The brother of Jared answers the question honestly with a twofold response: the event and the cause of the fear. The event was seeing. The fear was “lest he should smite me.” Until we get to the final clause concerning flesh and blood, this experience fits into the normal context of what we might expect of the Old World understanding of the relationship of man to Yahweh. The brother of Jared had seen something that (he expected) might cost him his life, not through any maleficence on Yahweh’s part, but because of the very majesty accompanying the presence of so personal a vision.
The second reason is the most interesting, since it seems to explain that the brother of Jared did not understand a corporeal God. This statement is much stronger than the description of the vision in verse 6 which states that what the brother of Jared saw was “as the finger of a man, like unto flesh and blood.” Nothing has changed from the vision in verse 6 to the explanation in this verse save the language used for the translation. I suggest that the firm declaration of flesh and blood results from Joseph’s translation, not the underlying text. I see the first indication as the better description of the actual event because nothing in the vision could possibly attest to physicality, only to anthropomorphism. Verse 9 confirms that Yahweh is not present in “flesh and blood,” but that the vision prefigures his mortality.
What might the brother of Jared’s statement have meant in the context of verse 6—the finger as the finger of a man? He did not see Yahweh on a throne in fantastic circumstances and surrounded by extra-human attendants as Isaiah and Ezekiel did. (See commentary accompanying verse 6.) When the brother of Jared saw the finger “like unto” flesh and blood, he was expecting Yahweh’s glory to manifest itself differently. What he expected was the more-than-human, divinely proportioned, majestic glory into which the ancient Near East translated its anthropomorphic understanding of deity. He did not expect anything that made the God of power at all like man, at all personal.