Exodus 34 and 2 Corinthians 3–4 : Veils and Radiance (part 1 of 3)

PART ONE OF THREE

Paul’s use of the Old Testament is, from the perspective of contemporary practice of hermeneutics, surprising. If the epistle of 1 Corinthians were lost to us, like others in the correspondence, and one of my students wrote in an essay of the rock that Moses bashed and splashed: “That rock was Christ,” I would not hail that student as inspired.

In a class on 2 Corinthians, we’ve been looking at Paul and the Old Testament. And I’ve done some digging into the relationship between 2 Corinthians 3:12 – 4:7 and the original story Paul is riffing on: Exodus 34:29–35. It has to do the veil Moses wears over his face after encountering God caused it to glow.

Why does the imagery come up for Paul? 2 Corinthians 4:1-3 is key. Look at the phrase in verse 3: “And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.” Dangerous though mirror-reading is, we must at least ask whether there is some sense in which the oppenents of Paul are arguing that his gospel is veiled. But probably not using those works: hidden or distorted or masked? If so Paul would be showing typical Pauline cleverness in taking an accusation about deception and distortion (4:2-3) and “we never see the real you”… and using the story of the veil on Moses to answer.

Perhaps there is a flavour of that, but the safer interpretation of his argument is that it is some kind of answer to “If God is in my gospel, and it is such good news, why do people, particularly the Jews, not see it?” And his answer is that the god of this age has blinded the unbelievers — just as in the days of Moses, when he wore a veil over his glowing face after speaking with God, there is still a veil, but it is over their hearts rather than over our gospel-radiant faces.

Does this use of the imagery show Paul as a good interpreter of the Old Testament Scriptures?

A look at Exodus 34 immediately shows us three differences. First, Paul seems to link the use of the veil with the radiance fading away (3:13), but there is no explicit mention of such a thing in Exodus. Second, more importantly, Paul writes very much as if the veil is a bad thing, a barrier between the Jews and the Jewish covenant (3:14). Exodus is surprisingly different. Third, and strangest of all, from 2 Corinthians, you might expect the veil in the Exodus story to act as a defensive shield, protecting the Israelites from a Raiders Of The Lost Ark-like devastation by unbearable glory. What we’ll find there is perplexingly different.

In part 2 we’ll look at what Exodus might intend to say by telling us about Moses wearing a veil.

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