What Does Exodus 20:21 Mean?

The spatial contrast between the community's retreat and Moses' advance is the theophany's defining image. The "thick darkness" (Hebrew: ha'arafel: opaque, deep cloud darkness) where YHWH is located is the paradoxical location of the divine presence: the source of all light inhabits the most impenetrable darkness. Psalm 18:11 uses the same image: "he made darkness his covering, his canopy around him, thick clouds dark with water." The divine presence at Sinai is simultaneously overwhelming in luminosity and obscuring in cloud: the theophanic paradox in which the most real reality is also the least directly visible.

Moses advances into the darkness that the community is fleeing: the Torah's single most compressed image of prophetic calling. The advancing mediator is not braver than the retreating community; he is differently constituted for a different function.

Exodus 33:11's "face to face, as a man speaks to his friend" characterizes the Moses-YHWH relationship that makes the advance into thick darkness navigable for Moses where for the community it would be fatal. The friendship-intimacy and the holiness-danger coexist: Moses does not enter the darkness on the same terms as an ordinary Israelite would, but on the terms of the relationship YHWH has specifically established with him.

John 1:18 ("no one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known") is the New Testament's response to the thick-darkness episode. What Moses approached partially, entering the opaque cloud where YHWH dwells, the Son inhabits permanently and fully. Moses went into the darkness to receive the covenant law and came back out; the Son who is "at the Father's side" does not leave to return with the message but is himself the message the Father sends. The mediator who went into the darkness is the type of the Son who is the light that the darkness cannot overcome (John 1:5).