it were apes of Moses, as the devil is the ape of God.