Paradoxically, the Torah ends by refusing to end. V’Zot HaBerachah closes not with triumph but with a funeral. Moses ascends Mount Nebo, sees the land he will never enter, and dies there. The story stops on the threshold, and that incompletion is the point.
Modern scholarship reads this structure as deliberate. Deuteronomy 33, “The Blessing of Moses,” is a self-contained poem written in markedly different Hebrew from the surrounding prose; Gary Rendsburg notes that it preserves “grammatical forms and lexical items that reflect the regional dialects of the tribes,” indicating an independent, early layer. Deuteronomy 34, by contrast, has a retrospective narrator (“No prophet like Moses”), characteristic of later Deuteronomistic editing observed by biblical scholars. The redactor’s decision to end here turns editing into theology: revelation cannot close; it demands readers to continue it.
The rabbis confronted the same puzzle. The Talmud (Bava Batra 15a; Menachot 30a) asks who wrote “And Moses died there,” given that Moshe could not write the Torah if he is dead. Rashi cites two possibilities. One view is that Joshua finished it. Another is that “The Holy One, Blessed be He, dictated, and Moses wrote with tears.” Sifrei Devarim 357:28 simply says, “Moses wrote what the Blessed Holy One told him to write.” Even the act of recording his own death becomes a final act of faith: writing while weeping, ensuring the Torah would not remain incomplete, even though his dream to reach the Holy Land was. The tension between dictation and tears captures the paradox — God’s word continues through human limitation.
Later commentators expand upon Moshe’s grief. Daʿat Zekenim records Moses’ plea to Hashem that “I shall not die but live and declare the works of the Lord” (Da’at Zekenim, 118:17), begging to make it to Canaan. But God responds that it is “impossible” to fulfill this wish because “every human being must die,” demonstrating to Moshe that his death itself is testimony to his pre-ordained plan. And even though his dream is crushed, Moshe is still as dedicated to Hashem as ever, with his fervor arguably reaching its apotheosis: Rabbeinu Bahya (Deut 34:5) observes that only at death is Moses called eved Hashem and given this special status of “servant of the Lord” — even to the last breath, Moshe serves the force that robbed him of his animating ambition of reaching Canaan.
In life, one can still fail; in death, one’s fidelity is sealed. Citing Chullin 7b, Bahya explains that “the righteous are greater in death than in life,” for only then are they beyond the reach of temptation. Halakhah ritualizes that idea. The Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chaim 669:1) prescribes that on Simchat Torah, three scrolls are read — the first for V’Zot HaBerachah (Deut 33 to end), the second for Bereishit 1:1–2:3, and the third for the festival portion — establishing the custom of completing and immediately beginning the Torah anew. Physically rolling the scroll from death to creation performs the theology the redactor embedded in the text.
Traditional faith and modern criticism converge: both see that the Torah’s power lies in continuity. The redactor ensured the story could never close; the rabbis ensured we would never stop reading. Each year we stand with Moshe at Nebo, and each year we refuse to leave him there. If we stop reading, the story dies with him. If we keep turning the scroll, revelation begins anew.
Moshe could only see the land. We enter it every year by reading on. The Torah’s final command isn’t written in ink but implied in structure: keep reading.
