All three artworks in this exhibition inspire questions about divine revelation and hiddenness and probe the complexity of Moses’s authority and power. In both accounts of law-giving in Exodus, there is an ambiguity about who actually inscribes the commandments (24:3,12; 34:1, 27–28). The boundary between divine and human activity and authority is blurred in the imposing figure of Moses.

In giving the law to the people, Moses assumes an unrivalled position in Israel as mediator and intercessor. In Ferdinand Bol’s painting, ‘Moses becomes the figure par excellence to present the double origin of authority, both theological and political’ (Vardoulakis 2019: 772). He provides the ideal symbol to theologically inspire and reinforce the civil court’s political power. In the manuscript illustration of La Somme le Roi, God is revealed through a window in the thunder clouds, underneath bright dazzling light, to hand the tablets of the Law to Moses. Their faces mirror one another, accentuating the intimacy of their relationship. In the context of instruction for parish priests tasked with catechesis, Moses serves as the model mediator—God’s representative—for those who teach and reinforce the commandments in a Christian context.

The Regensburg Pentateuch cleverly captures the hierarchy of authority, while also reflecting on the process of transmitting the commandments. The open hands of those at the foot of the mountain suggest their eagerness to receive the commandments. Yet the challenges of such transmission, hinted at here, are an aspect of the burden of the Law that Israel was asked to receive, as interpreted in the accompanying midrash, by Rabbi Aha ben Ya’akov. Christian ambivalence (or outright antipathy) towards Moses and the Law can now only be seen in the Regensburg Pentateuch with the aid of infrared technology. The original, distorted facial features of the Israelite characters—all in profile—such as a heavy chin with goatee, and a long, crooked nose, have been partially concealed and amended by the colourist. It is possible that the draftsman was a non-Jewish artist, commissioned by a Jewish patron (Sternthal 2018).

Moses as law-giver and covenant mediator is a complex and powerful figure. In the Christian tradition, he at once symbolizes the Law—regarded positively as a gift in covenantal terms, or negatively in contrast to grace—and the prophetic authority that comes from one who can talk to God ‘face-to-face’, who radiates and reflects the divine glory. The Church, claiming for itself the election and covenant that the gift of the Law represents, has often struggled to make sense of Moses as both a type of Christ and as a symbol of the ‘old’ covenant.

The figure of Synagoga in La Somme le Roi reveals the medieval Church’s vilification of the Law and its desire to assert itself triumphantly against Judaism. A tension is created between the Church’s reception of the Ten Commandments as their legacy from Moses, and the notion that Judaism is ‘blind’ to Jesus’s ‘fulfilment of the Law’. Christian Scripture, particularly Paul’s discussion of Moses’s veil in 2 Corinthians 3, has unfortunately been fuel for such antisemitic representations of Judaism, in which the Church has repeatedly sought to deny and condemn Jewish interpretations of these shared texts.

It is curious that Moses is rarely depicted in art with the veil that is described in Exodus 34:33–35. It is unclear what kind of veil is meant, particularly as the Hebrew word masveh occurs only here in this chapter of Exodus. The veil might have risked effeminizing the famous prophet, or perhaps it was simply transposed into the image of the blindfold (Britt 2003: 259). Revelation and concealment are both communicated through the veil: Moses removes it to talk with God and disclose God’s words to the people, and his face is radiant with divine glory. When he has finished, the veil is drawn back over his visage.

After Moses’s death, however, divine glory becomes associated instead with the tabernacle/Temple itself as the locus of divine presence. It is tempting to draw a connection between Moses’s veil and the curtain in the Holy of Holies (Exodus 26:31–33) that separates the inner sanctuary from the rest of the Temple—another way of marking God’s holiness and safeguarding the divine presence.

The whole of this narrative (Exodus 19–24 and 32–34) explores the depth of fear and difficulty for humans in their relationship with God. In accepting Moses’s revelation of the Law, Israel simultaneously accepts Moses’s authority and fearfully shies away from direct communication with God (Exodus 20:19). The people’s fear of God’s overwhelming power at Sinai leads to their (understandable but unhealthy) reliance on Moses. Consequently, the people’s fear that Moses has abandoned them leads to their desperate desire for gods that they can see and worship (Exodus 32:1).

References

Britt, Brian. 2003. ‘Concealment, Revelation, and Gender: The Veil of Moses in the Bible and in Christian Art’, Religion and the Arts 7.3: 227–73

Sternthal, Michal. ‘Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts: The Medieval Regenburg Pentateuch’, Oxford Chabad Society, University of Oxford, available at https://www.chabad.org/multimedia/video_cdo/aid/4103097/jewish/Hebrew-Illuminated-Manuscripts-The-Medieval-Regenburg-Pentateuch.htm [accessed 10 May 2024]

Vardoulakis, Dimitris. 2019. ‘The figure of Moses: The Origins of Authority in Spinoza’, Textual Practice 33.5: 771–85