Our friend John
Bradford exhibited this painting at the current Annual Exhibition of the
American
Academy of Arts and
Letters. It received a special cash award and was purchased by the Academy for
donation to a museum.
The Children of Israel
were nagging Moses for water. The Biblical narrative tells us that God
instructed Moses to command the rock to produce water, but instead he struck it
with his staff, three times. This use of force was considered a great sin, and
he paid dearly for it, being denied the right to enter the Promised
Land.
Moses’ use of force,
rather than his own soft, halting voice, as God ordered, might have led his
followers to attribute god-like powers to him.
…Moses impressed his monotheistic vision upon the Jews
with such force that in the succeeding three millennia, Jews have never confused
the messenger with the Author of the message. As Princeton philosopher Walter
Kaufmann has written: "in Greece, the heroes of the past were held to have
been sired by a god or to have been born of a goddess ... [and] in Egypt,
the Pharaoh was considered divine." But despite the extraordinary veneration
accorded Moses — "there has not arisen a prophet since like Moses" is the
Bible's verdict (Deuteronomy
34:10) — no Jewish thinker ever thought he was anything other than a man.
See And No One Knows His Burial Place to This
Day.
Source: Joseph Telushkin.
Jewish
Literacy. NY: William Morrow and Co.,
1991
