Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain—that is, the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees—as far as Zoar. The Lord said to him, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command. He buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day. Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired, and his vigor had not abated. The Israelites wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the period of mourning for Moses was ended. Joshua son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom because Moses had laid his hands on him, and the Israelites obeyed him, doing as the Lord had commanded Moses. Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequaled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servants and his entire land, and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel. Deuteronomy 34:1-12.
What does it mean to command death? At the time of this writing, two cases of capital punishment have drawn this question to the centre of public discourse. On September 30, Christa Pike survived after the state of Tennessee attempted to kill her with two lethal injections. Now she is slowly recovering, still with the memory of burning pain in the hospital, slowly regaining the ability to eat and walk. Meanwhile, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced his intention to livestream the killing by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at a U.S. Army post in 2009. (Donald Trump has since announced the livestream would not go forward, though the execution will otherwise proceed as planned.) Faced with this sort of celebratory cruelty, it is hard not to cry out: How long, O Lord?
It is in this context that the lectionary hands us two texts in which God commands humans to die. In that context, it is vital that we recognize how radically God’s handling of this responsibility diverges from the recklessness of human bloodlust. Certainly, there are places where scripture seems to endorse terrible violence, and it has been used to justify capital punishment as often as to denounce it. Yet because scripture is not univocal, it also enables readers to resist the trivialization of human life and death.
Deuteronomy 34 and Psalm 90 both invite us to reflect on a God who has the power to take life, both from Moses in particular and from all mortal people. This power, however, is inseparable from a deep responsibility for the dying. It exists in the context of a relationship between creator and creation in which God has obligations to meet and creation is able to call God to account. These texts provide a warning to any who would try to claim the responsibility to command death: that if you call someone to turn back to dust, you must prepare to be called upon in return.
First, in Deuteronomy 34, after bringing Moses to see the promised land, we are told that “Moses, the servant of the LORD, died there … at the Lord’s command” (Deuteronomy 34:5). The text goes on to tell us that Moses still had sight and vigor up until the moment of his death, as if to emphasize that his death was not merely one of natural decline. Moses did not simply fade out of this life; God commanded him to leave it. In this, Moses’ death may seem unusual–but Psalm 90 tells us otherwise, reporting that not only Moses but all people are called to death by God’s words: “Turn back, you mortals” (Psalm 90:3).
To read of God commanding us to die can be bracing for readers who view God first and foremost as a God of life. For example, some Christian readers of these texts will enter with the understanding that death is not God’s intention for creation, and is rather an enemy resulting from the fall that shall ultimately be defeated by Christ. Yet whether or not God wished death to enter the world, these scriptures report a God who actively takes responsibility for death as it now exists. This is a natural responsibility for the one who “formed the earth and the world” (Psalm 90:2) to claim over the un-forming of that same creation. Death is not merely permitted by God, but something God calls us to – it is for this reason not only an enemy.
But what’s most remarkable in these texts is not simply that God bears the responsibility of commanding death. It’s that the power to command death takes place in the context of a two-way relationship that includes demands of God. In Moses’ case, he has been negotiating death with God for years: negotiating to spare the lives of Israelites (Exodus 32:11-14), then asking God to take his life (Numbers 11:15), then pleading to live to see the promised land (Deuteronomy 3:23-25). Moses’ requests are sometimes allowed, sometimes denied, but always heard.
In this passage where Moses dies at God’s command, God is also accountable to Moses in strikingly intimate ways. Before Moses can die, God must first make good on the commitment to show Moses the promised land, a moment of reassurance that God’s promises to Moses and his forebears are still binding. After Moses dies, God buries Moses, and does so in secrecy: the text tells us that “no one knows his burial place to this day” (Deuteronomy 34:6). This does not fulfill any prior promise, but God acts as though this too is something Moses is owed.
When I read this text, God’s burial of Moses always stops me in my tracks. It is such a strange and profound moment: having taken responsibility for Moses’ death, God also enters into the practical work of grieving that necessarily follows after. Can we even imagine a judge, shovel in hand, committed to digging the grave of the person they sentenced to lethal injection? I wonder: how long could the death penalty last under those conditions?
Because of this, Moses’ commanded death does not read as an execution handed down from on high, but as the culmination of a long history of closeness between Moses and God. Each has seen the other in ways no one else can claim to have done: Moses alone having seen the glory of God pass by him (Exodus 33:18-23), God alone knowing where Moses’ body rests. In eulogizing Moses, Deuteronomy affirms that “never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10). God’s closeness to Moses in death expresses their closeness in Moses’ life.
As previously stated, Psalm 90 portrays God as actively calling not only Moses, but all mortals, into death. Here, too, that calling comes with responsibility: it is because God has the power to create and end life that God can also be called to account to do so justly, and consistently with prior commitments. Psalm 90 is attributed as “A prayer of Moses the man of God,” and whatever its historical authorship, it fittingly continues Moses’ practice of negotiating with God for a just death: not just for himself, but also for all.
The negotiation of death in Psalm 90 hinges on two uses of the Hebrew word שׁוּב, carrying the senses of “restore,” “turn back,” and “repent.” First, the psalmist says of God, “You turn us back to dust, saying “Turn back, you mortals” (Psalm 90:3). Here, God’s command to “turn back” has the sense of returning to the stuff God first made us from. It expresses the extent of God’s power over creation, and this power can be terrifying–in the verses the lectionary elides, the psalmist reports, “For we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed” (Psalm 90:7).
Yet despite the extent of God’s power, mortals can also call upon God in ways that mirror God’s call to us. After expressing righteous fear, the psalmist calls to God at the psalm’s turning point: “Turn, O LORD! How long? Have compassion on your servants!” (Psalm 90:13). The psalmist takes God’s very “turn back” and turns it back around on God, using the same word that calls us to death as a call to care for mortal servants. The psalmist accepts that death will come, that they will need to meet God’s call to turn back; but does not do so without also reminding God to turn back as well.
What does the psalmist ask of God? Not to be spared from death forever, but for good lives in the time before that death arrives. The psalmist objects to a life of undue suffering, to a life dominated by pain. They call out, “Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us / and as many years as we have seen evil” (Psalm 90:15). They call on God’s faithfulness to continue beyond one lifetime into the generations to come, to the children of God’s servants (Psalm 90:16). Because God as creator takes responsibility for death, God is also responsible for good lives: these obligations are inseparable from each other.
And this brings us back to the present, and the ways in which humans now attempt to take command of death. A surface reading would be that, by establishing death as God’s to command, they remove death from the domain of human authorities; our death is not ours to decide. But if the above readings of the texts have shown anything, it’s that humans do have some critical agency in negotiating death with God, and holding God to account for the promises God has made. It would be wrong to say that the nature of our deaths is entirely up to humans, but neither is it a matter in which we have no voice or choice.
Therefore, what is especially grotesque about the death penalty today is not merely the attempt to claim power over commanding death, but the attempt to take that power without any of the attendant responsibility and accountability to the life being taken. Christa Pike’s attorneys had warned that the injection approach had already failed several times in recent years, and that it was particularly unlikely to work due to Pike’s existing medical conditions, including a blood-clotting disorder. These calls were dismissed, and Pike is still suffering the consequences. This reckless inattention to Christa Pike as a particular embodied person is far removed from the God who personally buries Moses and negotiates death with the dying.
In the interview where Pete Hegseth first announced his plan to kill Nidal Hasan in public, he was asked whether Nidal Hasan has any final requests. Pete Hegseth’s response was to shrug and reply, “Don’t care.” It is important to Hegseth’s brand of politics that he never be seen to care; any concern for the people whose death he commands is taken as a sign of weakness. His primary stated goal in this process is to “win” – the same motivation that leads him to repeatedly commit the extrajudicial murder of suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific.
Governments like Hegseth’s are indeed responsible for the death of many, but only in the narrowest sense of responsibility. They want to lay claim over the lives of others and to be claimed by nobody. While a shrugging “Don’t care” is intended to be a show of strength, it only reveals the immaturity of evil and an incapacity to truly shoulder the demands of justice that are placed on those who would command death.
This raises the question: can any of our human powers claim the kind of thorough responsibility that God takes for death? In claiming the power to turn others back to dust, are they prepared to repent? What promises are they willing to fulfill to the dying, and to those who are left behind? Before a state claims God’s power of commanding death, it should ask whether it is truly ready to bear this burden.
