Deuteronomy 34:8
And the children of Israel mourned for him in the plains of Moab thirty days: and the days of their mourning in which they mourned for Moses were ended.
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- Vulgate (Clementine)
- Fleveruntque eum filii Israël in campestribus Moab triginta diebus : et completi sunt dies planctus lugentium Moysen.
- Septuagint (Swete)
- καὶ ἔκλαυσαν οἱ υἱοὶ Ἰσραὴλ Μωυσῆν ἐν ἀραβὼθ Μωὰβ ἐπὶ τοῦ Ἰορδάνου κατὰ Ἰερειχὼ τριάκοντα ἡμέρας· καὶ συνετελέσθησαν αἱ ἡμέραι πένθους κλαυθμοῦ Μωυσῆ.
- Hebrew (WLC)
- וַיִּבְכּוּ֩ בְנֵ֨י יִשְׂרָאֵ֧ל אֶת מֹשֶׁ֛ה בְּעַֽרְבֹ֥ת מוֹאָ֖ב שְׁלֹשִׁ֣ים י֑וֹם וַֽיִּתְּמ֔וּ יְמֵ֥י בְכִ֖י אֵ֥בֶל מֹשֶֽׁה
Haydock's commentary
Days, as they had done for Mary [Miriam] and for Aaron: (Josephus) the usual term was only seven days. (Calmet)
The Jews would probably have prolonged their mourning for Moses forty days, in honour of the years of his government, if they had not been ordered to cross the Jordan. (Salien)
From Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary, 1859, in the transcription made by Todd Easton and kept online by John Paul Wohlschied at johnblood.gitlab.io/haydock.
The Fathers on this verse
St Jerome The Letters of St. Jerome, To Paula
4. Why should I not mourn, you say? Jacob put on sackcloth for Joseph, and when all his family gathered round him, refused to be comforted. “I will go down,” he said, “into the grave unto my son mourning.” David also mourned for Absalom, covering his face, and crying: “O my son, Absalom…my son, Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son!” Moses, too, and Aaron, and the rest of the saints were mourned for with a solemn mourning. The answer to your reasoning is simple. Jacob, it is true, mourned for Joseph, whom he fancied slain, and thought to meet only in the grave (his words were: “I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning”), but he only did so because Christ had not yet broken open the door of paradise, nor quenched with his blood the flaming sword and the whirling of the guardian cherubim. …
St Jerome The Letters of St. Jerome, To Heliodorus
6. Let me come then to my proper subject. I will not beat my breast with Jacob and with David for sons dying in the Law, but I will receive them rising again with Christ in the Gospel. The Jew’s mourning is the Christian’s joy. “Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning.” “The night is far spent, the day is at hand.” Accordingly when Moses dies, mourning is made for him, but when Joshua is buried, it is without tears or funeral pomp. All that can be drawn from scripture on the subject of lamentation I have briefly set forth in the letter of consolation which I addressed to Paula at Rome. Now I must take another path to arrive at the same goal. Otherwise I shall seem to be walking anew in a track once beaten but now long disused.
The Fathers are given as they wrote. Where a passage lays the Passion on the Jewish people, the Church teaches that it cannot be charged against all the Jews then living, nor against the Jews of today, and that all sinners were its authors (CCC 597, 598).