Sight or Skin? Revisiting Deuteronomy 34:7c

Deuteronomy 34:5–7 describes Moses’s death. The usual translation of v. 7b, “his sight was unimpaired, and his vigor had not abated,” has been challenged by Jeffrey H. Tigay’s proposal, “. . . he had not become wrinkled” (1995). Tigay argued for the “moisture” of Moses’s skin not being affected rather than for “his vigor.” Recently Jeremy Schipper (2014) suggested that both phrases of v. 7b refer to skin rather than to eyesight. In this article, on the basis of context and the text, I propose interpreting the second debated phrase as referring to the freshness of Moses’s eyesight, rather than that of his skin.