Catholic Commentary
Moses' Lament Before God
22Moses returned to Yahweh, and said, “Lord, why have you brought trouble on this people? Why is it that you have sent me?23For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has brought trouble on this people. You have not rescued your people at all!”
Exodus 5:22–23 records Moses confronting God after Pharaoh increased the Israelites' burdens instead of freeing them, accusing God of harming his own people despite sending Moses to speak in God's revealed name. Moses holds God accountable to the promise of liberation, claiming that God has not rescued the people at all, turning divine self-revelation into an indictment of apparent divine failure.
When prayer feels like accusation, you are not abandoning faith—you are deepening it, exactly as Moses did when God's promise appeared to collapse.
Exodus 5:22 — "Moses returned to Yahweh"
The Hebrew verb wayyāšob ("returned") is deceptively simple but narratively crucial. Moses does not run from God after catastrophic failure; he runs to God. The direction of his grief is godward. This stands in sharp contrast to the Israelite foremen, who in verses 20–21 turned their anguish into accusation against Moses and Aaron. Moses absorbs that accusation and, rather than deflecting it toward the people or dissolving into despair, he carries it directly into the divine presence. The Tent of Meeting does not yet exist; Moses is engaging in unmediated dialogue—raw, face-to-face encounter with the God who sent him.
The address "Lord" (Adonai) is formal yet intimate. Moses is not cursing God; he is petitioning the divine sovereign with the full weight of his confusion. The paired rhetorical questions—"Why have you brought trouble on this people? Why is it that you have sent me?"—are charges, not inquiries. The Hebrew word for "trouble" (hēra'ōtāh, from ra'a') means to do evil or harm; Moses is accusing God of having harmed his own people through this mission. This is linguistically explosive language, and the narrator presents it without editorial rebuke, suggesting it belongs to an acceptable register of covenantal speech.
The second question, "Why is it that you have sent me?" reveals the specific wound: Moses fears he is not only useless but counterproductive. God did the sending; Moses merely obeyed. Therefore, if the mission has produced suffering rather than salvation, the accountability, Moses implies, lies with the One who commissioned him.
Exodus 5:23 — "For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name…"
Moses now presents his evidence. The phrase "in your name" (bishměkhā) is theologically loaded—Moses acted with divine authority, invoking the newly revealed name YHWH (cf. 3:13–15). This name was not merely a title but a guarantee of presence and power. Moses is therefore not complaining about his own performance; he is confronting an apparent contradiction within God's own self-disclosure. The name YHWH, revealed as "I AM WHO I AM" and linked explicitly to the promise of liberation, has produced the opposite of liberation. The name has, it seems, made things worse.
The final line—"You have not rescued your people at all!" (wehatstsēl lō' hitstsaltāh et-'ammekha)—is rhetorically intensified by the infinitive absolute construction in Hebrew, which amplifies the negation: "You have not rescued—not at all—not one bit." Moses is not merely expressing disappointment; he is making a theological claim that the promise-maker has not fulfilled his promise. Notably, Moses calls them "your people" ('ammekha), not "my people"—he is holding God to his own covenantal ownership of Israel.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the typological reading developed by Origen and later by Gregory of Nyssa in his Life of Moses, Moses prefigures Christ. Just as Moses enters the presence of God as intercessor for a suffering, doubting people, Christ enters the Father's presence as the one mediator who carries humanity's confusion, abandonment, and apparent divine silence (cf. Matthew 27:46, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"). The lament of Moses at Exodus 5:22–23 thus becomes a foreshadowing of the cry from the cross—not a failure of faith, but the deepest possible expression of covenantal solidarity with suffering humanity.
The passage also participates in the biblical tradition of the lament as a valid and even holy form of prayer. The Psalms are saturated with this form (cf. Pss 22, 44, 88). Catholic spiritual theology, particularly in the tradition of St. John of the Cross, recognizes that the felt absence or apparent failure of God is not incompatible with genuine faith; it is often its crucible. Moses' cry is not faithlessness—it is faith refusing to release God from his promises.
The Catholic theological tradition offers several distinctive illuminations of this passage.
God's permissive will and the mystery of suffering: The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§309–314) addresses directly the question Moses is raising: why does an all-powerful, good God permit suffering, especially when it seems to intensify under his own initiative? The CCC teaches that God can draw a greater good from permitted evil, though this good often remains hidden in time. Moses stands at the beginning of precisely such a providential arc: the hardening of Pharaoh and the escalating oppression are, within the divine economy, the very conditions that will make the Exodus incomprehensibly glorious—a salvation that no human strategy could have engineered.
The legitimacy of lament as prayer: St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q.83), argues that prayer is fundamentally an "unfolding of our desire before God." Moses' anguished questions are not a failure of prayer but its most sincere expression—desire for justice and fidelity refusing to be silenced. The Church Fathers, particularly Origen in his Homilies on Exodus, praise Moses' boldness (parrēsia) before God, noting it as a mark of true friendship with the divine, not presumption.
Prophetic intercession and priestly mediation: Vatican II's Lumen Gentium (§10, 28) speaks of the ministerial priesthood as a participation in Christ's own priestly mediation. Moses here acts as proto-priest and proto-prophet simultaneously—he speaks God's word to Pharaoh and brings the people's anguish before God. His willingness to stand in the breach, to absorb communal suffering and redirect it as prayer, is a type of the Church's intercessory vocation, which reaches its fullness in the Eucharistic sacrifice where Christ perpetually offers himself as mediator before the Father on behalf of a suffering humanity.
Contemporary Catholics frequently encounter what spiritual directors call "apparent failure in apostolic obedience"—you said yes to God, accepted a vocation, launched a ministry, began an evangelization effort, and things have demonstrably gotten worse. The parish program collapsed. The marriage you prayed over ended. The loved one you evangelized walked away from faith entirely. Moses names the specific temptation of that moment: to conclude that God has been absent or worse, complicit in failure.
This passage authorizes Catholics to bring that anguish directly and honestly to God in prayer—without sanitizing it, spiritualizing it prematurely, or retreating into pious formulae. A concrete application: in Lectio Divina or the Liturgy of the Hours, when praying Psalms of lament, resist the urge to rush to the consoling final verse. Sit with Moses in verse 23. The Catholic tradition of Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament is a natural home for this kind of raw, trusting, demanding prayer—because the one in the tabernacle is the one who himself cried "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He can receive the question. God's response to Moses comes immediately in chapter 6—but only after Moses has spoken the truth of his experience fully and without pretense.
Commentary