Difficult Questions: Why Did God Bury Moses?

From time to time, we dig into Scripture and seek answers to difficult questions from the Bible. Today, we are asking the question: “Why did God bury Moses’ body Himself?”

Then Moses went up to Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab and climbed Pisgah Peak, which is across from Jericho…. So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, just as the Lord had said. The Lord buried him in a valley near Beth-peor in Moab, but to this day no one knows the exact place. Deuteronomy 34:1, 5-6 (New Living Translation, NLT)

It is a special thing that God Himself buried the body of His servant Moses. However, the primary reason God buried Moses was not because of their special relationship. After all, consider the special relationship between God and Abraham or between God and David- but neither of those men was buried by God. No, I believe the main reason He buried Moses has more to do with the children of Israel than it did with Moses.

The Israelites had spent more than 400 years in a nation that was steeped in the occult and in the worship of other gods. The Egyptians had a major fascination with death and the afterlife. Theirs was a society that focused much on death and on the dead. The pyramids and the elaborate tomb decorations and ornate objects buried with their leaders attest to the fact that theirs was a culture that spent an excessive amount of time and resources looking towards death.

A people who spent centuries living in that culture would have been highly affected by it. After all, in the short time when Moses was receiving the ten commandments, the children of Israel created a golden idol and were committing sinful acts of worship to it. It did not take long for them to turn from the God who had delivered them. So, what would they do if they knew where Moses’ body was laid to rest?

It is likely that the Israelites would have worked to erect an elaborate tomb for the body of Moses. His burial place would have become an object of occult worship. They would have enshrined his body and turned their worship to the remains of Moses rather than God. They would have responded to his death in similar fashion to the way the Egyptians responded to the death of a Pharaoh. They might have even declared Moses to be a god like the Egyptians did with their leaders. They would have turned from God and they probably would have never left that place to enter the land of Canaan.

God hid the body of Moses to protect the nation of Israel from falling into sin and worshiping the remains of a man rather than the God who made than man. Heathen culture had made an impression on Israel and God was working to get it out of them. In the same way, we must be on our guard so the heathen beliefs and traditions of the culture around us don’t affect our worship of the one true God.