2.1. ‘Until Today’ (Deut 29.3 and 2 Cor 3.14–15 and Rom 11.8)

After declaring that Moses used to veil his face so that the sons of Israel could not behold to the end (and/or ‘goal’) of what was fading away, Paul mentions a contemporary counterpart:

‘Until today’ receives emphasis both by repetition at the start of successive cola (ἄχρι τῆς σήμɛρον ἡμέρας … ἕως σήμɛρον) and by the periphrastic expression for σήμɛρον in the first of these expressions.

Carol Stockhausen argues that the veil at the reading of the old covenant ‘until this day’ is associated with the hardening motif that Paul presents in Rom 11.7–8.Footnote ¹⁷ There he speaks of those who were ‘hardened’ (ἐπωρώθησαν), as is written in scripture:

Paul's quotation does not exactly replicate any known passage in the Septuagint.Footnote ¹⁸ It appears to be a catena. The first part recalls the unusual πνɛῦμα κατανύξɛως (‘spirit of stupefication’) in Isa 29.10, where God poured such a spirit over people so that they could not see or read the book. The theme of God-given blindness and deafness in the next line of Paul's quotation appears in many prophets but is particularly prominent in Isaiah, from the first ominous announcement of this punishment in Isa 6.9–10 to the messianic promises of restoration of sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf later in the book. Thus at first the reader thinks that Paul's framework is wholly Isaianic. However, his closing words modify this impression. The phrase ἕως τῆς σήμɛρον ἡμέρας in the context of God-given blindness and deafness resonates with Moses' woeful comment to the Israelites as he concludes his account of the sights of the Exodus and prepares them for his death:

Moses' observation that the Israelites were unable to see or hear so as to understand the wonders of the Exodus ‘until this day’ may explain how Paul claims to find in scripture (καθὼς γέγραπται) that his Jewish brethren have not been given eyes to see or ears to hear ‘until today’.

Stockhausen and others have suggested that the same combination of texts lies behind Paul's language in 2 Cor 3.14.Footnote ²⁰ He uses ἐπωρώθη as in Rom 11.7, together with the motif of not being able to see properly ‘until this very day’. There is no ‘spirit of deep sleep’ (πνɛῦμα κατανύξɛως) but Moses' veil may have reminded him of Isaiah's account of covering the heads of the seers in the very same verse. This is in the Hebrew of Isa 29.10;Footnote ²¹ and although studies have shown that Paul usually used an Isaianic text corresponding to the modern critical edition of the Septuagint, he did sometimes use a Greek text that had been revised so as to be closer to the Hebrew, and he probably knew the Hebrew as well.Footnote ²² As in Romans, however, Paul's epistle to the Corinthians interprets the Deuteronomic image of hardening so as not to see or hear ‘until today’ as articulating more than just the extended obstinacy of the Israelites. In his text it emerges as an eschatological turning point, enscripted in the ‘law and the prophets’ by Moses and Isaiah, and now realised in the life of the Christian community. The ‘ministry of death engraved in stone letters’ descended with Moses from Sinai, as recounted in Exodus, but the hardening of the Israelites went on ‘until today’, where Moses' ‘today’ on the borders of the promised land and Paul's ‘today’ among the church in Corinth narrativally coincide.

This is a closely textual relationship between Paul and a fixed combination of Old Testament passages. However, the role the intertext serves in this passage does, I suggest, go beyond the verbal limits of citation. At this point it is helpful to consider a richer critical vocabulary for analysing intertextuality.

2.2. A Typological Interpretation

The introduction of critical terms is necessary, but problematic. Gérard Genette's humorous equivocation about his own critical endeavour concerning intertextualities is apposite, for it is ‘a question … of choosing between drawbacks’. The technology of critical vocabulary is wont to seem ‘barbaric to lovers of belles lettres’, for it enters an area ‘we regularly grant to intuition and empiricism’.Footnote ²³ Michael Fishbane points to a similar concern in approaching relationships between sacred texts, quoting Martin Buber's sense that the reader of the Bible must read ‘with an appreciation of its poetic form, but also with an intuitive grasp of the suprapoetic element which transcends all form’.Footnote ²⁴ And yet, both Genette and Fishbane saw that some attempt to name what is happening textually, intertextually and palimpsestuously is a useful, though transitory, step to grasping what is ‘knowable … at the heart of the mysterious’.Footnote ²⁵

The term that I suggest is most fruitful, despite its problems, in approaching Paul's interaction with Deuteronomy in 2 Corinthians 3 is ‘typology’. It is a modern coinage, but it interacts with the biblical use of the nouns τύπoς (‘imprint’, ‘pattern’, ‘model’, ‘replica’, ‘cast’) and ἀντίτυπoς. Its meaning has been much debated, and I use it here in the sense that Frances Young argued for in analysing early Christian patterns of reading their scriptures:

The most significant relationship, she shows, is not historical, where one event precedes another, but literary and liturgical, where the basic ‘type’ signifies something not merely subsequent to the original, but transcendent and eschatological. The relationship between them is mimetic, marked by correspondences.Footnote ²⁷

Working with this definition, Paul's probable allusions to Deuteronomy and Isaiah in 2 Cor 3.14–15 raise the possibility of a typological reading of those texts. We have already seen a coincidence of temporal markers from scripture and contemporary experience, consummated in the liturgical setting. Furthermore, this unveils something both eschatological and transcendent. This is the juncture where Paul shifts his attention to the eschatological ‘today’, which is marked by the availability of the transcendental gift of the Spirit for anyone who turns to the Lord. Some scholars have described 2 Cor 3 as a typological reading of the Exodus narrative; the rest of this essay will investigate whether it is also a typological reading of the end of Deuteronomy.

3.1. Text

Our modern critical editions are, of course, not the same text as the one Paul is likely to have used, and he may have used more than one recension anyway. However, among the books of the Septuagint, the text of the Pentateuch was particularly stable, and a number of citations by Paul have been identified which strongly suggest that he was using a text coinciding with those known in extant manuscripts, while the variations in his citations are slight and usually best explained as his own interpretive rewordings, or those that he received from his tradition.Footnote ²⁸ But to what extent did Paul use a written text at all when he quoted, cited or alluded to scripture? He could not have carried complete Torah scrolls around with him, although some of his quotations suggest he was using written texts. Koch and Stanley argue that he probably made excerpts and kept them to hand.Footnote ²⁹ If this were so, it would raise the question of whether Deuteronomy 31 was ever among his excerpts. Guy Waters, in his monograph The End of Deuteronomy in the Epistles of Paul, declines to write ‘Deut 27–32’, preferring ‘Deut 27–30, 32’ because in his judgement ‘there are no discernible engagements of Deut 31 in Paul's letters’.Footnote ³⁰

Paul's ancient cultural setting, however, renders it most likely that he memorised the scriptures as a child, and that the twin practices of memorisation and meditation continued to nourish his pattern of devotion as an adult.Footnote ³¹ Furthermore, in the synagogues, the law would have been read sequentially on the Sabbaths. It cannot be proven that there was a system of lectio continua at this period; it is plausible that there was, but even if not, the markings on early Hebrew manuscripts suggest that the portions of text to be read out would have included a section starting at Deut 31.1.Footnote ³² In addition, when Paul did open the scroll of Deuteronomy, if he were keenly interested in ‘Deut 27–30, 32’, it would be surprising for him to pass over Deut 31, particularly in the absence of modern chapter divisions. Paul, then, probably not only knew the Deuteronomic narrative of Moses' end and the succession, but knew it by heart and heard most or all of it in the liturgy. This story was integral to the Jewish mythos of the Exodus, which saw beyond the wilderness to the inheritance of the promised land.

3.2. Intertext

In Deut 31 Moses has finished giving the law and is preparing for his death. He writes down the law and commits it to the priests and elders of Israel, giving them instructions to read it in the hearing of all Israel (ἀναγνώσɛσθɛ τὸν νόμον τοῦτον ἐναντίον παντὸς Ἰσραὴλ ɛἰς τὰ ὦτα αὐτῶν, v. 11) when they gather for the Feast of Sukkot. This passage is closely concerned with the juncture between later liturgy and the scene depicted in Deuteronomy itself: these are Moses' preparations for continuity between his own role, both enacted and described in this book, and what comes afterward for the people of Israel. Immediately after the reference to Sukkot, attention is focused on a further preparation: God asks Moses to appear before him with Joshua (LXX Ἰησοῦς) at the Tent of Meeting where God will commission him (Deut 31.14–15). At that point, the Lord appears to them and predicts that the Israelites will break his covenant (διαθήκη) and turn to other gods (Deut 31.16, 20). He speaks of hiding his face from them and of the disasters that will come upon them when that happens. The book of the law, which is initially written and included in the liturgy in order that people should learn and obey (Deut 31.11), is eventually preserved by the ark simply as a witness against Israel (Deut 31.26). Or, rather, the stone tablets are placed in the ark (cf. Deut 10.2, 4–5) and the Deuteronomist paradoxically juxtaposes this with the book that Moses writes, and with Deuteronomy itself that writes about that book.Footnote ³³ Moses speaks in conclusion of the stiff-necked disposition of the Israelites both in his day and thereafter (Deut 31.27–9), although he had earlier prophesied that when the Lord brought them into the land of their inheritance, he would multiply them and cleanse their heart and the heart of their seed to love the Lord their God with their whole heart and whole soul, so that they might live (Deut 30.5–6).

The Deuteronomist's story is distinctive and focused very differently from Paul's; yet Paul's narrative in 2 Cor 3 resonates with this Deuteronomic account in motifs, themes and some vocabulary. This essay will focus on Paul's appropriation of the idea of Jesus'/Joshua's succession at Moses' end, and the preparation for it through the reading of the book of the law in the presence of all Israel. First, however, we must examine other Hellenistic Jewish responses to this text for emphases and approaches they may share with Paul, and must then consider the compatibility of a Deuteronomic ‘succession’ with other evidence for Paul's theology of Jesus' relationship to Moses and the old covenant.

3.3. Tradition

Hellenistic Jewish and early rabbinic texts retell, elaborate and interpret the Deuteronomic account of Moses' end and the succession. In Deuteronomy, Moses goes up to Mount Nebo. God shows him the promised land, but denies him entry. Instead, Moses ‘ends’ there (ἐτɛλɛύτησɛν ἐκɛῖ Μωυσῆς), and the narrator tells us that ‘they buried him … and nobody knows his grave until this day’ (οὐκ οἶδɛν οὐδɛὶς τὴν ταφὴν αὐτοῦ ἕως τῆς ἡμέρας ταύτης, Deut 34.6). Some ancient interpreters thought Moses' soul was taken up into heaven, while his body remained on earth; others, that he was physically assumed into heaven.Footnote ³⁴ Some perceived significant parallels with Moses' earlier ascent at Sinai: Pseudo-Philo elaborates apocalyptic visions bestowed upon Moses at both Sinai and Nebo; it is at the law-giving and at his death only that Moses is glorified (LAB 19.16).Footnote ³⁵ Philo depicts both Sinai and Nebo as mystical ascents, where not only did Moses receive revelation but his soul was divinised.Footnote ³⁶ The tradition of Moses' physical assumption into heaven may be assumed by the Synoptic narratives of Jesus' transfiguration, which is itself evocative of Sinai.Footnote ³⁷

For many Jewish authors, Joshua's succession was integral to this story. According to Pseudo-Philo, God establishes his covenant with Joshua immediately after Moses' burial: et in tempore illo disposuit deus testamentum suum cum Ihesu filio Nave (LAB 20.1). Howard Jacobson detects here a verbatim quotation from Gen 15.18, substituting Joshua's name for Abraham's.Footnote ³⁸ God then instructs Joshua to put on the garments of Moses' wisdom, and gird himself in the belt of his knowledge, and declares that he will (then) be changed and be another man. Not all Second Temple texts celebrated Joshua so highly: Philo mentions Joshua only once in his two volume bios of Moses; he describes the succession elsewhere, as an example of Moses' humanity, and celebrates Joshua as Moses' ‘pupil and imitator’ (Virt. 66). Josephus took more interest in Joshua than Philo, seeing in this general and prophet a prototype for himself, but he nonetheless treats the succession quite briefly (AJ 4.165, 186–7, 324).Footnote ³⁹ One text probably contemporary with Paul, however, appears to have been devoted entirely to narrating Moses' preparations for the succession, followed by his own end. Known as the Assumption of Moses, and plausibly dated to the early first century ce, it was often discussed among the Church Fathers, but the latter portion is now lost. Originally written in Greek, the extant remains are in Latin.Footnote ⁴⁰ Joshua is described as arbiter (1.14) and successor (10.15) of Moses' covenant (testamentum). Moses gives him his books to be set in order, anointed with oil of cedar, and put in earthern vessels until the day of repentance and visitation (1.16–18). Idolatry and disaster are anticipated during Moses' absence.

These traditions show that there was Jewish interest in both Moses' end and Joshua's succession in Paul's day, and that some of these include motifs or emphases akin to Paul's in 2 Cor 3. Stories of Moses' end frequently associated it with Sinai; both were scenes not merely of revelation and glorification, but also places where Israel was gathered as a nation at the foot of a mountain and their identity forged through their allegiance to Moses. Joshua sometimes received extended and even exalted attention, his key role being the bearer of the covenant that Moses gave him, and the one who would take the people into the promised land.

3.4. Theology

Does Paul's own theology, as evident more widely in his epistles, have a place for contemplation of Moses' end and the succession? Paul is not renowned for his interest in Moses as a character in biblical narrative, much less for attention to Joshua son of Nun, whom he never mentions. He twice cites Moses to quote what he said in scripture, but usually he prefers to write simply that ‘the law says’ a thing; John Lierman suggests that he may prefer to think of the law's divine origin rather than as something Moses wrote.Footnote ⁴¹ However, the importance of the Exodus tradition as a mythos for making sense of the situation of the church within salvation history has been observed by several scholars. For the church, as for Israel, Paul perceived that God led his people out of bondage through water, in the hope of taking possession of their inheritance according to the promise given to their forefathers. There they could hope for a renewed and fruitful land, the restoration of glory, the gift of the spirit, and freedom.Footnote ⁴² This paradigm has usually been associated chiefly with Romans and Galatians, while the use of Exodus imagery in the Corinthian correspondence is more isolated (1 Cor 10; 2 Cor 3), but at least this shows that more widely in Paul's theology the Exodus paradigm was compelling, and did not stop with Sinai. Christ was the one through whom the promised inheritance would be granted, and if the fulfilment of this is interpreted chiefly through the image of sonship and the ancestry of Abraham in Galatians, it is not to be ruled out that Paul could also interpret it through the idea of Jesus as Moses' successor when he did, for once, focus on Moses (and not Abraham) as a narrative character (2 Cor 3).

The idea of ‘succession’ is rare in Paul, but his imagery in Romans 7.1–6 uses the idea of a succession of husbands to portray how the situation of the devout has changed through the death of Christ. The imagery is perplexing, because the image (vv. 1–3) does not map precisely onto Paul's interpretation of it (vv. 4–6). Most scholars think that the woman's first husband is the law, and her second is Christ, or at least that this is a plain reading of vv. 1–3, albeit the illustration is not followed through consistently.Footnote ⁴³ Some have further interpreted the first husband as sin or the old self, the second as Christ.Footnote ⁴⁴ John Earnshaw argued that the first husband is Christ under the law, or Christ in the flesh, the second the risen Christ.Footnote ⁴⁵ Others have abandoned the attempt to construe the imagery allegorically at all.Footnote ⁴⁶ For the present essay, what is significant is that Paul thinks of the new relation to God in the spirit in terms of a new marriage, a second husband, following the first who has died. He uses the imagery of marriage, which was biblical and traditional for Israel's covenant relationship to God as forged at Sinai, and which he also used in his own portrayal of the church's relationship to Christ (e.g. 2 Cor 11.2). Furthermore, his conclusion resonates closely with 2 Cor 3:

Only here and in 2 Cor 3 does Paul use the double contrast of ‘newness and oldness’ together with ‘spirit and letter’;Footnote ⁴⁷ the prominence of the difficult but characteristically Pauline verb καταργέω in both the marriage image (v. 3) and this interpretation of it (v. 6) reinforces the resonance between the two texts (cf. 2 Cor 3.7, 13–14). Origen's second Homily on Joshua draws on imagery from both this passage and 2 Cor 3 when he discusses how ‘Moses the servant of God has died, and Jesus the Son of God obtains the leadership’. He recounts how a ‘little book’ (probably the lost ending of the Assumption of Moses) tells that two Moseses were seen, one alive in the spirit, the other dead in the body, and he interprets this as an allegory for the emptiness of the letter of the law (Moses himself is dead in body), but ‘if you remove the veil, and understand that the law is spiritual, that is Moses who lives in the spirit’ (Hom. Jes. Nav. 2.1.83–6).

When Paul contemplated the glory of the Sinai covenant and its ‘ministry of death’ in 2 Cor 3, he contemplated also the way beyond that ‘ministry of death’ to the glory and life of the new covenant. The present discussion has shown that it is congruous with Paul's wider thought for him to contemplate the way beyond Sinai through the lens of the Exodus tradition, and that the concept of a succession in covenantal relationships is a possibility in his theological imagery for understanding how the church moves, through Christ, from the oldness of the letter to the newness of the spirit.

4.1. Moses' End and Other Closure

Paul's use of Exod 34.29–35 in 2 Cor 3 is conspicuous, yet the very narrative motifs that resonate most strongly with that passage – Moses' stone tablets, glory and veil – are contaminated by allusions to both causing and suffering death, when seen and heard without the ‘spirit of the Lord’, which is received in gazing upon the glorious icon of God in the face of Christ (2 Cor 3.17–18; 4.4–6). The motif of death probably draws in part on the death dealt to the disobedient Israelites at Sinai, Israel's archetypal narrative of disobedience and punishment for apostasy.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, it is developed through other imagery of ending and fading, which expands the focus from the Israelites to the law, and Moses' own person, who is the focus for their hardened gaze. I suggest that Paul is bringing the story of Moses and the Israelites as told in Exod 34.29–35 under the shadow of the last chapters of Deuteronomy with their varied emphasis on ‘ending’. As in Young's account of ‘typology’, the relationship is mimetic, drawing out correspondences, rather than built around quotation or citation.

Paul underscores themes of death, mortality, impermanence and closure in 2 Cor 3 in many ways. The ministry that Moses brings is described as a ‘ministry of death’ (διακονία τοῦ θανάτου). It is engraved in stone lettering, where stone tablets are understood as the antithesis of the spirit of the living God (ζῶντος θɛοῦ, 2 Cor 3.3, cf. 3.7–8). It comes in glory that is described as καταργουμένην, and this word closes the sentence that opened with the ‘ministry of death’ such that, as M. Theobald comments, the ministry of death ends by dying itself (2 Cor 3.7).Footnote ⁴⁹ The theme of closure is drawn out with evocatively ambiguous repetition of καταργέω (2 Cor 3.7, 11, 13, 14), to which τέλος is once added (2 Cor 3.13). If understood as ‘fade’ and ‘termination’ respectively, these terms clearly accentuate the emphasis on dwindling to extinction; καταργέω also has the sense of ‘abolish’, ‘render ineffective’, and τέλος, more perplexingly, of ‘goal’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Paul is imprecise concerning their referents: they are associated with the Mosaic ministry and all that attends it, but by using neuter forms (τὸ καταργούμɛνον, 2 Cor 3.11, and probably τοῦ καταργουμένου, 2 Cor 3.13) or omitting the subject of the main verb (καταργɛῖται, 2 Cor 3.14), Paul shrouds their intention in a mysterious amphiboly. The Israelites who behold a veiled Moses with hardened hearts fail to see τὸ τέλος τοῦ καταργουμένου, but Paul does not say whether this alludes to Moses' death, their own death, the end of the old covenant, or its glorious goal and purpose in Christ. One significant implication of the ambiguity is that the nature of the Israelites' end (and that of the Mosaic icon at which they gaze) is open to a twofold consummation, according to whether or not they turn to ‘the Lord’ (2 Cor 3.16–18).

With the exception of the term τέλος (2 Cor 3.13), Paul's vocabulary is different from the Deuteronomist's. However, his narrative shows significant thematic correspondences, both in his emphasis on closure, and in the twofold characterisation of the end. Moses completes the writing of the law, speaks of his own end, and looks forward to the end of the Israelites. The vocabulary for ‘ending’ is varied but insistent: συνɛτέλɛσɛν … ἕως ɛἰς τέλος, Deut 31.24; ἔσχατον τῆς τɛλɛυτῆς μου … ἔσχατον τῶν ἡμɛρῶν, Deut 31.29; ἕως ɛἰς τέλος, Deut 31.30; συνɛτέλɛσɛν, Deut 32.45.Footnote ⁵¹ Moses is preoccupied with how the history of Israel will be consummated in the face of his own demise and with the role of the law-book now written ‘to the end’. His perspective is as ambiguous as Paul's τέλος: at one time he has the completed law-book preserved in the ark to bear witness against Israel, because he foresees that they will be punished eschatologically for idolatry and thus consummate a history of infidelity that begins before and continues after his own decease. Later, however, he insists concerning the laws he teaches that ‘this word is not empty for you, because this is your life’ (οὐχὶ λόγος κɛνὸςFootnote ⁵² οὗτος ὑμῖν ὅτι αὕτη ἡ ζωὴ ὑμῶν, Deut 32.47). The law grounds Israel's opportunity to live long and enjoy their inheritance. Readers in Paul's day would know that the stone tablets preserved in the ark had been removed long ago by the Chaldaeans and in this way come to an end; the law-book, however, was preserved and continued to be read in the hope of life.Footnote ⁵³ In 2 Cor 3, like Deuteronomy, Paul explores a twofold possibility of consummation around the ‘end’ of the written and personal Mosaic revelation, but where Moses makes it centre on keeping the law (the ‘word’ that is ‘your life’), Paul interprets it according to whether one turns to ‘the Lord’ unveiled or not.Footnote ⁵⁴ The images are very different; it remains to be seen whether Paul nonetheless intends this as a particular way of reading the law rather than a new focus (icon) altogether.

4.2. Reading of the Old Covenant

Reading Moses' book is one of Moses' final commands in Deuteronomy (31.10–13); it is also a practice assumed by Paul in 2 Cor 3.14–15, where it locates the ‘end’ that occurs in Christ when the veil is removed on turning to the Lord (2 Cor 3.15–16). However, the mere motif of reading the law does not alone suggest a close connection between Paul and Deuteronomy. Paul in fact glides smoothly from the foot of Sinai, where Moses used to veil his face, to the contemporary reading of Moses and back to the Tent of Meeting again; this dream-like overlay of different narrative locations invites closer investigation.

Scholars who seek to identify the veil that, according to Paul, remains ‘until today at the reading of the old covenant’ (2 Cor 3.14) often discuss the veils that might have been used at synagogue services, assuming this is the setting for Paul's ‘reading of the old covenant’. The synagogue setting is evoked by the parallel clause, where Paul says that the Israelites have a veil on their heart ‘whenever Moses is read’ (2 Cor 3.14). This suggests a communal, public reading which happens frequently enough for the indefinite ‘whenever’ to make sense. The synagogue was the primary place for Torah study at this period.Footnote ⁵⁵ Paul's comment about the veiled-hearted Israelites parallels (and inverts) his vignette of the Corinthians themselves as a letter written in the heart and read by all people, written not with ink but the spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on parchment/fleshly hearts (2 Cor 3.2–3). His imagery of the Corinthians as a letter read out interacts creatively with the worship setting of where his own letter would be being read aloud amongst them, and this is the Christian counterpart to the Jewish synagogue gathering. Thus it is plausible that the synagogue is indeed in Paul's mind in 2 Cor 3.14–15.

However, the synagogue gathering is not the only setting that gives shape and sense to Paul's account. In Deut 31.10–13, Moses commands that, after seven years in the year of release (ἄφɛσις/ ) at the Festival of Sukkot when all Israel gathers ‘to be seen before the Lord’ (thus LXX; Hebrew לראות also allows the reading ‘to see the Lord’) at the place which the Lord has chosen, the priests and elders are to read ‘this law’ before all Israel, so that they may hear and learn to fear God and do the words of the Lord and live long in the land they are crossing the Jordan to inherit. This public reading before the whole nation is essentially different in character from the small-scale synagogue reading with exegesis.Footnote ⁵⁶

There are several points here that invite comparison with Paul's narrative in 2 Cor 3. Before embarking on that comparison, however, it may be objected that Paul cannot be understood closely with this Deuteronomic provision because there is little evidence that the Israelites carried out the command for public reading of the Torah that was laid down in Deut 31.10–13. The main exception is the reading by Ezra depicted in Neh 8, where the form of the ceremony is adapted for a closed group who considered themselves the community of returned exiles in the Babylonian diaspora, quite different from Paul. Footnote ⁵⁷ Paul, however, is layering contemporary practice with motifs and narrative derived from scriptural texts and from the sacred past; he emphasises that ‘the same veil’ remains from Moses' day until his own. Most likely, then, he is thinking of the contemporary synagogue service but interpreting it in ways intended to resonate with Moses' practices of speaking at the foot of Sinai (Exod 34.29–35). I suggest, however, that he is also engaging with Moses' commands for public reading of the Torah as he approached his end (Deut 31.10–15). Paul shares Deuteronomy's explicit interest in the relationship between hearing and seeing Moses in his lifetime and contemporary practices of listening to him. Like the Deuteronomist who equivocates between the stone tablets, the book that Moses writes and the book the Deuteronomist compiles, Paul too equivocates between ink-writing and stone tablets in 2 Cor 3.4, and again between stone tablets and modern Moses-reading in 2 Cor 3.7, 13–14.

A number of Paul's motifs are closer to Deut 31 than to the synagogue service; some of these are also shared with Exod 34; the two Pentateuchal texts lend different perspectives to the nuances of Paul's text. Like the public, national reading at Sukkot, Paul envisages how ‘the sons of Israel’ en masse beheld the veiled Moses with ‘their’ thoughts hardened (2 Cor 3.13), and he emphasises continuity with those who now hear Moses read with a veil (‘the same veil’) on ‘their’ hearts (2 Cor 3.14–15). Rather than focus on extended exegetical discussion as in the synagogue liturgy, he underscores ‘beholding’ (2 Cor 3.13, 18), which implies a more comprehensive and personal encounter. His fleeting piece of explicit exegesis (2 Cor 3.16–17) builds up to a vision of Christ vouchsafed to ‘us all’ who behold ‘with unveiled face’, not just to a small community such as a synagogue, let alone to just Moses or another individual (2 Cor 3.18).Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus, in both the collective emphasis and the public and comprehensive character of the encounter depicted, Paul's allusion to reading Moses resonates more closely with Deuteronomy than with the synagogue setting. In Exod 34 too, all the Israelites looked and listened as Moses communicated the commands of the Lord received in the Tent of Meeting, but only in Deuteronomy is the public encounter with Moses considered in relation to Moses' end and the juncture with future liturgy, when the old covenant will be read as a whole, not just received ex tempore in small doses following Moses' private visits to the Tent of Meeting.

Paul's visual imagery for ‘beholding’ Moses, turning to the Lord (implying Moses' encounter at the Tent of Meeting) and beholding the image of God face to face also suggests a real engagement with the matter of seeing the divine. Deuteronomy's account of the instructions for preservation of Moses' book as he approaches his end combines two themes of visual encounter: Moses' and Joshua's encounter with God at the Tent of Meeting (Deut 31.14–15),Footnote ⁵⁹ where, according to Exodus, Moses always wore a veil (Exod 34.33–5), and the command to the Israelites to go up at Sukkot to see God, which, in later times, was fulfilled by going to the Temple where the veil of the Holy of Holies was drawn back and the Tabernacle furniture displayed before the gaze of assembled worshippers.Footnote ⁶⁰ Paul's imagery of ‘all’ beholding the glorious image at the reading of Moses when the veil is removed from the face thus resonates both with Moses' private experience at the foot of Sinai,Footnote ⁶¹ and with the national experience at Sukkot where the covenant was read and the veil drawn back to see the Divine Presence in the Holy of Holies.Footnote ⁶²

Paul is problematising the Jewish sacred gaze, suggesting that the experience of ‘seeing God’ is a veiled one without Christ. Moses' book in this setting functions more as witness against Israel (cf. Deut 31.26) than as teacher and saviour (cf. Deut 31.11). But for those who do turn to the Lord there is ‘freedom’ (ἐλɛυθɛρία, 2 Cor 3.17). The term ‘freedom’ is surprising as Paul has not been using imagery of slavery in the immediate narrative.Footnote ⁶³ The development of his image suggests freedom from veils together with the darkness, hardening and ministry of death that attend them. However, the intertextual associations with the events of the Exodus and subsequent wanderings may suggest also freedom compared with slavery in Egypt; and perhaps the freedom associated with the ‘year of release’ (ἐν καιρῷ ἐνιαυτοῦ ἀφέσɛως) which Moses stipulates as the time when his law should be read and Israel should assemble together to see God at Sukkot (Deut 31.11).

The relationship between Deuteronomy and 2 Corinthians 3, then, transforms Paul's account of the problems of reading Moses in the synagogue into a depiction of the nation of Israel located before the presence of God, poised to see and to hear the divine presence if ever the veil is removed. Young's interpretation of ‘typology’ is again relevant, for the intertextuality is mimetic, liturgical and eschatological. The resonances with Exodus and Deuteronomy lift the depiction of the contemporary liturgy into the sacred narrative of national history, not stuck fast at Sinai, but now located on the edge of the promised land, at the moment of Moses' imminent demise.

4.3. Handover from Moses to Joshua (Ἰησοῦς)/Christ

In Deuteronomy, the way forward after Moses' end is prepared by appointing a successor. Joshua is to ‘go ahead before the face’ of Israel into the promised land (Ἰησοῦς ὁ προπορɛύομɛνος πρὸ προσώπου σου, Deut 31.3; ɛἰσɛλɛύσῃ πρὸ προσώπου τοῦ λαοῦ τούτου, Deut 31.7), and at the same time the Lord God will go ahead with them and will not leave or forsake them (Deut 31.6, 8). The handover of leadership from Moses to Joshua takes place at the Tent of Meeting, where Joshua had always been when Moses himself went to speak to the Lord even before this (Exod 33.11); now the Lord descends in a pillar of cloud and delivers his final instructions to Moses (Deut 31.15–16), who in turn commands Joshua to bring the sons of Israel into the promised land, and the Lord shall be with him (Deut 31.23). After teaching and recording his Song (Deut 32), he and Joshua appear before the people again; Moses gives another lengthy blessing, then goes up to Mount Nebo and ‘comes to an end’: the Septuagint uses τɛλɛυτάω for what happened to Moses, rather than offering any explicit term for a ‘death’.

The story of Deuteronomy is chiefly concerned with Moses; Joshua is a necessarily significant character but he is never placed in the spotlight in this book as Moses is. For Paul, however, the climax of the story is when Jesus rather than Moses becomes the figure ‘before the face’ of the Israelites, indeed before the face of ‘us all’ (2 Cor 3.18). His vocabulary of καταργέω and τέλος preserves the Deuteronomist's ambiguity over Moses' end, while his vision of turning to the Lord (as at the Tent of Meeting) culminates in beholding the glory of the Lord, which, we soon learn, is seen ‘in the face of [Jesus] Christ’ (2 Cor 4.6, cf. v. 4).

It has already been shown that, among Paul's contemporary Jews, Moses' end was glorified and Joshua was supported as a less interesting, but still important, successor. Paul's reading of the Deuteronomic narrative, I suggest, works with the same tradition of interest in this narrative, but casts the story in a different way, to celebrate Jesus as the true successor to Moses and to offer an end to idolatry and disaster for those who gaze at him instead of his otherwise poorly discerned forebear.

Already in Romans 7.1–6, Paul had used the imagery of a succession of covenantal relationships to different ‘husbands’ as a way of understanding how Christ's death made it possible for the church to be released from the oldness of the letter and from bondage to sin and death, to form a new marriage, a new covenantal relationship, to a second man, in spirit and in freedom.Footnote ⁶⁴ His vocabulary there was similar to the terms he uses in 2 Cor 3. I suggest, then, that Paul's development of the idea of ‘succession’ from Moses to Jesus in this passage is underpinned by typological meditation on the end of Deuteronomy, where typology refers to correspondences with eschatological and transcendental significance.

This result may seem surprising, since ‘Joshua typology’ for Jesus is usually thought to be later than Paul. It became widespread in the early church, but it was usually associated with an emphasis on the shared name (Ἰησοῦς),Footnote ⁶⁵ whereas Paul does not use the name at all in this little vignette. It is plausible that the shared name is part of what drew his attention to resonances between the roles of Jesus and Joshua in succeeding Moses before the face of the Israelites; however, this feature is not highlighted in his account.Footnote ⁶⁶ The epistle to the Hebrews may offer the earliest extended example of Joshua typology for Jesus, and its depiction of Jesus' Joshua-like role merits comparison with 2 Corinthians.Footnote ⁶⁷ Notwithstanding their significant differences in linguistic style, narrative, motifs, theology and Christology, there are many striking similarities between these two epistles. Hebrews too is interested in Ἰησοῦς as Moses' successor, and here the depiction of ‘Jesus' and ‘Joshua’ coincides, though homonymity of their names is assumed rather than discussed (cf. Heb 4.8). Both epistles are closely concerned with Jesus' role in establishing a ‘new covenant’ (Heb 8.8; 9.15; 12.24 etc., cf. 2 Cor 3.6; also 1 Cor 11.25). In Hebrews, Jesus is depicted as the one who would successfully lead the people into the promised land, but also as the one who would correspondingly open a way for them through the veil into the Holy of Holies (Heb 7.19–20; 10.19–20). Like 2 Corinthians, Hebrews envisages a ‘vertical’ dimension to this pilgrimage, aiming to arrive ultimately not in an earthly, temporary, man-made sanctuary, but in the ‘once-and-for-all’ heavenly dwelling, not made by man (Heb 8.2, 5; 9.7, 11, cf. 2 Cor 5.1–2). Like 2 Corinthians, Hebrews uses verbs of seeing in inviting people to fix their eyes on Jesus in order to follow faithfully (βλέπομɛν, Heb 2.9; ἀφορῶντɛς, Heb 12.2). Both, however, combine this invitation to visual focus on the exalted Jesus in the sanctuary with a recollection that at present Christians ‘walk’ ‘by faith and not by a visible form’ (2 Cor 5.7); their ‘faith’ is ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the proof of things not seen’ (Heb 11.1). Both emphasise ‘today’, Hebrews as the juncture when the command is given to listen to ‘his’ voice and harden not their hearts (Heb 3.13, 15; 4.7, quoting Ps 95.7), 2 Corinthians as the time ‘until which’ the Israelites' minds have been hardened with veils on their hearts (2 Cor 3.14–15). This ‘today’ is located explicitly at (Heb 3.16), or alludes plausibly to (2 Cor 3.14–15, cf. Deut 29.3, discussed above), the point of entry into the promised land. These many similarities between Hebrews and 2 Corinthians do not indicate a close literary relationship, since there are also many differences, but they do make some relationship likely.

It is plausible, then, that Paul's typological reading of the end of Deuteronomy in 2 Cor 3 went so far as to envisage Jesus as Moses' successor, who could protect the people from idolatry and grant them the restoration of glory, the gift of the spirit and of freedom, which were associated with the inheritance of the promised land. Furthermore, this typology became more fully and explicitly expressed in later Christian thought, demonstrating its significance for Paul's own successors.