St. Paul and the Mystery of the Rock of Moses
An adventure in literary interpretation, Part I.
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A spiritual rock that followed them…
There was a curious passage in last Sunday’s lectionary reading from the epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, describing God’s providence towards the Israelites during their exile in the desert:
I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, and all of them were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. All ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was the Christ. (1 Cor 10:1-5)
Wait…what?? A rock that followed them? I suppose I’ve breezed over this verse many times without ever registering its strangeness, but that day it caught my attention and I was curious to know what biblical commentators have made of it.
Fortunately, I recently acquired a vintage set of Marvin Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament, originally published in 1887. I can get by with the Latin Vulgate but I know nothing of New Testament Greek, so it’s a useful reference for my study of Scripture. What’s more: Prof. Vincent is not only a minister but a Greek scholar whose scriptural exegesis draws on biblical scholarship and classical literature with equal facility. He’ll go from quoting theologians like Charles Ellicott and J. B. Lightfoot to literary giants like Homer, Aeschylus, and Dante without missing a beat.
So here’s what Prof. Vincent has to say on this passage from Corinthians:
Paul appears to recall a rabbinic tradition that there was a well formed out of the spring in Horeb, which gathered itself up into a rock like a swarm of bees, and followed the people for forty years; sometimes rolling itself, sometimes carried by Miriam, and always addressed by the elders, when they encamped, with the words, “Spring up, O well!” Num. xxi. 17.1 (Emphasis mine.)
He also reports that local tradition describes the Rock of Moses at Mt. Sinai as a large boulder about fifteen feet high with multiples fissures out of which water would have flowed, and that the story is also recorded in the Koran.2 I didn’t look up the Koran reference, but I found a similar account repeated in The Lord of Spirits podcast episode on the apocryphal Book of Jubilees. As Orthodox priest Fr. Stephen De Young was discussing the importance of Midrash—ancient Jewish commentary on the Hebrew scriptures—within the rabbinic tradition, he brought up the Corinthians passage above as an example of St. Paul engaging with Midrash.
Then he raised a reasonable question about the rock of Horeb, which Moses struck at God’s command to give the people water: if the Israelites are provided water from this rock at the beginning of their 40 years of wandering (Exodus 17:1-7), and again at the end (Numbers 20:7-11), “where did they get water for the rest of the 40 years?” The answer, according to Fr. Stephen, is recorded in the Midrash and echoed by St. Paul—the rock followed them the entire time!
Fr. Stephen: What you find in the Midrash is not only a whole story about the rock following them, but the complete text of a song that Israel sang every time they made camp to get the rock to pick up from where it was and to roll over to them and deposit itself where they were camped now—
Fr. Andrew: That's so amazing.
Fr. Stephen: —and all the rejoicing they did every time it happened. So it's like this whole developed story, but it's just incorporated into the [Biblical] text.3
By recalling this midrashic story, Fr. Stephen is making a point about apocryphal (i.e. extra-biblical) literature. Although it’s not on the level of inspired Scripture, both Rabbinic Judaism and the Apostle Paul appear to sanction teachings contained in it. “And by the way,” says Fr. Stephen, “St. Paul feels totally free to just reference these traditions. He doesn't feel the need to parenthetically say, ‘Oh, but that whole 'following [rock]' thing, that's just a tradition; that's not actually in the Bible.’”
…and the rock was Christ.
Returning to Prof. Vincent’s Word Studies, however, we encounter a different interpretation of St. Paul. From the last clause of verse 5 (“the rock was Christ”), Vincent concludes that St. Paul “does not believe the legend, but only uses it allegorically.” He then expounds in a footnote on the range of theologians’ reactions to the story: “Edwards, Meyer, Alford, Stanley, [sic] adopt the reference to the tradition. Ellicott is very doubtful; and Godet thinks it incredible that ‘the most spiritual of the apostles should hold and teach the Church such puerilities.’”4
This reinforces my general impression of 19th century theologians: that they were a well-educated and sober-minded bunch, predictably rational if not downright skeptical. Men like Vincent and Godet would have been enamored with the latest theories of textual criticism and hermeneutics, various views of historicism, or the proliferating discoveries of archaeology. I expect, too, that their tolerance of Christianity’s supernatural claims would have varied, with many striving to avoid the taint of too much “myth or superstition” in their personal beliefs.
After all, the decades that followed the Napoleonic Wars had ushered in a new age of industry, science, and global enterprise. Modernity was at its high-water mark, in terms of both cultural optimism and material achievements. A story about an ancient Semitic tribe passing through the Red Sea on dry land, followed afterwards by a “rolling stone” in the Sinai wilderness was probably a tad too much to swallow for the generation that witnessed its own Red Sea marvel—the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869.
For these modern men of letters or science, an “allegorical” explanation comes in handy—it’s suitably spiritual without making the embarrassing cognitive demands of the miraculous.
Understanding Literal and Allegorical Meaning
Which brings me to the crux of this quandary of scriptural (i.e., literary) interpretation: what is the real meaning of St. Paul’s statement that “a spiritual rock followed them”?
Do I accept the apocryphal story of the self-propelled rock as historically true and incorporate it into the traditional biblical story for an even richer narrative? Or…
Do I follow the modern Christian tendency to seek spiritual meaning first and foremost, knowing that ancient writers lacked the scientific knowledge and historical consciousness that we have today?
Another way of asking this is, simply, do I adopt a literal or a spiritual stance towards this story?
Does it need to be one or the other, though? Can or should it even be both? What does the long-standing Christian tradition reveal about how to read such texts profitably? I’ve found an exciting clue in my research to help solve this dilemma, but you’ll need to wait for Part II of this story next week!
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Marvin Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament, 4th Reprinting., vol. III, 4 vols. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., MI, 1887), 239.
[Arthur P.] Stanley says: “In accordance with this notion, the Rock of Moses, as pointed out by local tradition of Mt. Sinai, is not a cleft in the mountain, but a detached fragment of rock about fifteen feet high, with twelve or more fissures in its surface, from which the water is said to have gushed out for the twelve tribes. This local tradition is as old as the Koran, which mentions this very stone.”
“The Book of Jubilees,” The Lord of Spirits (Ancient Faith Ministries, May 31, 2024), accessed March 27, 2025, https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits/the_book_of_jubilees/.
Vincent, Word Studies, Vol III, 239.
Love the question, Amy. Jean-Luc Marion wrote about how the unseen world will reveal itself like a bulging through the liminal space into our own. We “see it” but not all of it. That’s how I view this story. Do I take it literally? Yes. But not “literal” as determined from our perspective. Literal in that we see it protruding into our world, but it still remains mostly hidden.
Well, this is utterly fascinating!