Graves of Craving

Antony Gormley’s Home of the Heart II helps us consider Moses’s complaint (Numbers 11:10–17; 24–30) about his task to ‘carry … this people alone’ (v.14).

Gormley’s sculpture is part of a series in which concrete blocks upon closer inspection reveal carefully placed holes through which the head and limbs of a body might pass.

Two aspects of this work help illuminate our text.

First, it contrasts the weightlessness of the body-shaped ‘interior’ with the heaviness of the block ‘containing’ it. Moses needs help in ‘lifting’ his ‘burden’ (vv. 11, 14, 17), and this sculpture can be read as a visualization of the demands of embodied life. Embodied humans have wants, desires, and needs—these all on a daily basis.

This sense of bodily burden can be additionally intense for those who, like Moses, are ‘caretakers’ of their fellow human beings: those with duties of protection and pastoral care. For them even more than for others, life can feel like being encased in a concrete block, not just of one’s own bodily needs but of others’ as well.

In addition to the weightiness of physical burdens, this sculpture captures the depth of Moses’s psychological state too. He has nothing left; he is, emotionally, ‘flat on his back’. Although Moses’s emotional burden is featured in other stories about him (cf. Deuteronomy 1:9–18; Exodus 18:13–27), only here is Moses in utter despair—to the point where he wishes to die (v.15; cf. 1 Kings 19:4). Under the weight of his current life, Moses just wants to lie down, forever. Some have thought this culpable, but Martin Luther displays the sympathy of a fellow pastor: ‘[O]nly speculative theologians’ would condemn him (Luther 1967: 30–31).

The supine state of Gormley’s block is all the more poignant when one also considers the threat that Moses’s death poses to the people he leads. If Moses dies, does their access to the word of God die with him? His personal cry for death signals a corporate cry of crisis.

Yet this cry will not be the end of the story, and Moses’s unique apprehension of the Lord (cf. Deuteronomy 34) will be carried forward to generation after generation—we are as much his audience as those he led through the wilderness. The particular, spiritual ‘holes’ in Moses’s particular, fleshly ‘block’ will be addressed by God’s particular, spiritual gift.

References

Luther, Martin. 1967. Luther’s Works, Vol. 54: Table Talk, ed. and trans. by Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress)

This photograph might be called merely ‘fashion art’, but, here and elsewhere, Ferdinando Scianna chooses to juxtapose his model with episodes of everyday life. Contrasts of life and death, of poverty and wealth, fill his ‘fashion’ portfolio; here, a model and (being carried in the background) a huge side of meat!

What is our attention drawn to here, and why? Are we drawn to the youth and beauty and clothing of the model or are we drawn to the meat? Are we provoked by envy or sexual desire or driven by hunger? What does the difficulty in untangling these possible responses tell us about the tangle of desires inside us?

Likewise, the desire for meat in Numbers 11 presents to us not just our hunger but our taste, not just needed nourishment (which is met by the manna, vv.7–9) but desired satiation (vv.4–6). The ‘strong craving’ of the ‘rabble’ in verse 4 (followed soon after by the rest of the people in v.10) signifies the transition from grateful partaking to avarice, the transgression of the limit that keeps enough from becoming too much.

God never rebukes the people merely for wanting meat. He rebukes them for letting their want for meat push them into rejecting Him as their saviour and rescuer from Egypt (vv.18b, 20b).

Although the Lord gives them what they want in abundance (vv.31–32; Psalm 78:27–29), the people were told to consecrate themselves (v.18), to prepare to be grateful. There is no indication they ever did or were. Instead, they consume the meat without gratitude or thankfulness. They may even have succumbed animalistically to devouring the flesh without cooking it. Verse 32’s ‘they spread them out’ implies ‘that they ate the meat raw’ (Milgrom 1989: 92). So ‘while the meat was still between their teeth’, God sent ‘a very great plague’ (v.33 NRSV), killing ‘the strongest of them’ (Psalm 78:31).

Scianna’s photo can help to draw out this aspect of Numbers 11. As in Numbers 11, death intrudes into the picture. Looking anew at the passage and the photo together, do we see something attractive (the desire for variety in food, the glamourous model) or how ugly and debased our cravings for ‘more’ can be?

References

Davis, Ellen. 2001. ‘Greed and Prophecy: Numbers 11’, in Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (Lanham, MD: Cowley), pp. 202–08

Milgrom, Jacob. 1989. Numbers, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America)

In the mid-1200s, Rudolph von Ems, a German knight and poet, composed the Weltchronik (‘Chronicle of the World’), consisting of ‘some thirty-three thousand lines of rhymed German verse’ (Cohen 1997: 67).

This copy of Von Ems’s seminal work was made for the accession of Charles IV to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire in 1355—bolstering the divine legitimacy of Charles’s new earthly authority by casting the empire itself as successor to the nation of Israel.

Numbers 11 (vv.16–17, 24b–25) is similarly concerned with the handing on of power: seventy elders are appointed to transmit Moses’s authority to future generations. The decorative architectural details depicted in this illumination of the episode mimic those atop the flying buttresses of St Vitus Cathedral in Prague. Moses obeys the Lord’s specific instruction to bring these elders ‘to the tent of meeting’ (cf. Exodus 33:7–11; 40:34–35). What better cultural equivalent to Moses’s tent of meeting than Prague’s St Vitus Cathedral? Here, we are dealing with the transfer of authority from Davidic Jerusalem to Carolingian Prague and from Moses to the later Christian Church.

The illumination deliberately includes God the Father as a golden circle on a ‘cloud’ (v.25) positioned above the centre of the tent of meeting, with God the Son (a second circle of gold haloing his human face) and the dove of God the Spirit to right and left, respectively. These bring a Christian hermeneutic to the scene. If the golden motifs in the illumination are read as signalling God’s presence and activity, it is striking that the symbols of the Spirit’s progress which we see outside the tent of meeting are a different shape from those representing the divine activity within. Forming triangles like Moses’s (falling) cone-shaped Jewish hat, these golden motifs seem to move from the Spirit via Moses to form a golden aura over the heads of the elders. Here is a specific equipping of scribes (or ‘officers’) and ‘elders of Israel’ (v.16) to prophesy like, with, and from Moses (v.24). They will carry his authority (‘the spirit upon Moses’) beyond his foretold death and into the future.

The depiction of this centralized, authoritative, prophetic but conciliar body receiving Moses’s spirit opens a theological path of continuity to the way that the spirit of Christ’s own person is breathed onto his disciples (John 20:22; cf. Luke 10:1–12, and Acts 2:1–13).

References

Cohen, Aaron S. 1997. ‘Rudolph von Ems, Weltchronik’, Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Illuminated Manuscripts (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum)

Mengel, David C. 2004. ‘From Venice to Jerusalem and Beyond: Milíč of Kroměříž and the Topography of Prostitution in Fourteenth-Century Prague’, Speculum 79: 407–42

———. 2014. ‘Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space’ in Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen, ed. by David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton (Notre Dame, IL: University of Notre Dame Press)

Roth, Norman. 2014. Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis)

St Clair, Archer. 1987. ‘A New Moses: Typological Iconography in the Moutier-Grandval Bible Illustrations of Exodus’, Gesta 26: 19–28