Deuteronomy 34 describes Moses climbing from the plains of Moab to the summit of Pisgah, on Mount Nebo, at the end of Israel's forty years of wandering, where the text says the Lord showed him the whole of the promised land, from Gilead to Dan, the territory of Naphtali, Ephraim and Manasseh, the land of Judah as far as the Mediterranean, the Negev and the plain of Jericho, "the City of Palms," as far as Zoar, before telling him he would see the land but not cross into it. Moses died there, at a hundred and twenty years old, and the text states plainly that he was buried in a valley in Moab, and that no one knows his burial place to this day, a deliberate withholding that later Jewish tradition connects to concern that the tomb of so central a prophet might itself become an object of worship.
Because Deuteronomy is itself traditionally the last book Moses is said to have delivered before this scene, the mountain closes the entire narrative arc of the Israelite exodus and wandering: the man who led the people out of Egypt and received the law at Sinai looks, at the very end, at a land he will never enter, a scene that has made Mount Nebo a fixed reference point in later religious and literary reflection on unfulfilled longing well beyond its immediate biblical context.