The Discourses of Deuteronomy and the Death of Moses
In the thirty-seven days before his death Moses delivers Deuteronomy—summary, rebuke and testament—and on the seventh of Adar he dies on Mount Nebo at a hundred and twenty.
On the first day of the eleventh month of the fortieth year Moses began to speak—thirty-seven days before his death. Deuteronomy is his farewell address, delivered in the plains of Moab to a generation that does not remember Egypt. He retells the journey without softening it, naming where the people failed and where he failed. He repeats the Ten Utterances, pronounces the Shema—hear, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one—and sets out the laws of settled life: courts, kingship, war, the field, the poor, the seventh year. He puts the choice bluntly: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; choose life. He sings the song Haazinu and blesses the tribes one by one, hands leadership to Joshua before the whole people, writes the Torah down and gives it to the Levites. On the seventh of Adar, his birthday, aged a hundred and twenty, he climbed Mount Nebo, was shown the whole Land, and died there by the word of God; no one knows his burial place to this day.
How we know
On the chronology
Here the chronologies differ not by years but by a century. Seder Olam Rabbah places the Exodus in 1313 BCE. The prevailing academic date is the thirteenth century, the time of Ramesses II: its firm anchor is the stele of Pharaoh Merneptah of 1208 BCE, the first mention of Israel outside the Tanakh, where Israel is already in Canaan. A minority of scholars holds to the fifteenth century, reckoning by the plain count of I Kings 6:1 — four hundred and eighty years from the Exodus to Solomon's Temple. The timeline shows the prevailing dating.
Sources
Tanakh
- Devarim 1:3 — the date the addresses began: the first day of the eleventh month of the fortieth year
- Devarim 6:4 — “Shema Yisrael” — the heart of the farewell address
- Devarim 30:19 — “choose life” — the choice set before the people
- Devarim 31–34 — the handing over to Yehoshua, the song Haazinu, the blessings, Nevo and the death
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Devarim Rabbah 11 — Moshe’s plea for his life and his last hours — the midrash
- Bava Batra 15a — who wrote the last eight verses of the Torah
- Sotah 13b — death “by a kiss”; the Almighty Himself saw to the burial
- Kiddushin 38a — the seventh of Adar — the day of birth and of death; manna eaten until the sixteenth of Nisan
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.
People and places
Moses · Joshua · Mount Nebo · The Torah (Pentateuch) · Deuteronomy · Tefillin