YHWH kills Moses by his command in Deuteronomy.
Yahweh’s burial of Moses was one of a number of encounters the deity undertook with the material remains of the dead. Although his priests in Jerusalem would eventually come to impose a strict separation between the sacred and the sepulchral, fearing the cultural ‘dirt’ of death would contaminate the ritual cleanliness of holiness, the segregation of the divine from the dead was a relatively late incursion into the life of Yahweh. According to some biblical books, he had already proved himself an experienced corpse-wrangler and bone-handler. But God’s role as a tomb raider was not always malevolent. In the famous vision attributed to the sixth-century BCE prophet Ezekiel, Yahweh walks about a Babylonian valley housing the tombs of his exiled worshippers, picking his way through an overspill of bones littering the valley floor. Opening the tombs, he disinters the buried dead, bringing out their bones to join the others. Magically, the bones fuse back together; flesh, sinews and skin coat the newly articulated skeletons. The divine breath of life is blown into them, and the revivified dead stand on their feet, ready to return to Jerusalem.
It is a ritual gesture well attested in the Hebrew Bible, in which worshippers variously raise up, spread, or reach out their hands to Yahweh as they invoke his name. ‘I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name’, vows one psalmist. ‘Every day I call on you, O Yahweh; I spread out my hands to you’, declares another (Psalms 44.21–22; 63.4; 88.9; 119.48; 141.2; cf. Exodus 9.29, 33; 1 Kings 8.22, 38, 54; Lamentations 2.19; 3.4; Ezra 9.5; Nehemiah 8.6; 2 Chronicles 6.12–13, 29–30). ‘I held out my hands all day long’, Yahweh says (Isaiah 65.2). But for worshippers across the ancient Levant, the tactility of touch was felt in the action itself. Within the religious imagination, the hand-raising ritual was a potent performance, creating otherworldly realities. In raising their hands in prayer or petition, worshippers described themselves as ‘taking hold’ of their god (Isaiah 64.7). Kings, priests and prophets felt the deity take hold of their hand, and hold it tight, as Yahweh himself insisted: ‘I am Yahweh your god, who holds your right hand’ (. Isaiah 41.9, 13; 42.6; 45.1; 64.7; Jeremiah 31.32; Job 8.20; Psalms 73.23; 139.10).
The intimacy of the hand-raising ritual spoke to the intensity of the relationship between God and his worshippers.
By the time the highly authoritative book of Jubilees had been composed in the second century BCE, God himself was keeping Shabbat every week with his angels and his people – as he had always done, apparently
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