11 And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend. And he turned again into the camp: but his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, departed not out of the tabernacle.

The closeness between Moses and the Lord is remarkable. We have not heard of anyone on such equal footing with the Lord since Abraham, whom God met with directly and invited counsel from.

At the end of this verse, it talks about Moses exiting the tabernacle, but the following verses seem to go back to describe the conversation that just took place. It may be that this is the transition between two different accounts that had been given of the same event.

Apparently, Joshua came with Moses into the tent. Whether he was within the veil and also face-to-face with God is unspecified, though when Moses was up in the mountain it sounded as if Joshua was a bit withdrawn from the meeting with the Lord, so my assumption would be that he was not inside of the veil, but in an adjoining room. Apparently, after the conversation in the following verses and Moses’s departure from the tabernacle, Joshua remained behind in the tabernacle. For what purpose, we do not know.