The Promised Land, He says, will not be for them but for their children. To have absolute faith in God would require of them that they embrace the ultimate mystery; what Paul Tillich (1886-1965), the great Christian theologian of the 20th Century, referred to as the “God beyond God” which is simultaneously both “ground of being” and “abyss”. For Tillich faith in God encompasses a surrender to the anxiety inherent in the being/nonbeing dichotomy, which is present in the awareness of death and which is at the heart of all existence.
In this regard it’s noteworthy that God several times says to Moses that He must shield His own face even from Moses, for it would kill him. And after Moses has spent 40 days and nights with God on Mount Sinai, when he descends his face beams so much light that he must wear a veil to protect the Israelites from its powerful intensity. Although the Israelites have experienced living under the protection of divine providence, they nevertheless are still unable to confront the terrifying awareness of their own existential vulnerability.
If we now jump to 40 years later, past the death of Moses on the border of the Promised Land and then many years after that, past the death of Joshua who succeeded Moses and conquered the Land of Canaan, and then even later than that to the time of the Judges, we read in the last line of the Book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Despite having been brought to the Promised Land, the Israelites have become a lawless nation with each individual acting in his own self-interest.
In fact, the Bible tells us, it was a period of widespread corruption and depravity. The commandments that God had given them have been forgotten and even the priests of the holy ark have become dishonest. There is increasing social unrest including intermittent battles with the Philistines and other neighboring nations, occasional worship of local heathen gods and some of the tribes of Israel have even begun fighting one another. The order of things is breaking down, and though the Israelites are no longer slaves they are also not yet free.
