Exodus 32:11 Meaning Moses Begged Yahweh His God

Egypt is the dark bodily condition, the flesh from which the inner energies were raised by great power, and the people brought out are those scattered thought-forces led up from bondage toward the higher life. Moses is the intercessory reason within a person, the faculty that stands between the consuming heat of divine judgment and the wayward energies below, pleading for them when they have turned back to the lower nature. The waxing hot of wrath is the fierce upward pressure of spirit against a consciousness that has lapsed toward matter after being lifted out of it.

What this shows is the mediating power in a person holding the balance when the higher and lower are set against each other. Reason intervenes so that the raised energies, however far they have fallen back, are not destroyed but held for the completion of the deliverance already begun.

Egypt: the dark bodily condition, the flesh from which consciousness and its energies are raised. The people: the scattered thought-energies within, led up out of bondage toward the higher life. The mighty hand: the concentrated inner power by which those energies are drawn up out of the body.

Kodha: Anger Kodha names anger at the moment it flares. Heat is what is burning here, and heat is the one thing that can still be brought down while it burns, so Moses speaks to it the way you would speak up about a fire in the house. He puts himself close enough to feel it, standing on the very ground where the people who made the calf had been standing.

Karuṇā: Compassion Karuṇā is the heart's shaking at another's coming pain. Moses begs for people who, hours earlier, were dancing around a metal calf, and he asks nothing for himself in the begging. Compassion of this kind goes out to people as they are, faults and all, which is why it can reach a whole camp caught in the wrong.

Nissaraṇa: The way out Nissaraṇa is escape, the door out of confinement. Moses builds his entire case on a door already opened: the great power and the mighty hand that carried this people out of Egypt. A way out that has been given is worth more than the failures of those still learning to walk through it, and he makes that the whole argument.

Khanti: Patient forbearance Khanti is bearing provocation without striking back, called in the old teaching the highest austerity. Moses requests it on behalf of others, the harder direction, since he is asking that an insult be carried instead of answered. He puts it as a question rather than a defense, and a question buys the time forbearance needs.

Nibbuti: Cooling Nibbuti is a fire going out, the image sitting inside the word for freedom. Moses wants the burning to die down, and a fire dies when nothing further is fed to it. Someone cooled in this way is called nibbuta, a word used of a person at peace and of a lamp that has gone out alike.