Friendship with God: The Christian Call to Divine Intimacy

The Book of Exodus contains a brief passage that expresses the unique intimacy that the Lord accorded to Moses during the people’s sojourn in the desert. “>e Lord spoke to Moses face to face” (Exod 33:11a). To explain this face-to-face colloquy, the text o@ers a comparison that employs the Hebrew word rēa . >e Lord spoke to Moses the way “a man speaks to his rēa ” (Exod 33:11b). What does this Hebrew word mean in this context? >e Drst to confront this question were the Jewish scholars in Alexandria who, in the third century BC, undertook the task of translating the Drst Dve books of the Old Testament into Greek, a project that became the foundation of the translation subsequently known as the Septuagint (LXX). >eir