The Frustrated God
“Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation.” Exodus 32:10 NASB
Let me alone – Did God intend to destroy Israel? Did Moses change God’s mind? These two questions, and the answers you give, really reveal your exegetical epistemology. Oh, sorry, such big words. Let me put it this way: How you answer these questions will depend on how you view the ideas of what God knows and how God reacts. If you think of God according to standard philosophical terms, then God must have known beforehand what Moses would say and do, what the people would do and what He would do. Therefore, the answers to these two questions are, “God never intended to actually destroy the people, and Moses didn’t really change God’s mind.” The conclusion is that this incident is for Moses’ benefit. God leads Moses to consider Moses’ role by playing him. Of course, this requires some explanation since it ignores the plain meaning of the text (maybe?). Here are three typical attempts to resolve the conflict:
The mistake Christian scholarship makes is to look at God through human “lenses.” Perhaps the passage means what it appears to mean and God was really considering destroying all of Israel except Moses. He sure didn’t hesitate to flood the earth and start over w/ Noah… I don’t believe this passage is telling us that Moses changed God’s mind. Rather, we see that, as the one God preferred to lead his “chosen people,” he deferred to Moses’ wish to do so through the lives at the bottom of the mountain rather than God’s consideration of doing so through a new Mosaic bloodline.
God wanted Moses to pray for his people. By doing so, Moses was showing love for them. On verse 7 (Genesis 32.7), God himself tells Moses what is going on. God knew it, it was no surprise to him, but for sure it would be a great surprise and disappointment to Moses if God had not prepared him for what was about to come. God knew Moses, He knew Moses would probably grow weary. God was not lying, as some may think, but he was coaching Moses, more than that he was leading him, teaching him at a level of understanding which Moses could grasp. If that conversation had not happened, Moses himself might have destroyed everyone and given up on his mission at his moment of fury.
God is all knowing, He knew all that the Israelites would do even before he created the universe. God knew that Moses would intercede as he did, God chose Moses, He knew Moses’ heart, so no God would not have destroyed the Israelites completely or God would have chose [sic] a prophet whom [sic] would not [have] interceded for the Israelites as Moses did.[1]
All of these resolutions suggest God was just playing with Moses. God says these things in order to get Moses to reflect on his own issues. God knew Moses needed adjustment. It was all a ploy. God doesn’t change.
Don’t think that these answers only reflect a naïve Christian viewpoint. Zornberg suggests something like this when she writes:
“ . . . reconstructing history with Moses as patriarch of a revised world, would mean in effect to conspire, like Noah, in destroying the sinful world. . . God signals to Moses to respond not on the conscious level of His apparent desire to destroy, but on the unconscious level of His desire to save the people; and Moses, unlike Noah, catches the drift of God’s intention, rather than unimaginatively obeying His explicit words. Noah becomes the paradigm, then, of an unimaginative literalism, which is harshly judged as murder.”[2]
Zornberg’s reasoning is more subtle, taking a clue from the Hebrew phrase, we-ʿattâ hăniḥâ (“Let me alone”), but the conclusion is very similar. The declaration is for Moses’ benefit. It really doesn’t express God’s intention.
Unfortunately, all of these explanations require that we read the text as fiction, a kind of divine reverse psychology. In other words, we ignore what God says in order to make God say something else. I think this is a mistake. Abraham Heschel offers an important point that corrects these attempts to salvage God from our ideas of divine dignity:
“Sin, guilt, suffering, cannot be separated from the divine situation. The life of sin is more than a failure of man; it is a frustration to God.”[3]
What Heschel suggests is that God really feels, in this case, real frustration over the behavior of the people. This does not diminish God’s dignity. It enhances God’s involvement. The biblical God is not a detached, all-knowing, puppet master. He is the concerned Creator, and having accepted the risk of other free agents, He feels according to the outcome of any particular situation, in this case, the continual obstinance of the people. Far from a lesson for Moses, this is a real intercession. God changes His mind because Moses makes his case. The event is what the text says it is—divine frustration.
There is a small caveat here. The opening Hebrew word, ʿattâ, translated “now,” is a derivative of ʿānâ, a word that basically expresses “to answer, to respond, to speak.” This is Zornberg’s point. Hidden in the vocabulary is an invitationfor Moses to respond. And Moses catches the clue. Maybe God does express frustration. Maybe He does change His mind. But maybe there is also something else going on here.
Topical Index: ʿattâ hăniḥâ, let me alone, frustration, Exodus 32:10
[1] https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/5175/did-god-really-want-to-destroy-the-people-of-israel
[2] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 416.
[3] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 6.
