Why did God Himself attend to the burial of Moses? Because of what Moses had done decades earlier in Egypt, when everyone else was busy loading up silver and gold for the exodus. While the Israelites filled their arms with treasure, Moses spent three days and three nights walking silently through the city, searching for one thing—the coffin of Joseph.
Exhausted and faint, he was found by Serah bat Asher, a woman who had lived since the time of Jacob. She led him to a brook where Pharaoh's magicians had sunk Joseph's coffin—a lead casket weighing five hundred talents—so the Israelites could never leave without it. Moses stood at the water's edge and called out: "Joseph, Joseph, you made Israel swear to carry your bones. Do not prevent their redemption." The coffin rose from the depths, floating as lightly as a reed. Moses lifted it onto his shoulders and carried it the entire way out of Egypt, while everyone else carried their gold.
God told him: "You think this was a small thing. By your life, the mercy you have shown is great." So when Moses' own death came, God repaid him in kind. Moses tried everything to avoid dying—he wrote thirteen Torah scrolls on his last day, one for each tribe and one for the Ark. He tried to outrun the sunset, hoping that if the day never ended, the decree could not take effect. God stopped the sun for him, but the decree held.
In his final moments, according to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle translated by Moses Gaster in 1899, Moses seized the angel of death and forced him to walk ahead as Moses blessed each of the twelve tribes. The angel came for him three times. Twice, Moses drove him off by speaking the Shem HaMeforash (שם המפורש), the Ineffable Name. The third time, Moses accepted the judgment. His soul argued with God, protesting that no body had been purer. God agreed—and carried the soul Himself to rest beneath the divine throne.