Prophetic Extracts 1.11–1.14

“Behold, I send my angel before your face, to guard you on the way, so as to bring you into the land that I have prepared for you. Pay heed to him and listen to him; do not disobey him, for he will not hold back from you; for my name is upon him.” These things the Lord enjoins on the people along with the other ordinances. If, then, after the death of Moses the same Lord who gave oracles in the wilderness had not been present with the people, but one of the angels had led them, there would be nothing to inquire into in these passages. But it appears from the history that after the death of Moses the same Lord gives oracles to Joshua and says clearly in his oracles to him: “As I was with Moses, so I will be with you, and I will not forsake you nor overlook you. Be strong and be courageous; for you will divide to this people the land that I swore to your fathers to give them.” And throughout the whole Scripture no angel at all is seen standing by Joshua or giving him oracles, but the Lord himself, the one indicated in Moses by the tetragram, who also seems to me to be the same as the one who appeared to Joshua once only in the form of a man. For just as he is recorded to have appeared to Abraham and to Jacob, so now too, to teach his servant not to think him the first and unbegotten God, he declares himself the chief captain of that one's host. If, then, throughout the whole book of Joshua no angel at all is named as present, but the Lord himself who is indicated throughout the whole legislation of Moses (for the Scripture clearly testifies, saying, “And the Lord was with Joshua”), of whom would it be said, “Behold, I send my angel before your face, so as to bring you into the land that I have prepared for you”? It seems, then, that these words indicate no one else but Joshua himself. For he brought the people into the land of promise, as God's words to him show, when he says, “Be strong and be courageous; for you will divide to this people the land that I swore to your fathers concerning it.” So he gives the people their orders beforehand, saying, “Pay heed to him and listen to him; do not disobey him.” And one should not wonder that he named him an angel, since the prophecy also calls John by this title when it says, “Behold, I send my angel before your face, who will prepare my way before you.” If the passages set out above should be referred wholly to Joshua the son of Nun, see how the Lord says of him, “For my name has been called upon him.” And what name is that but “Jesus” itself? For the name Jesus was not the proper name of the man who then appeared: he was formerly called Hoshea. Moses, inspired by God, was the first to call him Jesus, clearly moved by a more divine Spirit, so that the oracle that said “For my name is upon him” might be fulfilled. The name of the Lord who gave the oracles, whom we have often shown to be the pre-existent Word of God, was Jesus, the name that Moses gave to Hoshea, as the divine Scripture testifies, noting with great exactness that it was at no other time than when, in keeping with the oracle, he sent him out as a messenger to survey the land of promise before the face of the people, that he called him by this name. So by these things Moses clearly appears to have known the title of our Saviour Jesus as well; and just as the name Jesus is found first in him in the passages under examination, so too he appears to have been the first to proclaim the name Christ, though before his times, from all ages, no one had ever yet been called either Jesus or Christ. And he appears to have honoured these titles by inspired reasoning. For on two men who were the most eminent of all the people and distinguished before God, and who had other names of their own, he bestowed these two titles: on his own brother Aaron and on the son of Nun, formerly called Hoshea. Having appointed them, at God's bidding, before all the people as rulers of the whole nation, he glorified them with the titles of our Saviour Jesus Christ: the one he called Christ, because of the image he bore of the true High Priest of the universe, the Word, God himself, who was in the beginning with God; and his own successor he proclaimed Jesus, because he too preserved a type of our Saviour Jesus. For our Saviour, when the worship handed down symbolically through Moses had ceased, and Moses had in this way, as it were, died, took over the worship of God; he has conquered by war and subdued all the invisible powers that opposed his word, and, making his own possession the whole earth among all the nations that was tyrannized by them, he has distributed it as an inheritance to his own people through the churches throughout the whole inhabited world.

“Whenever Moses went into the tent, the pillar of cloud would come down and stand at the door of the tent; and the people, standing, would bow down each from his tent. And the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as if one were to speak to his own friend; and he would go back to the camp; but his servant Joshua son of Nun did not go out of the tent. And Moses said to the Lord, ‘Behold, you say to me, “Lead this people up,” but you have not shown me whom you will send with me; yet you said to me, “I know you above all, and you have favour with me.” If, then, I have found favour before you, reveal yourself to me; let me see you so as to know you, so that I may be one who has found favour before you, and that I may know that this nation is your people.’ And he says, ‘I myself will go before you and give you rest.’ And he says to him, ‘If you yourself do not go with us, do not lead me up from here. And how will it be known that I and your people have found favour with you, except by your going with us? And we shall be glorified, I and your people, beyond all the nations that are on the earth.’ And the Lord said to Moses, ‘This word too that you have spoken I will do for you; for you have found favour before me, and I know you above all, and you have favour with me.’ And he said, ‘Show me your own glory.’ And he said, ‘I will pass by before you in my glory, and I will call in the name of the Lord before you; and I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ And he said, ‘You will not be able to see my face; for no human shall see my face and live.’ And the Lord said, ‘Behold, a place beside me, and you shall stand on the rock; and I will cover you with my hand until I pass by. And I will take away my hand, and then you shall see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen by you,’” and what follows, to which it adds: “And the Lord came down in a cloud and stood beside him there; and he called in the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before his face and called, ‘The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and full of mercy and true, keeping righteousness and doing mercy to thousands, taking away lawlessness and injustice and sins; and he will not clear the guilty, bringing the lawlessness of fathers upon children and upon children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.’ And Moses hastened, bowed to the ground and worshipped, and said, ‘If indeed I have found favour before you, Lord, go with us face to face.’”

Moses is recorded speaking to God with as much boldness and freedom as a man might use in conversing with his own friend. These words show no ordinary progress in the prophet. But since the Lord spoke to him face to face, yet had not yet been seen by him as by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for this reason he makes his request, saying, “If indeed I have found favour before you, reveal yourself to me; let me see you so as to know you.” By this he shows that God did not make his appearances to him in the same way as he spoke to him. For if, as one might think, God's having spoken to him face to face is the same as his having been seen by him, as one would say, face to face, what room would still be left for his request, “If indeed I have found favour before you, reveal yourself to me; let me see you so as to know you”? And if he had been seen by him face to face before, as one might suppose, how is it that the Lord adds, saying to him, “You will not be able to see my face; for no human shall see my face and live”? Let whoever wishes say why the word never once testifies that the Lord was seen by him, as it is observed to have said of the patriarchs. But from these words it is evident that, although the Lord spoke to him face to face, he nevertheless spoke to him through the cloud; for the Scripture shows this beforehand, saying, “The pillar of cloud would come down and stand at the door of the tent, and he spoke to Moses.” So he spoke through the cloud, yet he was not seen by him as by Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob. For he is recorded to have been seen by them barely and distinctly, without any form; but by Moses through what is called the form and through the cloud, which the word also calls the glory of the Lord, saying, “Whenever Moses spoke to the whole congregation of the sons of Israel, they turned toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in a cloud, and the Lord spoke to Moses.” And again: “Moses went up to the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. And the glory of the Lord came down on the mountain, and the cloud covered it six days; and the Lord spoke to Moses on the seventh day out of the middle of the cloud. And the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a flaming fire on the top of the mountain.” Clearly, then, by these words what Moses beheld is said to be not the Lord himself but the form of the Lord, and cloud and fire, which the word also calls the glory of the Lord. So he saw the form of the Lord and his glory, but by no means the Lord himself, the Word, the Lord who was speaking; yet he heard him speaking through the cloud, which is why it is said, “And the Lord spoke to Moses face to face.” But it is not recorded that he was also seen by him face to face; for he asks for this as something that had not yet happened, saying, “Reveal yourself to me; let me see you so as to know you.” And in another place the word teaches that God spoke to him mouth to mouth, yet was not correspondingly seen, but in a form and through his glory already mentioned. It says this: “And the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud and stood at the door of the tent of witness; and Aaron and Miriam were called, and both went out. And he said to them, ‘Hear now my words. If there is a prophet of yours for the Lord, I will be made known to him in a vision, and I will speak to him in sleep. Not so my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house. Mouth to mouth I will speak to him, in form and not through riddles, and he saw the glory of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?’” So he saw the glory of the Lord, and heard him giving oracles in a form and speaking mouth to mouth, yet he had not yet seen the Lord himself as the fathers had. And it is no wonder that God is recorded to have spoken with Moses mouth to mouth, since Moses teaches in Deuteronomy that he spoke face to face to the whole people, saying, “Not with your fathers did the Lord make this covenant, but with you; you yourselves, all of you, living here today. Face to face the Lord spoke to you on the mountain out of the middle of the fire.” Yet even if he gave oracles in this manner both to Moses and to the whole people, see that it is said that he spoke to them mouth to mouth and face to face, but not that he was seen by them, as by the fathers, without the fire or the cloud; for to them the Lord is recorded to have been seen barely, without the veil of cloud or fire. Our Saviour and Lord too teaches that seeing God belongs to the perfect, whose understanding has been purified to the utmost, saying, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” This is why the Lord also proclaims himself God as of such men, saying to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel: ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’; this is my eternal name and memorial to generations of generations.”

So Moses, eager for the greater gifts and reaching for progress like theirs, makes his request to the Lord, saying, “Reveal yourself to me; let me see you so as to know you.” For he had an impression of the greatness, the loftiness, and the unspeakable and unattainable pre-eminence of the Word of God who gave him oracles, and he saw that it was through ministering angels that he gave him his visions. So he begs him to reveal himself to him more distinctly and purely, no longer through veils nor by other ministers, but barely, as to Abraham and his family, without the form that came through fire and cloud. This, at least, is what the phrase “Reveal yourself to me; let me see you so as to know you” seems to me to signify. In the same way, having heard beforehand the Lord saying to him, “Behold, my angel will go before your face,” he gently declines, reaching for the greater thing, and says, “If you yourself do not go with us, do not lead me up from here.” When the Lord assented to the request and said, “This word too that you have spoken I will do for you,” Moses, perceiving the readiness of the divine generosity, whose kindness anticipates those who reach for great things, then made himself small, and, reckoning himself not yet worthy of the greater things, puts forward another request, lesser in comparison with the first, saying, “Show me your glory.” And the Lord, fulfilling his word, says, “I will pass by before you in my glory, and I will call in the name of the Lord before you,” and what follows, teaching that the knowledge of the Father and God of the universe is greater than every vision he had beheld before; and this he promises to hand on to him, saying of himself, “I will pass by before you in my glory,” and of the initiation into the Father, “and I will call in the name of the Lord.” For of what Lord does he promise to call, since he is himself the Lord indicated by the tetragram, unless it is the Father? And truly, unless the Word of God first passes through a person, and unless he himself calls upon the Father, it is not otherwise possible to take up the knowledge of the Father of the universe; since “no one knew the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son reveals him.” He is the door and the way, through whom alone it is possible to see the cause that is beyond and above all things, the Father himself. For although the divine Word, like a forerunner of the Father, comes first to dwell in the souls of the blessed and gives them a share in his own glory, he does not stop at the end by taking the supreme authority to himself; having prepared and made ready the dwelling, he withdraws and hands the kingdom over to God and the Father. He himself confesses this, saying, “I will pass by before you in my glory, and I will call in the name of the Lord.” Now, then, he promises in word to do this; and next he adds the deed as well, where it is said, “And the Lord came down in a cloud and stood beside him there; and he called in the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before his face and called, ‘The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and full of mercy and true, keeping righteousness, doing mercy to thousands, taking away lawlessness and injustice and sins; and he will not clear the guilty, bringing the lawlessness of fathers upon children and upon children's children, to the third and fourth generation.’” For it is the Lord indicated by the tetragram who says these things himself, having come down in a cloud and stood beside Moses; and he, passing by before his face according to the promise he had made, calls upon his own Lord and Father, the one who is truly Lord, Lord, who appears twice through the tetragram, saying, “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and merciful,” and what follows. If someone should insist that it was not the Lord but Moses who said these things, let him take firm assurance from the very words of Moses, who confesses that the words set out above are the Lord's, when, praying in another place, he says, “And now let your hand be exalted, Lord, as you said: ‘The Lord is long-suffering and full of mercy and true, taking away lawlessness and injustice and sins; and with cleansing he will not cleanse the guilty, repaying the sins of fathers upon children to the third and fourth generation.’” Most plainly and clearly, then, it is shown by these words that the Lord himself spoke the words set out above, calling upon a greater Lord, the one who is truly Lord, clearly his own Father. Or, if anyone is reluctant to accept this, let him say whether he is able to give any other explanation of these passages, while keeping to the point that the one who gave the oracles was not an angel, but the Lord himself indicated by the tetragram, who is also recorded to have spoken to Moses face to face, and whom Moses entreats, declining the protection of angels, saying, “If you yourself do not go with us, do not lead me up from here.”

But it is not possible to refer these things to any other than to the Word, God, who was in the beginning with God. He reveals to Moses, who longed for great things, the knowledge of the greater one, teaching him how he may know the only true God, and the Word, God, whom he sent, who is himself also Lord and God in the second place after the Father. And this is the first and most necessary benefit he provides him, that he should never, because of the surpassing glory of what he beheld, take the conceptions proper to the God of the universe and apply them to the Word who gave him oracles. So he teaches him to regard as the first and only true God the one whom he himself called upon, saying, “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and full of mercy and true.” Attend carefully to the word “true,” said in the same way as “that they may know you, the only true God,” spoken by the same Saviour in the Gospels. But the whole people could not have received these things; to them, as beginners, the one giving the oracles said, “I am, and there is none besides me.” For they still needed an elementary introduction to the monarchy of God, being not yet able to articulate the doctrines concerning Father and Son, since they had only recently turned away from the polytheistic error of the Egyptians. Yet “I am, and there is none besides me” might be said in the person of the Word of God, like “I and the Father are one,” and “I am in the Father and the Father in me.” For just as he who has seen him has seen the Father, according to “He who has seen me has seen the Father who sent me,” in the same way he who heard him heard the Father in him saying, “I am, and there is none besides me.” We have said this, as far as is possible in such great matters, wishing to show that beyond dispute it was neither the God of the universe nor some angelic power that gave oracles to Moses, but the divine Word himself, whom we have believed with exactness to be, after the Father and Lord of the universe, the second God and Lord of all things, as the evangelist John teaches us more clearly, saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

It would take much leisure, not the present, to make clear what the place and the rock are of which the Lord said, “Behold, a place beside me, and you shall stand on the rock.” The apostle made clear what the rock is, saying, “And the rock was Christ.” And I take the place to be nothing other than the rock, and the same as the place that met Jacob, where it is written, “And Jacob went out from the Well of the Oath and went to Haran. And he met a place,” where, having seen in a vision the ladder and the Lord standing firm upon it, he says on waking, “The Lord is in this place,” and again he said, “How fearful is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” But also what the face of the Word of God is, which Moses, the Law, being human and more bodily, cannot behold; and what his back parts are, which alone the typical Law, symbolic of spiritual things, was able to receive; and how “I will cover you with my hand” is said, a veil and covering being laid on the Law, so that through this veil it can see the things behind but not the things that go before and excel: whoever cares to search into these things will learn by examining them privately in due time.

“A man shall come out of his offspring, and he shall be lord of many nations; and the kingdom of Gog shall be exalted, and his kingdom shall be increased. God led him out of Egypt; he has as it were the glory of a unicorn; he shall eat up the nations of his enemies, and drain the marrow of their fatness, and with his darts shoot down the enemy. He lay down and rested like a lion and like a whelp; who shall raise him up? Those who bless you are blessed, and those who curse you are cursed.” Christ is the one born according to the flesh of the offspring of Israel and who has become lord of many nations. For what nation has been ignorant of service under him, since the word of his disciples has gone out into all the earth, and their sayings to the ends of the inhabited world? Among very many even of the barbarians one can see many who through faith in him have come to the knowledge of the one God, and who for their devotion to him have endured every kind of punishment, even to death. This prophecy too, then, is clearly shown to have reached its fulfilment in our Saviour; or else let someone else come forward and show to whom these things could be referred. For us it is evident that the spiritual kingdom and dominion of our Saviour increases daily among the souls that have received his word. And at his coming the kingdom of Gog was also exalted; some have taken this to be the Roman empire, others figuratively the heavenly citizenship according to the Gospel and the contemplation of spiritual doctrines, understanding that this is signified by “Gog,” which is interpreted “roofs.” And God led him out of Egypt: literally, when Joseph, warned by an oracle, took Mary with the child Jesus out of Egypt and returned to the land of Israel, fulfilling both the present prophecy and the one in Hosea, according to the Hebrew and the version of Aquila, which says, “Out of Egypt I called my son”; and in the spiritual sense, when the Father took him up from the spiritual Egypt and from the places here below and led him to the heavens. The so-called glory of unicorns in the Saviour hints at the divinity in him of the Father's monarchy. After this it is said, “He shall eat up the nations of his enemies”: for all the nations that have come under his teaching, which were formerly the portion of his enemies, he has, after their faith in him, made fit, as it were, to be food for himself; thinning down and searching out their fatness, that is, everything material and earthly that has grown together with them, and producing in them nourishing fruits through his own husbandry. These things he accomplished with spiritual and rational darts, shooting down the one who of old ruled the nations and was his enemy, that is, the devil. The words beginning “He lay down and rested like a lion” were spoken in almost the same terms by Jacob too in the prophecies about Judah; having set out what sense they have as it occurred to us, we shall not repeat it. It is clear how we who bless the Christ of God have been blessed. For even if they abhor us, as the Egyptians abhorred God's people of old, yet in our case too it is fulfilled that “the more they humbled them, the more they multiplied, and grew exceedingly strong.” And it is clear in what way those who from the beginning cursed him have received the curse, through “Crucify, crucify him!”; for the cross was a thing of cursing, according to “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” But he who endured their curse has been highly exalted by the Father, while those who were cursed by God himself have received a destruction that lasts for ever; and if anyone examines it with exactness, he will see the greatness of the power of God, which pursues even now those who have once been cursed by him. So much on “Those who bless you are blessed, and those who curse you are cursed.”

“A star shall rise out of Jacob, and a man shall rise up out of Israel, and shall shatter the leaders of Moab, and shall plunder all the sons of Seth.” The Word of God, having emptied himself and taken the form of a servant and been found in fashion as a man, rose as no small star, not to Jacob but out of Jacob; for beginning from the bodily people of those of the circumcision, he shone upon all the nations. And having moved away from them he waged no small wars, cleansing away the opposing powers and the spiritual forces of wickedness; having fought them down, he made plunder for his own lot, taking back all the nations that were formerly under them, concerning which the Father promised him, saying, “Ask of me, and I will give you nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession.”