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Did Moshe have free will when he struck the rock in the wilderness?
We know that God told the entire torah to Moshe (with Moshe writing it down the second time) at Har Sinai. This must include the book of D'varim, because I have learned somewhere that there is a dispute about whether Moshe also wrote the last eight verses about his death. (I've seen two opinions: either he did with tears in his eyes, or Yehoshua wrote those.) Either way, Moshe knew the entire contents, including the episode that caused him to be denied entry into the land.
And yet he did it anyway, even knowing the outcome and that his pleas would not be granted. How do our sources understand this? Did he forget (or did God cause him to forget) certain parts of the journey chronicle after receiving torah? Did he remember but know he could do nothing else because it was already ordained, so he "played along"? Did he, even at the time, have the ability to act differently despite the torah already given to him -- maybe he could have spoken to the rock instead of hitting it, but (as foretold) he was overcome and hit it instead?
I am aware that Avot 3:15 teaches that all is foreseen yet free will is given. I've always taken that to be referring to God -- God knows what we will do, but nonetheless we have free will to act. It seems that this free will depends on us not knowing what has already been determined. But Moshe knew, and so I am puzzled about his free will in the post-Sinai part of his life.
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Near the end of D'varim, we are told that no one knows where Moses' grave is "to this day," which to me would imply that this part was written after his death. If "to this day" refers to a specific generation of readers, than this generation is unspecified and the meaning is ambiguous (at least to modern readers). If it's supposed to hold valid for every generation of readers, than this contradicts the normal use of the phrase "to this day" in the Bible. There are many instances in the Bible where "to this day" is used about something that is no longer true (for example, Joshua 9:27, Joshua 15:63, and Joshua 16:10), so in these places it clearly means "at the time of writing."
Gittin 60a (as explained by Rashi) alludes to a debate as to whether the Torah was written down one paragraph at a time throughout the stay in the desert, and then put together at the end of the forty years, or was only written down for the first time, in one go, at the end of the forty years (with earlier installments simply remembered orally until the time came to write it all down).
Either way, it seems that Moshe was not given the full written text of the Torah as we possess it today on Har Sinai. It only took on its final written form at the end of the forty years.
Thus I don’t think there is any reason to believe that Moshe knew of the episodes in the desert in advance.
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