Ver. 7. Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died, &c.— The sum of the verse is this: that though Moses lived the full length of human life, and to an age which, in others who attain it, is accompanied with many infirmities, no alteration was made in him; whom, for the support of the great charge committed to him, a special providence preserved in full vigour of every faculty, both of body and mind, to his dying hour. Houbigant, instead of nor his natural force abated, reads, nor had his cheeks lost their floridity. Of these one hundred and twenty years, he had employed a third part, excepting a month, in the government of Israel, as Josephus remarks in his fourth book of the Jewish Antiquities. The Scripture does not precisely point out the day or the month of Moses's death; but the Jews, following Josephus, fix it to the seventh day of the month Adar, which was the last of the fortieth year after the departure from Egypt: however, they are mistaken; for, as Torniel has shewn, Moses was dead at the end of the eleventh, or upon the first day of the twelfth month; and it is to this last date that the learned and exact Archbishop Usher has fixed it. The ideas which the Jews have given us of the dispositions wherewith Moses died, are pleasing. "Acquainted with the time, place, and manner of his death, he was neither surprised when it happened, nor taken from life involuntarily. It was neither age, nor decay, nor any external accident, that determined the moment of his decease; but the mere will of God: that will, in which he acquiesced with a soul tranquil, submissive, and full of ardent desire to possess Him, whom, above all things, it loved." See Huet. Demonst. Evan. prop. iv. c. 1. sect. 57.
Related Commentaries of Deuteronomy 34:7
Deuteronomy 34:7
7 And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.