Moses Spent His Life Arguing With the Angels

Most people think Moses talked to God and the angels just delivered messages around the edges. Louis Ginzberg, gathering rabbinic legends into his Legends of the Jews between 1909 and 1938, tells a different story. Moses spent his life arguing with angels. Three of those arguments shaped the man.

Michael argues for the marriage

The first fight happened at the burning bush, after the fire. God told Moses to remove his sandals. The rabbis Ginzberg follows in Legends of the Jews 4:197 heard something larger in that command. Removing the sandals meant cutting every cord that bound Moses to the ground. His work. His sleep. His wife.

The angel Michael, who functions in Jewish tradition as Israel's defense attorney before the heavenly court, refused to let that pass without comment. He spoke up to God on Moses's behalf. Lord of the world, he said, blessing only happens when male and female unite. You are asking Moses to separate from Zipporah. Are you trying to end the world?

It is a startling moment. An angel calling God's plan into question. Ginzberg preserves it because the rabbis preserved it. They wanted Michael's protest on the record before they let God answer.

God answered. Moses had already fathered children. He had done what mortals do. Now God wanted him for something else. Moses would unite with the Shechinah (שכינה), the divine presence, so she could descend to earth through him. The price of being the channel was the loss of an ordinary life.

Read the full text on Moses and the Angels of Shekinah. Michael lost the argument. Zipporah lost her husband. Moses became the only mortal the rabbis ever described as the Shechinah's partner.

The Angel of the Face refuses to lie

Forty years later, on the other side of the desert, Moses argued with a different angel about a different separation. This one he could not bear.

He was about to die. He knew it. Ginzberg, drawing on the rabbinic compilation Petirat Moshe and on Legends of the Jews 6:151, tells how Moses went to the Angel of the Face. The title comes from Isaiah 63:9, which speaks of the angel who stands in God's presence and goes out with Israel in their distress. In late rabbinic tradition this becomes one of the highest-ranking angels in the upper court, close enough to overhear what God has just decided.

Moses begged him. Pray for me. Ask God to take pity. Let me live.

The angel told him the truth. He had already overheard the verdict. God had sworn that Moses would not enter the land. The prayer would not be answered. There was nothing left to pray for.

Moses put his hand on his head and wept. Ginzberg keeps the gesture exactly as the rabbis kept it. The greatest prophet Israel ever produced, the man who had argued God down from destroying the people at Sinai, sat in the dust and asked the question every human eventually asks. To whom shall I now go, he said, that he might implore God's mercy for me?

There was no answer. The angels who had argued for him at the bush could not argue for him at the end. Even the Angel of the Face, who stood closer to God than any other being, refused to carry a prayer he already knew was denied.

The Angel of Death gets chained

Moses lost the first fight. He lost the second. The third fight he refused to lose.

In Legends of the Jews 7:27, Ginzberg gathers a cluster of late midrashim, including material from Sifre Devarim and the Yalkut, that describe Moses's last hour. The people came to him on the slope of Mount Nebo and said the words no follower ever wants to say. The hour of your death is at hand.

Moses had one thing left to give them. A blessing. He had spent forty years correcting Israel, warning Israel, dragging Israel back from one rebellion after another. He wanted to leave them with something other than rebuke. He wanted the last sound in their ears to be a prayer for their survival.

The Angel of Death stood between him and that blessing. According to the legend Ginzberg preserves, the Angel of Death had been blocking Moses from blessing Israel for years. Death does not want the dying to leave something behind. Death wants the leaving to be clean.

Moses, who had argued with Michael and lost, who had begged the Angel of the Face and lost, did something no rabbinic text attributes to any other mortal. He chained the Angel of Death and threw him beneath his feet.

What the blessing said

Only then, standing on the bound Angel of Death, did Moses open his mouth. Save Thy people, he said. Bless Thine inheritance. Feed them. Bear them up forever.

The words are quiet for a moment of such cosmic violence. No fireworks. No final revelation. Just a request that the people he had carried for forty years would be carried by someone after he was gone.

The Angel of Death waited beneath his feet. The blessing finished. Moses stepped off, and the angel got up, and the work resumed. Moses died that day on Nebo, alone, by what the rabbis call the kiss of God.

What the three fights mean

The rabbis who built these legends, working in Palestine and Babylonia between the third and tenth centuries, were not telling angel stories for the sake of angels. They were telling a story about prayer. Michael could argue. The Angel of the Face could intercede. The Angel of Death could be chained. But the only fights worth having were the ones fought on behalf of someone else.

Moses lost the argument for his own marriage. He lost the argument for his own life. He won the argument for Israel's blessing, and that was the one he died holding. Ginzberg preserved the pattern because his rabbinic sources preserved the pattern. The greatest prophet was not the one whose prayers were always answered. He was the one who kept praying anyway.