How Moses Went From Hiding His Face to Seeing God

The first thing Moses did when God spoke to him at the burning bush was hide his face (Exodus 3:6). Not bow, not prostrate himself, not respond. He hid his face, as if he could make himself invisible.

Then he told God he couldn’t speak well. Then he asked God to send someone else. Seven days, according to the Midrash Tanchuma, compiled in the fifth century CE: seven days of divine persuasion, seven days of Moses finding new reasons why he was the wrong person for this mission.

The Tanchuma opens its reading of this episode with a verse from Job: “Though thy beginning was small, yet thy end shall greatly increase” (Job 8:7). The contrast is the whole point. The man who hid his face became the man of whom it is written: “The likeness of the Lord doth he behold” (Numbers 12:8). From hiding to beholding. From refusal to a face-to-face encounter that no other prophet in Israel would ever achieve.

How does a person travel that distance?

Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai, cited in the Tanchuma, holds one position: Moses’ reward for hiding his face was receiving the vision. He hid in reverence — not from cowardice but from the same yirah, awe-filled reverence, that Philo identifies as the foundation of righteousness. You do not look upon what you cannot yet bear to see. Moses understood this instinctively, before he understood anything else about the God who was addressing him from a fire that did not consume.

Rabbi Samuel bar Nahman read it differently. The verse from Job, he says, applies to Abraham as well. Abraham was one hundred years old and had no son. His beginning was as small as a beginning can be: past the age of fathering children, with nothing to show for a lifetime of obedience except a wandering and a promise. But his end was Abraham: father of nations, the man to whom God said “go out and look at the stars” (Genesis 15:5) and showed him that his descendants would outnumber them. The rabbis read this as God literally lifting Abraham above the arc of the sky — placing him above the stars so he could look down at his own constellation and understand that he was no longer subject to its predictions. Destiny is not fixed for the one who walks with God.

The Tanchuma weaves these two figures together because they share a structure. Moses is small at the beginning: a man with a speech impediment, a fugitive from Pharaoh’s court, a shepherd in Midian who has been out of circulation for decades. Abraham is small at the beginning: a hundred-year-old man with no heir. Both of them receive missions they resist. Both of them carry out those missions to a greatness that dwarfs their starting point.

The Midrash Tanchuma is not interested in the mechanics of how Moses grew into his role. It is interested in the principle. There is a pattern in Israel’s history where the most significant figures begin not in confidence but in smallness. The hiding of the face is not a flaw to be overcome. It is the appropriate starting position for anyone about to receive something too large for their current self to hold.

You have to be small enough to grow into the assignment.

Moses hid his face at the burning bush. The Tanchuma reads this as preparation, not failure. The man who would stand at the top of Sinai, speaking with God as a man speaks with a friend (Exodus 33:11), needed to know in his body what it felt like to be too small for what was coming. Otherwise he could not have carried it.

His beginning was small. His end was the only vision of God that any prophet of Israel would ever be permitted to see.