Neville Goddard Lectures: “Moses and Joshua”

23 Feb Neville Goddard Lectures: “Moses and Joshua”

4/29/68

We all know that when we discuss the Bible we are discussing the great mystery. It is not secular history; it is simply the story of salvation. All of the characters from the beginning, from Adam to Jesus, are states of consciousness. As Blake said in his Vision of the Last Judgment: “It ought to be understood that the persons Moses and Abraham are not here meant; these are only states as they were revealed to mortal man in that series of divine revelations as they are written in the Bible.” He claimed that he saw the entire plan, the play, God’s play. I have seen it in my visions, and as he said, “When you see it from afar, it’s like one man, and as you approach it is a multitude of nations. The one man becomes the many, all nations, all races.”

So here tonight, we will take a character, a very important character in scripture. We speak of the first five books as the Torah, the law. The dominant character—there is, naturally, Abraham, the beginning of all civilization—but the outstanding character is Moses. Here is an infinite state, an eternal state, Moses. I have read many interpretations of the name Moses…a play on the word Moses which means “to draw out.” But it doesn’t really. “I call him Moses because I drew him out of the water,” as we are told in the 2nd chapter of Exodus. But the word is the old perfective of the Egyptian verb “to be born,” that’s what the word really means. There is something to be born, that’s Moses. Oh, I could take the word and do lovely things with it. It’s Mem Shin He. Alright, you take it and turn it backwards and it spells “name”…He Shin Mem. Take the middle out, Shin or Shem, put it first, Shema, which means “heaven”; so he is drawing out of heaven everything in this world. But that is not the importance of the name. It’s the old perfective of the Egyptian verb “to be born.” That’s what it means…here is something to be born.

Now we are told in the end of the Torah, the 34th chapter of Deuteronomy: “And Moses the servant of the Lord died and he buried him, that is, the Lord buried him; but no man knows the place of his burial to this day” (verses 5, 6). Because the grave is unknown, they cannot make a cultic site of it. Today the whole vast world, every prominent person tries to perpetuate his identity in some vulgar thing. In our country all the presidents do, and there are daily pilgrimages to their graves. Today undoubtedly in Washington, in Arlington Cemetery many want to carry flowers to the different graves of their heroes. I am told that there isn’t a day, seven days a week, that Kennedy’s grave is not swamped with flowers, people crying and praying. I know in New York City they go all the way up to Hyde Park to this, really, a mausoleum of Roosevelt. They go daily to Churchill’s tomb. And this is all dead.

So no one knows the burial place of Moses so that they cannot make a cultic site of him, because Moses is buried in man. It is to Moses that the whole plan of God was revealed. Moses represents in germinal form the whole future of Israel, the whole future of Israel. Now, an Israelite is not a descendant of Abraham according to the flesh but the elect of God of whatever nation. It is the elect that is Israel whether he be a Jew, a Christian, a Mohammedan. Whatever is the elect, that is Moses buried in man. In germinal form it is actually the whole future of Israel, and Israel simply means “a man who rules as God.” That’s what it means. The word Israel is a man who rules as God…not “in the place of.”