“Thou Shalt not go Thither”

Abstract

Abstract In the Journal of Biblical Literature, Volume 107, No 1, March 1988, William Propp wrote the following in his article entitled “The Rod of Aaron and the Sin of Moses”: “... A third problem is often mentioned but I think it is not relevant to the secular scholar. That difficulty is whether the deeds of Moses and, a fortiori, Aaron merit the punishment they receive. The Bible frequently violates our sense of justice and the author was faced with the problem of explaining an antecedent tradition, shared with other sourced, that Moses (and Aaron) dies in Transjordan.” Similarly, these theodocies are complicated by what appear to be LXX and Hellenistic attempts to understand the reasons for Moses and Aaron's exclusion from the land in light of ideas current in the Greco‐Roman period. The MT's different theodocies may have indirectly contributed to the varying views in LXX and Hellenistic literature which reconciled Moses and Aaron's punishment through even more complicated narratives which reflect Hellenistic concerns of justice and divine justice rather than the considerations found in the MT.