The Face of God: Dialogue and Distance in Exodus 33,12-34,8

ABSTRACT The dialogue between Moses and God in Exodus 33 is one of the most mysterious and complex in the Hebrew Bible and raises acutely issues of metaphoricity, corporeality, and ineffability in relation to God. It turns on different meanings of the word “face” and thus on different conceptions of the deity in the Hebrew Bible. A close reading of the dialogue will be accompanied by considerations of metaphor. There are two issues in the text. One is the paradox that YHWH speaks to Moses “face to face,” yet his face cannot be seen. The second is the relationship of “face” to other terms in the passage, such as “goodness” and kavod. I will conclude by suggesting a resistance to metaphoricity, as to all cultic and mythic images.