3. But I shall not go up. The initial Hebrew conjunction ki most often means “for” but also sometimes has an adversative sense, “though” or “but,” which seems probable here: go up, and My messenger will go before you, but don’t expect Me to go up with you.

lest I put an end to you on the way. These words seem to be dictated by a strongly anthropomorphic characterization of God: after the flaring of His anger over the Golden Calf, He prefers to keep a certain distance from this provoking people, whose behavior could easily push Him to destroy them entirely. Abraham ibn Ezra understands God’s refusal to dwell in the midst of Israel as a cancellation of the construction project for the Tabernacle—a not unreasonable reading, because all along the Tabernacle was conceived as an institutionalized focus for God’s presence in the midst of the people.

4. none of them put on their jewelry. Given the fact that they have just made a mass donation of gold earrings for the fashioning of the Golden Calf, one gets a sense that they have come out of Egypt bedecked with a rich abundance of precious ornaments.

5. You are a stiff-necked people. If but a single moment I were to go up in your midst. This entire verse duplicates verse 3 and has the look of an uneven editorial splicing of sources. One difference, however, is that in the first instance these words were addressed only to Moses, whereas now he is enjoined to report them to the people, and with a certain note of intensification (“If but a single moment . . .”). Another element of puzzling duplication is the injunction to remove the jewelry, an act that the Israelites have already executed. Richard Elliott Friedman explains the contradiction by proposing that the verb here, “put down from upon you,” is meant to indicate not just a temporary removal of the ornaments but a permanent renunciation of wearing them during the Wilderness period. This reading is supported by the odd prepositional use in the next verse of “stripped themselves of their jewelry from Mount Horeb,” where “from” probably has a temporal sense (which this translation reflects by adding the adverb “onward”).

7. would take. Biblical Hebrew has no specialized verbal form for the iterative tense (that is, habitually repeated actions), but the use here of the imperfective followed by the perfective form and the contextual clues make it clear that this whole passage is in the iterative.

and he called it the Tent of Meeting. Elsewhere, this designation was synonymous with the Tabernacle, but here there is no question of erecting that elaborate structure but rather of Moses’s pitching his own tent outside the camp and making it serve as a Tent of Meeting, a place where God meets or encounters Moses as Israel’s spokesman. Ibn Ezra proposes, with an eye to the iterative character of the passage, that Moses has placed the second set of tablets of the Law in this tent. The Tent itself is located outside the camp because Israel, after the Golden Calf, is deemed unworthy to have God’s meeting place with them inside the camp.

8. each man would station himself . . . they would look after Moses. This setup replicates horizontally the vertical setup in which Moses goes up on the mountain to encounter God and the people wait below, looking upward at the cloud on the summit. The refractory people now appears to have resumed the stance of obedient followers of Moses.

9. the pillar of cloud would come down . . . and speak with Moses. It is of course God speaking from within the pillar of cloud. The oddness of the formulation is dictated by the fact that it is a vividly faithful representation of the people’s visual perspective: as each man stands at the entrance of his tent looking after Moses, and as he sees the pillar of cloud (verse 10), it seems to him as though the pillar of cloud were speaking with Moses.

11. And the LORD would speak to Moses face-to-face, as a man speaks to his fellow. These two idioms for direct communication cannot be literally true because the burden of what follows in this chapter is that no man, not even Moses, can see God’s face. The hyperbole is in all likelihood a continuation of the visual perspective of the people so clearly marked in verses 8–10: as it appears to the Israelites from their vantage point in front of their tents, Moses conversing with the pillar of cloud is speaking to God as a man speaks to his fellow.

Joshua son of Nun, a lad. The preceding narrative conveys a strong impression that Joshua is a man of mature years. Ibn Ezra, who places him in his fifties at this juncture, plausibly infers that the Hebrew naʿar here reflects its not infrequent sense of someone in a subaltern position (it would thus be a synonym for “attendant”).

12. You have not made known to me whom You will send with me. The verb “to know,” both in the hiphʿil (causative) and qal (simple) conjugations, is the key word of this section, which turns on Moses’s urgent need to know both the nature of the guidance God will provide Israel through the wilderness and God’s intrinsic nature. Moses appears to balk at God’s previous declaration that He will not go up in the midst of the people to the promised land but instead will delegate a divine messenger for that task.

I know you by name. The Hebrew idiom suggests both special election and intimate relationship.

13. for this nation is Your people. Moses seeks to remind God of His covenantal attachment to Israel, bearing in mind that in the flare-up of divine anger when Israel made the Golden Calf, God had referred to the Israelites as “your people.”

14. My presence shall go, and I will grant you rest. The Hebrew is altogether cryptic—and so compact that the whole sentence is only four words—and this translation mirrors that cryptic effect. Presumably, what God is telling Moses is that He will indeed go before the people through the wilderness, and thus lighten Moses’s burden, “grant you rest” (alternately, that verb could refer, according to biblical idiom, to giving Moses, or the people, “rest” from their enemies when they enter the land). But God, scarcely willing to concede that He Himself will lead the people, words the response so laconically, suppressing the clarifying “before you” after “My presence shall go,” that Moses is by no means sure what God means, and so he goes on to say, “If Your presence does not go, do not take us up from here.” He then stipulates (verse 16) that it is only through God’s presence among the Israelites as they journey onward that his own favored status before God can be confirmed, and the election of Israel as well. In all this, it should be noted that “presence” and “face” are the same Hebrew word, panim.

18. Show me, pray, Your glory. We are not likely to recover precisely what the key term kavod—glory, honor, divine presence, and very literally, “weightiness”—conveyed to the ancient Hebrew imagination. In any case, Moses, who first fearfully encountered God in the fire in the bush, is now ready and eager to be granted a full-scale epiphany, a frontal revelation of the look and character of this divinity that has been speaking to him from within the pillar of cloud.

19. I shall make all My goodness pass in front of you. In response to the request that God show Moses His glory, He offers instead to show him His “goodness” (tuv), a manifestation of His moral attributes as divinity. But God’s goodness is not amenable to human prediction, calculation, or manipulation: it is God’s untrammeled choice to bestow grace and compassion on whom He sees fit, as He has done with Moses.

21. And the LORD said. Extraordinarily, there are three consecutive iterations of the formula for introducing speech (verses 19, 20, 21) with no response from Moses. Moses, having asked to see God face-to-face, is in a daunting situation where it is God Who will do all the talking and explain the limits of the revelation to be vouchsafed Moses.

22. shield you with My palm. The Hebrew kaf means the inside of the hand, the part that holds objects, and is not the general word for hand (yad). The conjunction of the verb “shield” (or “screen”) with kaf is unusual, and perhaps kaf is used here because it is the tender part of the hand. Another scholarly proposal is that kaf in this instance is an assimilative spelling of kanaf, “wing” (or “border,” of a garment), a noun elsewhere idiomatically associated with shielding or protection.

23. you will see My back, but My face will not be seen. Volumes of theology have been spun out of these enigmatic words. Imagining the deity in frankly physical terms was entirely natural for the ancient monotheists: this God had, or at least could assume, a concrete manifestation which had front and rear, face and back, and that face man was forbidden to see. But such concreteness does not imply conceptual naïveté. Through it the Hebrew writer suggests an idea that makes good sense from later theological perspectives: that God’s intrinsic nature is inaccessible, and perhaps also intolerable, to the finite mind of man, but that something of His attributes—His “goodness,” the directional pitch of His ethical intentions, the afterglow of the effulgence of His presence—can be glimpsed by humankind.