Infirmity

Physical infirmity — the failure of sight, strength, hearing, or limb that comes with age or affliction — is treated in the Old Testament as the normal lot of long life, the more striking, then, when two figures are noted as having escaped it. The umbrella collects the two named exemptions: Moses at his death, and Caleb at the conquest.

Moses Exempt at One Hundred Twenty

The closing notice of Deuteronomy records the death of Moses with a careful qualifier: "And Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated" (Deut 34:7). The two clauses cover the two markers of bodily decline most commonly named — failing eyesight and waning strength — and deny both of him. The sentence treats infirmity as the expected condition his case stands apart from.

Caleb at Eighty-Five

The same exemption is claimed for Caleb when he comes to Joshua to receive Hebron. He measures his present vigor against the day he was first sent as a spy: "As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, and to go out and to come in" (Josh 14:11). The frame is identical to the notice for Moses — strength undiminished by years — and the application is military: Caleb is fit for war, fit to come and go, fit to take the hill country he is asking for.