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Moses Rode the Chariot and Sang What the Earth Was Waiting to Hear

Midrash Tehillim places Moses inside the divine chariot to sing eleven psalms as prophecy, ending with a vision of exile trembling toward return.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Moses Enters the Chariot
  2. Before the Mountains Existed
  3. The Light Moses Was Born Into
  4. When Will the Face of the Earth Be Renewed

Moses Enters the Chariot

Moses had already seen more than any prophet should have to see. He had watched the sea divide and close. He had stood on Sinai with fire eating the stone. He had seen the golden calf and smashed the tablets. He had pleaded for a people who deserved to be abandoned and been told that his prayer had worked. He had looked into the Promised Land from the mountain where he would die and understood that he would not enter it.

Then Midrash Tehillim places him inside the divine chariot and gives him eleven psalms to sing.

This is Psalm 90's context in the rabbinic imagination. The superscription says it is a prayer of Moses, the man of God. The midrash hears "man of God" as a title, not a description. Moses is placed inside the merkavah, the divine chariot, and there he recites eleven psalms as prophecy, which means these are not poems about what has already happened. They are poems about what has not happened yet.

Before the Mountains Existed

The first thing Moses sings from inside the chariot is the most vertiginous claim in his psalms: before the mountains were born, before earth and inhabited world took shape, from everlasting to everlasting, You are God. Human life by comparison is breath. A thousand years in God's sight are like a watch in the night, like yesterday once it has passed.

Moses knew this scale firsthand. He had been alive for one hundred and twenty years when he sang it, which is a long human life by any measure, and he was standing in the chariot of the One who preceded the mountains. His own lifespan was not even a unit of measurement in that context. He was not being nihilistic. He was being accurate.

What follows from the psalm's opening is not despair but a reorientation. If human time is measured differently against divine eternity, then the disasters of human history, exile, destruction, the breaking of what should be permanent, do not have the last word. The chariot is still moving. The Presence is still present. The mountains came into being after the One riding the chariot had already been eternal for what the psalm can only gesture at as "everlasting."

The Light Moses Was Born Into

The midrash connects Moses' psalm to his own birth. When he emerged, the house filled with light. His parents saw the child and saw the light simultaneously, and they understood that something was entering the world that the world was not expecting. The Pharaoh who had ordered every Hebrew boy thrown into the Nile could not have known that the child filling his enemy's house with light would be the one to pull his empire apart at the seams.

That light at the birth and the light of divine eternity in Psalm 90 are, for Midrash Tehillim, the same subject. What Moses was born into was not merely a body or a name or a people's hope. He was born into the light that preceded the mountains, the same light from which the chariot operates, the same light that makes a thousand years a watch in the night. His birth was a delivery of something that had been waiting inside eternity to enter history.

When Will the Face of the Earth Be Renewed

The second teaching the midrash holds alongside Moses' chariot-song asks a question that sounds geological: when will the face of the earth be renewed? The phrasing comes from Psalm 104, where the spirit of God sweeps over the earth and renews it. But in the context of Midrash Tehillim's meditation on Moses and the Temple, the question is not about seasons.

It is about exile and the return from exile. The earth's renewal is the renewal of Jerusalem. The shaking of the earth is not seismic activity. It is the trembling of a world that knows the Temple has fallen and is waiting for what the psalms promise will come next. Moses in the chariot sang eleven psalms as prophecy. The prophecy has not finished arriving. The face of the earth waits.

This is what Midrash Tehillim hears beneath an earthquake: not geological fault lines adjusting, but heaven grieving something lost and the ground registering that grief. The chariot that carried Moses through the eternal spaces is still in motion. The psalms he sang there are still pointing forward. The face of the earth will be renewed when the Temple returns to its mountain, and the shaking is the earth's way of saying: not yet, but soon.

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From the tradition

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The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Midrash Tehillim 90:2Midrash Tehillim

A prayer attributed to Moshe, the man of God. It’s a powerful opening, immediately grounding us in the foundational narrative of the Jewish people: "Before the mountains were born, and You gave birth to the earth and the inhabited world, from eternity to eternity You are God." (Tehillim 90).

The Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) then embarks on a series of intriguing juxtapositions. We see verses from Psalms paired with blessings or associations related to specific tribes. "Let Reuven live and not die" (Devarim 33:6) is connected to "He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide in the shadow of the Almighty" (Tehillim 91:1). Then, this is contrasted with the tribe of Levi, who symbolically "sat in the shade of the Temple courtyards" (Tehillim 68:5).

Similarly, "A song, a psalm for the Sabbath day. It is good to give thanks to the Lord" (Tehillim 92:1) is linked to the tribe of Yehuda and the verse, "This time I will praise the Lord" (Bereishit 29:35). And so it goes, with the tribes of Binyamin, Gad, and Yissachar each finding their place within the tradition of Psalms. It's as if the Midrash is showing us how deeply interwoven the spiritual and tribal identities are.

Then, the passage takes a sharp turn. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi declares, "Up until this point, I have related to you what I have heard. From here on out, you must rely on your own understanding." It's a striking moment of intellectual honesty, acknowledging the limits of transmitted knowledge. Are we, the listeners, now challenged to interpret the text ourselves?

This sets the stage for a deeper exploration of prophecy. Rabbi Elazar, citing Rabbi Yosei ben Zimra, makes a bold claim: that all the prophets, with the possible exceptions of Moshe and Yeshayah, didn't fully understand their own prophecies. Moshe said, "My teaching shall drop like the rain" (Devarim 32:2), and Yeshayah said, "Here am I and the children whom the Lord has given me" (Yeshayah 8:18). This is a radical idea! It challenges our assumptions about divine communication. Did the prophets act as mere conduits, vessels for a message they themselves couldn’t fully decode?

The discussion continues, with Rabbi Yehoshua the priest suggesting even Eliyahu might not have grasped the full meaning of his words. And Rabbi Elazar even extends this to Shmuel, considered a major figure in the prophetic tradition. The text quotes Shmuel I 12:11, "The Lord sent Yerubaal and Bedan and Yiftach." He was mentioned by name, but he did not know what he was prophesying.

The passage concludes with Rabbi Levi, quoting Rabbi Chanina, speaking about the eleven psalms that Moshe recited in the Divine chariot. These psalms, Rabbi Levi explains, were prophetic in nature. So why weren't they written in the Torah? Because "These are the words of the Torah, and these are the words of prophecy, and we do not make a distinction between the words of the Torah and the words of prophecy." Torah and prophecy are intertwined, inseparable aspects of divine communication.

What are we to make of all this? Perhaps the point isn't about diminishing the role of the prophets. Instead, it might be highlighting the many-sided nature of divine communication and, ultimately, the ongoing responsibility of interpretation. The prophets spoke, but it's up to each generation to wrestle with their words, to find meaning and relevance in their own time. The Midrash invites us to engage actively with the text, to bring our own understanding to bear, and to recognize that the search for meaning is a continuous journey.

Full source
Midrash Tehillim 104:20Midrash Tehillim

Midrash Tehillim, a collection of homiletic interpretations of the Book of Psalms, suggests it's tied to a future time when "the face of the earth is renewed," a time when God's glory will endure forever. Sounds amazing. But what's keeping us from that glorious future now?

Rabbi Berachia, quoting Rabbi Levi, offers a pretty blunt assessment: "The Holy One, blessed be He, said, 'I have not found joy in My world, but the gentiles find joy.'" It's a sobering thought, echoing Psalm 83, a lament about enemies rejoicing while God's people suffer. Ouch.

Speaking of things feeling a little shaky.. what about earthquakes? They seem like random acts of nature, but Jewish tradition often looks for deeper meaning. Elijah, the prophet – may his memory be a blessing – puts this very question to Rabbi Nehorai. Rabbi Nehorai initially suggests that earthquakes are caused by the failure to give tithes properly. Elijah, though, pushes back. “It appears that way to you, but it’s not so."

Elijah proposes a much more profound reason: "When God sees that the gentiles sit in ease while the Temple is destroyed, He looks at His world and seeks to destroy it." Whoa. It's a visceral image of divine frustration. The destruction of the Temple, the center of Jewish life, is such a profound loss that it literally shakes the earth. "Be the one who looks at the earth and it trembles," the verse concludes, a reminder of the weight of that loss.

But the Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) doesn't stop there. Rabbi Acha offers another perspective, connecting earthquakes to "the sin of forbidden sexual relations." He imagines God saying, "You have made your organs tremble in a place where it is not appropriate for you; I too am disgusted with the world because of you." It's a powerful metaphor, linking personal transgression to cosmic instability. Actions have consequences, not just for us individually, but for the entire world.

Finally, Rabbi Samuel bar Nachman links "trembling" to the downfall of kingdoms. "Everywhere that it says 'trembling' it means the cessation of the kingdom," he says. And where do we see this connection most clearly? "The earth quaked and trembled, for the plans of the Lord were fulfilled against Babylon." Here, the earthquake isn't just a random event; it's an act of divine justice, a sign that even the mightiest empires are subject to God's will.

So, what does it all mean? This passage from Midrash Tehillim isn't just about literal earthquakes. It's about the tremors that run through our world when things are out of balance – when joy is misplaced, when holiness is violated, when justice is denied. It's a call to examine our own actions and to consider how they contribute to the stability, or instability, of the world around us. Are we causing the earth to tremble? Or are we helping to build a world worthy of renewal, a world where God's glory can truly shine?

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