Moses and Elijah: Before and During the Transfiguration

Faith & Science Conversation
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Before asking what Moses and Elijah were doing with Jesus at the Transfiguration, I want to ask a prior question: What did Jewish scripture and tradition think had happened to Moses and Elijah before they ever appeared on that mountain?

Elijah presents the easier case. Second Kings does not record his death. Elijah and Elisha are walking together when a fiery chariot separates them and Elijah ascends “in a whirlwind into heaven” (2 Kings 2:11). Centuries later, Sirach still speaks of Elijah as one who had been taken up and who was expected to appear again at the appointed time.

Moses is stranger. Deuteronomy is explicit that Moses died in Moab. Yet his burial was unlike anyone else’s: he was buried where no human witness apparently observed it, and “no one knows his burial place to this day” (Deut. 34:5–6). Then Jude adds a detail found nowhere in the Old Testament: Michael the archangel disputed with the devil “about the body of Moses” (Jude 9).

So what became of Moses?

That question was already being asked by Jews around the time of Jesus. Josephus describes Moses disappearing when a cloud suddenly came over him, although Josephus also acknowledges that the Torah says Moses died. Philo describes Moses leaving mortal life for immortality and beginning a journey from earth to heaven. Other Jewish traditions speak of divine burial, angelic involvement, and eventually even claim that “Moses did not die.”

I would like to look first at those traditions—carefully distinguishing the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Jewish sources, later rabbinic traditions, and still later Jewish legends—and only then turn to Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9.

My particular question is this: Is there enough Jewish background to make it reasonable to understand Moses and Elijah as existing in some transformed heavenly condition when they appeared with Jesus?

And there is a second puzzle. Peter apparently knows that the two strangers are Moses and Elijah. But Peter had never met either man, and there were obviously no authenticated portraits from which to recognize them. The Gospels tell us that the two men were talking with Jesus before Peter named them. Did their conversation identify them? Did Jesus tell the disciples who they were? Or does the narrative simply leave the means of recognition unexplained?

I don’t know the answer to either question yet. That’s what I would like to explore.

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I’ll begin with Elijah.

The biblical account is remarkable for what it says—and what it does not say.

In 2 Kings 2:11, while Elijah and Elisha are walking and talking, “a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven.”

The text does not say that Elijah died. It does not describe a burial, and there is no tomb. Elisha sees Elijah disappear and subsequently takes up Elijah’s mantle.

There is an interesting qualification, however. The company of prophets apparently did not immediately conclude that Elijah had permanently departed the earthly world. They proposed sending fifty men to search for him, because they thought “the spirit of the LORD has caught him up and thrown him down on some mountain or into some valley” (2 Kings 2:16). Elisha initially told them not to go. They searched for three days and did not find him (vv. 16–18).

Much later, Malachi contains the promise:

“Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes.” (Malachi 4:5 NRSV)

And by the second century BC, Ben Sira could describe Elijah as one who “was taken up by a whirlwind of fire, in a chariot with horses of fire” and who was “ready at the appointed time” to return and perform an eschatological role (Sirach 48:9–10).

So, before we get anywhere near the Transfiguration, it seems we can establish at least this much: Jewish Scripture and pre-Christian Jewish tradition provided a basis for believing that Elijah had not undergone an ordinary death and burial and that he could appear again.

What they do not yet tell us is what sort of existence Elijah had between his departure and his expected return. Was he bodily alive somewhere? Transformed? Heavenly? Something else?

I think that is the first question worth exploring before we turn to the considerably more complicated case of Moses.

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Two very, very interesting posts. I don’t have time now but in a couple of days I would like to come back to this topic. This is a great thread.

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  • A methodological note: I have deliberately not introduced Platonism—or the concept of an inherently immortal, disembodied soul—into this discussion. So far I am trying to let the biblical texts and the relevant Jewish sources supply their own categories.
  • If a Platonic or otherwise Greek concept of the soul becomes necessary to explain Moses, Elijah, or the Transfiguration, we can introduce it when the evidence warrants it. But I don’t want to assume it at the outset.
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Moses and Elijah both are said to have gone up a mountain to talk with God. It is not a stretch to say they all ascended the same mountain.
From this starting point, I have wondered if perhaps there was a time warp going on, that to Moses and Elijah they went up and came down, the same as Jesus did, but that their starting points in time differed.

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  • What we MISSED Reading the Transfiguration… [9:11] This video unpacks possibly the most profound story in Jesus earthly ministry. It in, secrets and deeper meanings are revealed that I hope will encourage you in your personal walk with our Lord.
  • March 28, 2024
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Nothing new there, and it missed some points. A big point is that the mountain they went up was the same mountain the Jews believed that the rebellious “sons of God” spirits descended on to start their mischief among mankind and was therefore called “the gates of hell” by all the pagans in the ANE and the Greeks.

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  • As for Moses, the evidence becomes considerably more complicated.
    • Deuteronomy 34:5–6 says that Moses died in Moab and was buried there. But there is something peculiar about the account: Who witnessed either his death or his burial?
    • Moses had gone up Mount Nebo alone. The text reports his death and burial, but then says that “no one knows his burial place to this day.”
    • And Jude 9 makes the mystery stranger still: Michael the archangel disputed with the devil “about the body of Moses.”
    • So before looking at later Jewish traditions about what became of Moses, I think we should distinguish two questions:
      • What does Deuteronomy say happened to Moses?
      • And what, according to Deuteronomy, did anyone actually see happen to him?
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  • What does Deuteronomy say happened to Moses?
    • It says plainly that Moses died in Moab and was buried there. Indeed, it says twice that he died (Deut. 34:5, 7).
  • And what, according to Deuteronomy, did anyone actually see happen to him?
    • Apparently, nothing. Moses went up Mount Nebo, where the LORD showed him the land. The narrative then tells us that Moses died and was buried, but it identifies no human witness to either event. On the contrary, it says that “no one knows his burial place to this day” (34:6).
  • That distinction seems important. Deuteronomy tells the reader that Moses died; it does not tell us that anyone saw him die. Nor does it tell us that anyone saw his burial.
  • So the mystery is already present in Deuteronomy itself: Moses’ death is narrated, but the end of his earthly existence is unwitnessed.
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  • I’ve been consulting Daniel Lam’s recent Divinised Humans in Ancient Judaism (The Library of Second Temple Studies). Lam devotes an entire chapter to Moses, examining how Jewish texts developed the biblical portrayals of Moses as an extraordinary human figure. Since my immediate interest is what Jewish traditions might contribute to understanding Moses’ appearance at the Transfiguration, I’ll begin with Lam’s chapter on Moses and work through the evidence in approximately chronological order, distinguishing what the sources themselves say from Lam’s interpretation of them.
  1. Hebrew Bible — Exodus 4:16; 7:1; 34:29–30; Deuteronomy 34:5–7.
    • We’ve already treated Deuteronomy extensively, so these needn’t be repeated at length.
  2. Ezekiel the Tragedian, Exagoge — this is the first major extrabiblical source in Lam’s chapter (pp. 99–102).
    • Moses dreams of an exalted enthronement: the heavenly figure gives Moses his crown and sceptre, Moses sits on the throne, surveys the whole earth, and the stars fall before him. Lam concludes that Exagoge depicts Moses as enthroned, receiving royal ornaments and worship, ruling, and possibly being enlarged—but importantly does not explicitly give Moses immortality.
  3. Sirach 44:23–45:2 — especially the fascinating textual difference.
    • The Greek has God making Moses “like the glory of the holy ones”; the surviving Hebrew has language about God strengthening/honoring him “in the higher realms.” Lam thinks this may hint at angelification, but explicitly acknowledges that the text is vague and that transformation cannot confidently be established.
  4. 1 Enoch 89:36, the Animal Apocalypse/Book of Dreams.
    • Moses, represented as a sheep, “became a man” before building the Lord’s house.
  5. The Qumran Moses fragments, particularly 4Q374 and 4Q377.
    • These come immediately before Philo. The material is fragmentary and disputed. In 4Q377 Moses is described as being consecrated “like an angel,” but Lam himself concludes that this probably isn’t sufficient evidence that Moses crossed the human/divine boundary.
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As you note, there was a tradition that Moses did not die but was taken into heaven just like Elijah. I think Josephus says Moses lied in writing about his own death to keep himself from behind worshipped or something like that.

But it we look at both (Elijah and Moses) their accounts in the OT, neither saw the face of God. Here on a mountain, both are allowed to see the face of God in Jesus.

Moses on Sinai: Moses asked to see God’s glory, but God told him no one could see His face and live, letting Moses see only His back (Exodus 33).

Elijah on Horeb: Elijah experienced God passing by in a whisper, but he covered his face with his cloak out of awe and fear (1 Kings 19).

Before this, Catholics believe Elijah was in the bosom of Abraham, not a witness to the Beatific vision.

For me, the transfiguration is a theophany where Jesus is connected with seeing God’s face. It’s a revelation of the incarnation and one of the places where the Synoptic gospels say, “hey, this guy is God.”

How Peter recognized them is not an issue. Ancient bios often telescopes or leaves things out and casts literary spotlights. This is not an exact transcription of only what happened.

Peter wants to build three tents but the heavenly voice is pretty clear who is at the top of the pecking order here and it’s not the law and prophets.

Vinnie

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I largely agree with this. The only thing I’d tweak is Elijah and Abraham’s bosom. Since Scripture never records Elijah’s death, Catholic theology doesn’t require placing him there. Aquinas, for example, thought Elijah had been preserved alive in an exceptional state, not yet admitted to the beatific vision (ST III, q.49, a.5, ad 2).

I’d also soften the Josephus point: he says Moses disappeared in a cloud and had written that he died so people would not claim he had “gone to God,” but Josephus still speaks of Moses as having died (Antiquities 4.326–327).

Aside from this, tip top.

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  • The Josephus passage is one of the ones I want to get to. What particularly interests me is that Josephus seems to preserve both sides of the problem. He says that a cloud suddenly came over Moses and Moses disappeared, but also says that Moses wrote that he died, lest people conclude that because of his extraordinary virtue he had “gone to God.” And Josephus himself then says that Moses died. So I’m not sure I’d call it Moses lying; Josephus seems to preserve an unresolved ambiguity between Moses’ death and his extraordinary disappearance.
  • Your second point about Moses and Elijah as recipients of earlier theophanies is also interesting. I’m deliberately holding off on interpreting their role at the Transfiguration until I’ve finished looking at what the Jewish sources say about what became of them. But I definitely want to come back to that.
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I think the important part is not having access to the Beatific vision. I think that only comes after the work on the Cross. Elijah is a mystery as is Moses given the NT portrayal.

Catechism: Scripture calls the abode of the dead, to which the dead Christ went down, “hell” - Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek—because those who are there are deprived of the vision of God. Such is the case for all the dead, whether evil or righteous, while they await the Redeemer: which does not mean that their lot is identical, as Jesus shows through the parable of the poor man Lazarus who was received into “Abraham’s bosom”: “It is precisely these holy souls, who awaited their Savior in Abraham’s bosom, whom Christ the Lord delivered when he descended into hell.”

As for Josephus, this is what happens when you go from memory in early morning. Good points. I misremembered. @Terry_Sampson Josephus is trying to please everyone it seems. Scripture on Moses, his Greco-Roman Audience (he seems to want to make sure they understand Moses was not a divine figure to be worshipped) and is even giving an ode to the traditions of Moses’s assumption with the cloud. I think his view is Moses wrote a preemptive account of his death so people wouldn’t worship him as a divine being of some sort. We know that Jude preserves a tradition of angels fighting over Moses’s body: But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’" (Jude 1:9).
Luke specifies Elijah and Moses appeared in glory and were discussing Jesus’ future exodus. This seems to treat them as aware, glorified bodies. Both Elijjah and Moses seem to show up in Rev 11 as well. The full Jewish tradition appears messy on what happens to Moses. Good luck in wading through that. The NT seems to put Moses and Elijah together in several places.

If we want to interpret the Transfiguration I think we need to consider genre as a start. It’s in a gospel. That means it is an ancient bios and has Jesus as its primary subject. I take the Transfiguration to be about who Jesus is and it is connecting it to the popular stories of Moses and Elijah where they did not see the face God. There are a lot of connections. For example, Pitre writes:

“In other words, just as Moses took the three priestly figures of Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu (two brothers) with him to the top of Mount Sinai in order to see the God of Israel, so now Jesus takes Peter, James, and John (two brothers) with him to the top of the mountain in Galilee in order to see Jesus transfigured.” Jesus and Divine Christology

The incident with Elijah also occurred on a mountain (Sinai IIRC). Pitre again:

" . . . the Synoptic accounts of the transfiguration suggest that Jesus is not merely a human being; he is also a heavenly being—one who temporarily lifts the visible appearance of his humanity to give his disciples a glimpse of his invisible heavenly glory. In this regard, it is significant that other human figures in early Jewish literature only become luminous after death, once they have been raised from the dead (Dan 12:6–7) or are exalted into heaven (Testament of Abraham 11:4–9). By contrast, Jesus appears dressed in luminous garments during his earthly life. In other words, Jesus is being depicted as a human who is already a heavenly being, but whose heavenly identity is currently hidden under his ordinary human appearance.”. Jesus and Divine Christology

Vinnie

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Continuing with Lam’s sources:

  • 6. Philo of Alexandria

With Philo we finally reach a source that speaks quite directly to the question I started with: What became of Moses after his death?

Philo, writing in the first century, accepts Moses’ departure from mortal life, but describes it as something considerably more than ordinary death. In Life of Moses 2.288 he calls Moses’ end his “pilgrimage from earth to heaven” and says that he was about to “leave this mortal life for immortality.” Philo then says that God resolved Moses’ twofold nature of soul and body into a single unity and transformed his whole being into pure mind. At the burial, moreover, Moses was buried with no one present, “surely by no mortal hands but by immortal powers.”

Elsewhere Philo is even more explicit about the body-soul distinction. In On the Virtues 76, Moses begins to change “from mortal life to immortal existence”; his body is stripped away like a shell while his soul is laid bare and departs.

This seems to be the first source we have encountered in which my earlier methodological caution about importing Platonism becomes directly relevant. Here I am not importing a Greek conception of the soul into a Jewish text; Philo himself is supplying a strongly Hellenistic body-soul anthropology.

Lam goes considerably further in interpreting all this as Moses’ “divinisation” and argues that Moses becomes a purely noetic, angelic being. There is scholarly disagreement about how far Philo actually elevates Moses, so I don’t think we need to settle that question here. What seems considerably less controversial is the point relevant to this thread: Philo understands Moses’ death as a transition from mortal earthly existence to immortal heavenly existence.

That does not give us a resurrected Moses, nor apparently a Moses retaining his ordinary earthly body. But it does give us, from a Jewish author roughly contemporary with the beginnings of Christianity, a Moses who has died and nevertheless continues in an immortal heavenly mode of existence.

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7. Testament of Moses

The Testament of Moses is particularly interesting because it is probably a first-century Jewish work, perhaps from before the destruction of the Temple. Unfortunately, the ending of the surviving text is lost—an important limitation when we’re asking what it thought happened to Moses at death.

What survives calls Moses a “divine prophet” and a “great messenger,” a phrase that could also be translated “great angel.” Lam is appropriately cautious: in context Moses may simply be described as God’s extraordinary mediator, and the terminology by itself does not establish that Moses became an angel.

So this source is tantalizing but inconclusive for our particular question.

8. Josephus

Josephus is much more interesting—and Vinnie and Massimiliano have already anticipated the problem.

Josephus describes Moses going up the mountain with Eleazar and Joshua, dismissing them, and then disappearing when a cloud suddenly came over him. Yet Josephus immediately says that Moses wrote in the sacred books that he died, lest people say that because of his extraordinary virtue he had “gone to God.” Josephus subsequently speaks of Moses as having died.

Lam sees the disappearance, the absence of an ordinary burial account, and the language surrounding Moses’ departure as suggestive of apotheosis or immortality. I would put it more cautiously: Josephus leaves us with both Moses’ death and an extraordinary disappearance associated with the possibility that he had “gone to God.” He does not explain Moses’ subsequent condition nearly as explicitly as Philo does.

9. Pseudo-Philo, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum

LAB, generally dated somewhere between about 50 and 150 CE, gives us yet another picture. God tells Moses:

“I will take you from here and lay you down to sleep with your fathers … You will rest until I visit the world. I will raise up you and your fathers from the earth in which you sleep and you will come together and dwell in the immortal dwelling place that is not subject to time.”

This one is especially important for our purposes because its categories are quite different from Philo’s. Moses dies and sleeps; God buries him; and he awaits a future raising from the earth into an immortal dwelling.

So by this point we don’t have a single Jewish answer to “What became of Moses?” We have substantially different ones. Philo describes a transition from mortal life to immortal heavenly existence. Josephus gives us death combined with an extraordinary disappearance. LAB gives us death, sleep, future resurrection, and eventual immortal existence.

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Either Plato philonizes or Philo platonizes.

I think Josephus’s account of Moses’s death is strange and way it is described seems odd.

Vinnie

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Continuing with Lam’s sources … we now move beyond the material roughly contemporary with the New Testament into later Jewish traditions. These obviously cannot simply be read back into the first century, but they are interesting evidence for the different ways Jewish interpreters subsequently dealt with the peculiar account of Moses’ death in Deuteronomy 34.

10. The Targums on Deuteronomy 34:6–7

  • Targum Onqelos says that God buried Moses and that when Moses died, “the splendor of the glory of his face” had not changed. Targum Neofiti similarly says that “the splendour of his face had not changed.” Lam observes that both traditions therefore preserve Moses’ transformed, radiant appearance through the time of his death.
  • Targum Pseudo-Jonathan develops the burial differently. Moses is accompanied by groups of ministering angels, including Michael and Gabriel, and four angelic “masters of wisdom” lay him in his burial place. But unlike Onqelos and Neofiti, Pseudo-Jonathan does not preserve the tradition that Moses’ face remained radiant at death.

11. Sifre Deuteronomy 357

Here the tradition becomes considerably more striking. Sifre Deuteronomy, which Lam dates to around 200 CE, preserves several opinions about Moses’ death. One says:

“Others say: Moses never died, and he stands and serves on high.”

The argument connects the word “there” in “Moses died there” (Deut. 34:5) with Moses being “there with the LORD” (Exod. 34:28). Lam understands this as a tradition in which Moses continues to serve God after his earthly life.

This is one of the sources I find particularly interesting because the text itself can be read on https://www.sefaria.org/texts

12. Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 13b

The same remarkable interpretation appears much later in b. Sotah:

“Others declare that Moses never died… As in the latter passage it means standing and ministering, so also in the former it means standing and ministering.”

Lam dates this tractate to approximately 450–550 CE and therefore, again, it cannot be evidence for what Jews in Jesus’ time necessarily believed. But it demonstrates the persistence of a Jewish interpretive tradition in which the statement “Moses died there” could coexist with the claim that Moses remained “standing and ministering” before God.

At this point I think Vinnie’s description of the Jewish tradition as “messy” is fair. We do not find one consistent account of Moses’ fate. We find death and burial, extraordinary disappearance, transition to immortal existence, future resurrection, and eventually even the explicit claim that Moses “never died” but “stands and serves on high.”

That diversity is itself important. I don’t think the evidence permits us simply to say, “Here is what Judaism believed happened to Moses.” There wasn’t one answer.

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You said it, not me. In either case, though, it’s important to note, IMO, that Terry_Sampson did neither.

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Yeah, that’s really important.

Back the. I used to imagine something analogous to Abraham’s bosom as a possible intermediate state for unbaptized infants until the final judgment, but that it doesn’t really work.

The Church simply entrusts them to God’s mercy and allows us to hope for their salvation.

If they are saved, they are saved entirely through the merits of Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit. I think that God may apply the fruits of Christ’s redemption to them extra-sacramentally, in a way known to Him (afterall God is not bound by the sacraments), perhaps in connection with the prayer and intercession of the Church. And if that is how they are saved, there is no doctrinal reason to assume that they must remain deprived of the beatific vision until the Last Judgment, they could already enjoy the vision of God (specially because they have no personal sins), while, like all the blessed, still awaiting the resurrection of the body.