Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai examined the verse in which God tells Moses he will not cross the Jordan, and he declared: this verse is not needed. The Torah already states the same thing elsewhere, in (Deuteronomy 4:22), where Moses himself says: "For I shall die in this land. I shall not cross the Jordan."
But Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai pressed further with a piercing question. If Moses already knows he will die in the wilderness, why does he need to be told separately that he will not cross the Jordan? Is it possible for a dead man to cross a river? Obviously not. So what additional information does the seemingly redundant prohibition convey?
The answer is devastating. The verse was not simply telling Moses that he would die before reaching the Promised Land. It was telling him something worse: even his bones would not cross the Jordan. Unlike Joseph, whose remains were carried out of Egypt and eventually buried in the Land of Israel, Moses would receive no such honor. His body would remain on the eastern side of the Jordan forever.
This teaching transforms what looks like a simple redundancy into one of the most painful details of Moses's story. Death alone was not the full punishment. The complete exclusion — body and soul, living and dead — from the Promised Land was the decree. Moses, who led the people for forty years through the wilderness toward that land, would not set foot in it by any means, in any form, for all of eternity.