1. And Moses went up. He of course has to go up to reach the mountaintop from where he will see the grand panorama of the land which he will not enter. The action of ascent, however, also signals the trajectory of Moses’s life: he is born in the Nile Valley, first encounters God in the burning bush on a mountain, returns from his mission in Egypt to that same mountain to receive the law there, and now dies on a mountaintop.

the LORD let him see. Elsewhere, this verb (the hiphʿil or causative conjugation of the verb r-ʾ-h, “to see”) has been translated as “show,” but here it is important to preserve the literal sense of allowing or causing to see because that is the pointed meaning of this verb when it occurs again in verse 4.

from the Gilead as far as Dan. Moses’s gaze is directed first to the north, to the trans-Jordanian region of the Gilead, and then westward to the tribal territory of Dan in the northernmost part of the Land of Israel. Dan’s original settlement was near the coastal plain in the south, and only later did the tribe migrate to the north; so the indication of tribal geography reflects the time of writing, not that of Moses.

2. and all Naphtali. The gaze now begins to sweep to the south, ending with the Negeb and the plain along the Dead Sea.

4. the land that I swore to Abraham. This final mention of the promise to the forefathers links the end of Deuteronomy with the beginning of the Patriarchal narrative in Genesis.

5. by the word of the LORD. The literal sense of this idiom, repeatedly used elsewhere in the Torah, is “by the mouth of the LORD,” i.e., by divine decree. But the use of “mouth” encouraged the Midrash to imagine here a “death by a kiss” (mitat neshiqah), the ultimate favor granted to the righteous leader.

6. And he was buried. The Hebrew says literally, “and he buried him,” but the third-person singular verb without specified grammatical subject is not infrequently used in biblical Hebrew in place of a passive verb. Many interpreters have understood this ostensibly active verb to mean that God buried Moses. That possibility cannot be dismissed, but God’s acting as a gravedigger for Moses seems incongruous with the representation of the deity in these narratives, and thus construing the verb as a passive is more likely.

in the glen. This note of location is of a piece with the mystifying reticence in the whole report of Moses’s death. It is unclear how or by whom he was brought down from the mountaintop to be buried in a glen, though the evident purpose of this removal from the heights is to underline Moses’s irreducible humanity: we are not to imagine any act of “assumption” into the celestial sphere; Moses is buried down below, like all his fellow men.

no man has known his burial place to this day. As many commentators have observed, the occultation of the grave of Moses serves to prevent any possibility of a cult of Moses, with pilgrimages to his gravesite. The phrase “to this day” is a giveaway of the temporal perspective from which this concluding chapter of the Torah was written. Both the rabbis of the Talmud and the medieval Hebrew commentators were perplexed about the authorship of the story of the death of Moses. One opinion was that Joshua wrote this chapter; another, more poignant one, was that God dictated it and Moses wrote it down, weeping (Baba Batra 14B). But the phrase “to this day” is regularly used in biblical narrative to signal a present moment shared by the writer and his audience that is many generations removed from the time of the reported events.

7. one hundred and twenty years old. This is, of course, the typological number for the extreme limit of a human life (see Genesis 6:3, which first sets this limit), based on the Mesopotamian sexagesimal numerical system. Several eminent rabbinic sages are given biographies that divide their lives into three large periods of forty (another formulaic number), and some commentators have suggested that such a division may also be implied in the life of Moses: forty years in Egypt, forty years in Midian until his return to Egypt, forty years as leader of Israel in the wilderness.

10. no prophet again arose in Israel like Moses. This clause again reflects the temporal distance of the writer from the event reported. There will be other prophets in Israel, but none will enjoy the unique stature of Moses, whom God knew (or embraced—the same verb that is used in different contexts for sexual intimacy) face-to-face. Deuteronomy in this way concludes with an implicit claim for its own irrevocable authority, for no subsequent revelation of God’s will to a prophet can equal the words conveyed to Israel by the one prophet whom God knew face-to-face. Some interpreters detect here a clue to the composition of this passage in the time of Ezra, when the period of prophecy was deemed to have come to an end, but it is safer simply to infer that the Book of Deuteronomy is confirming its own status, and that of the entire Torah which it now concludes, as the product of an unparalleled prophecy that suffers no amendment or replacement.

11–12. with all the signs . . . to all his servants and to all his land, and with all the strong hand . . . before the eyes of all Israel. It is fitting that the Book of Deuteronomy concludes with one last instance of the grand sweeping sentences that are characteristic of its style, here running from the beginning of verse 10 to the end of verse 12. This final flourish flaunts the anaphora of “all” to convey the comprehensiveness of Moses’s epic undertaking: he executed all the signs that God had directed him to do, made all their spectacular effects manifest to all Pharaoh’s servants in all the land of Egypt, before the eyes of all Israel. It is beautifully apt that the last words of the book should be leʿeyney kol-yisraʾel, “before the eyes of all Israel,” for these words pick up the strong rhetoric of witnessing that has informed the book. The claims of the book on the sense of history and the religious loyalty of its audience are founded on Israel’s having witnessed God’s great portents in the formative experience of national liberation. The envisaged result of that experience is a unified nation sharing the legacy of its supreme prophet—“all Israel,” the concluding words of the book.