Moses Argued He Sinned Less Than Adam and Still Had to Die

Moses was standing at the edge of the land he would never enter, and he was not accepting it.

He had one last argument left. It was not a prayer. It was a legal brief. And according to Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, the seven-volume synthesis of rabbinic lore he published between 1909 and 1938, Moses opened his case with the oldest defendant in the Torah.

"Lord of the world," Moses said, "to the first man You gave a single command that could easily have been obeyed. He disobeyed, and so he merited death. But I have not transgressed a single one of Your commandments." In other words: Adam ate the fruit. I did not. Why is the sentence the same?

God's first response was quiet. "Behold, Abraham also, who sanctified My name in the world, died." Moses did not accept it. He pushed back. From Abraham came Ishmael, he said, whose descendants would one day make God angry. God answered with Isaac, who had offered himself on the altar at Moriah. Moses countered with Esau, who would destroy the Temple. God cited Jacob, father of the twelve tribes. Moses shot back that Jacob never ascended into heaven, never walked on clouds, never received Torah from the hand of God. It was not pride. It was the closing argument of a lawyer who had run out of other moves. "Only I did those things," Moses was saying. "So only I deserve to be spared." It was the kind of argument that only a man who had spoken with God face to face could even attempt.

The whole debate was framed around one silent assumption, which was that death was Adam's fault. This assumption is everywhere in Jewish tradition, but Midrash Tehillim, the medieval collection of rabbinic interpretations on Psalms edited sometime before the twelfth century, complicates it in a way that should have given Moses pause. In its comment on Psalm 92, the Midrash stages a pair of courtroom scenes. God asks Moses why he cannot enter the Land. Moses says, "I caused it myself." God asks Adam why he dies. Adam says, "I caused it myself." Neither blames the verdict on heaven. The Midrash compares it to a doctor who warns a sick patient not to eat a certain food. If the patient eats it anyway and dies, the doctor did not kill him.

Moses knew this. He had preached it his whole life. And yet, at the very end, he tried the Adam defense anyway, hoping that the comparison between his own careful obedience and Adam's single lapse would buy him a few more years.

The rabbis had already thought about this matchup, and they had come to a counterintuitive conclusion: Moses and Adam were not opposites. They were the same archetype, separated by a sin.

In Ginzberg's reading of the Zohar, the foundational kabbalistic text first circulated in Castile around 1290 by Moses de Leon, God once said to the generation of the wilderness: "I had hoped you would live forever, like the angels. But you conducted yourselves like Adam. And hence, like Adam, you must die." The comparison cuts both ways. The Israelites at Sinai had stood exactly where Adam had stood in Eden. They had a chance to reset the human story. They had the Torah in their hands. Instead, they acted like Adam all over again, and Moses, their leader, went down with them.

Vayikra Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, notices something stranger still. The very first verse of Leviticus says, "He called to Moses." The rabbis of Vayikra Rabbah point out that God had called out to Adam too. "The Lord God called to the man" (Genesis 3:9). And to Noah. And to Abraham. So what made the call to Moses different? Their answer, in a line that reads like a parable out of Kafka: "There is no disgrace in a king speaking to his sharecropper." Adam, set in Eden to cultivate and to guard, was God's sharecropper. Noah was God's shepherd. Abraham was God's innkeeper. Moses was the only one God spoke to directly, without intermediary, without the formality of messenger or angel. The line of divine speech ran from Adam's ear to Moses's, and no one else heard it that clearly.

So when Moses made his argument at the end of his life, he was speaking in a very old conversation. He was Adam, on the other side of the Tree. He was asking: if I was the one who finally got it right, why does the sentence still fall on me?

Yalkut Shimoni, the thirteenth-century anthology compiled by Rabbi Shimon Ha-Darshan of Frankfurt, offers a haunting answer in the form of a single object. The staff in Moses's hand was not his. It had been carved on the sixth day of creation, at twilight, and passed from Adam to Enoch, from Enoch to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, then to Isaac, to Jacob, to Joseph, and finally to Moses in the house of his father-in-law. The same piece of wood that had been in Eden was now in the wilderness. It would later pass to David, and David would use it on Goliath. Every generation since Adam had been carrying Adam's stick.

Which meant Moses, on his final mountain, was holding the one artifact in human history that connected the death of Adam to the death of Moses in an unbroken chain. He had wanted to argue he was nothing like Adam. The staff in his hand said otherwise.

In the end God refused him gently. There had not been, and there would not be, a prophet in Israel like Moses. The Midrash has God promise him the world to come. Moses stopped arguing. He climbed Nebo. He looked at the land. And Adam's descendant, holding Adam's staff, finally accepted Adam's sentence.