2 Corinthians 3:13

13. Vail The emblem of concealment, and the sign of the mystery of the old in contrast with the transparency and freedom of speech under the new. The new testament was truly concealed in the old one: Christ was vailed under types and shadows; but now he is revealed in person, and declared with great plainness of speech.

Could not… look to the end By the end many able commentators understand Christ, who is “the end of the law for righteousness.” And this the mystic vail, symbolized by that on Moses’s face, so shades Christ that the Jews could not behold him. And see next verse that vail still remains, concealing Christ from the Jews, who recognise not that the old is abolished, and that its end is Christ. But the true view, as Alford, and Stanley, and other late commentators have shown, will appear by a connexion of our translation of Exodus 34:33, in accordance with the Septuagint and Vulgate, by a substitution of when for “till.” It will then appear that Moses spoke to the people with his radiant face unvailed, but vailed his face when he ceased speaking, so as to conceal the evanescence and cessation of the radiance. “The vailed prophet of Khorasan,” in Moore’s Lalla Rookh, always kept his face, which was really a hideous visage, concealed from the people under pretence that it was too glorious for mortal sight. Moses showed his face while radiant with the glory, and vailed it as the glory ceased. It was, then, the cessation of the radiance which St. Paul here calls the end of the abolished; and which he figures as an image of the cessation of the glory of the abolished old covenant.