The Book of Deuteronomy is the most sustained deployment of rhetoric in the Bible. It is presented, after all, as Moses’s valedictory address, which he delivers across the Jordan from the promised land just before his death, as the people assembled before him are poised to cross the river into the land. It comprises a series of speeches, discourses, or, as some scholars actually call them, sermons. The two long poems that cap these speeches not only follow a biblical convention for concluding a book but are also a culmination of the rhetorical energies of this book, grandly echoing some of its major themes and even some of its recurring phrases. Only the code of laws in the middle of the book, from chapter 12 to chapter 26, does not participate in this manifestly rhetorical enterprise, though one function of the surrounding rhetoric is to underwrite the authority of the laws here promulgated, reminding the people again and again that their very lives and their collective survival on the land depend upon the punctilious observance of “this teaching” (hatorah hazoʾt).
If one tries to imagine, however, the actual audience for which Deuteronomy was first framed, it will begin to be evident that its impressive deployment of rhetoric serves another purpose. Rhetoric is an art of persuasion, and the rhetoric of Deuteronomy is meant to persuade audiences in the late First Commonwealth and exilic period of the palpable and authoritative reality of an event that never occurred, or at any rate surely did not occur as it is represented in this text—the national assembly in trans-Jordan that was a second covenant after the covenant at Sinai, in which Moses reviewed the whole code of law, rapidly rehearsed the story of the Wilderness wanderings, and exhorted the people to be loyal to God, with repeated predictions of the dire consequences if they should fail in their loyalty. There are, in fact, two equivalences that the language of Moses’s address is devised to establish: an equivalence between this solemn convocation and the defining experience at Sinai, which is repeatedly referred to as yom haqahal, “the day of assembly,” in order to line it up with this new assembly in the trans-Jordan; and an equivalence between the experience of this audience physically present to receive Moses’s last words and that of the seventh-century B.C.E. audience and its prospective heirs listening to the Book of Deuteronomy and assenting to its authority. The resources of rhetoric are marshaled to create through a written text the memory of a foundational national event, so that the latter-day Israelites listening to “this book of teaching,” sefer hatorah hazeh, will feel that they themselves are reenacting that event.
The role of stylistic indicators of temporal and spatial location and orientation—those “pointing words” that linguists refer to as deictics—is essential to the creation of this general effect. (Although critical scholarship views the opening section of the book through 4:44 as a somewhat later composition that was added as an introduction, there are significant stylistic continuities with the rest of the book, and it is those that will concern us here.) Moses’s first discourse, beginning in chapter 1, is a rapid and highly selective recapitulation of elements of the Wilderness narrative reported in Exodus and in Numbers. The first discriminated episode in this recapitulation is the appointment of a judicial bureaucracy to help him carry the burden of administering justice to this multitudinous people. The prominent element of the parallel story in Exodus 18 pointedly omitted is the intervention of Moses’s father-in-law Jethro as the person who proposes the delegation of judicial authority. Though a suspicious reader might wonder whether this change reflects an element of xenophobia in Deuteronomy (Jethro, of course, is a Midianite), the more urgent reason is that nothing must be allowed to diminish from the depiction here of Moses’s strong leadership, grounded in his wisdom (a key value for Deuteronomy) and in his uniquely direct access to God. Moses concludes his account of creating this judicial system by declaring, “And I charged you at that time all the things that you must do” (1:18), right after having used the same phrase in relation to the magistrates, “And I charged your judges at that time saying, ‘Hear between your brothers …’” (1:16). This seemingly minor deictic gesture, “at that time,” baʿet hahiʾ, reflects an important, and recurring, rhetorical strategy in the book. There is no biblical text more generous than Deuteronomy in its use of demonstrative pronouns. “At that time” temporally positions both Moses and his audience in relation to the legal injunction he is delivering: you heard it then, the phrase tells us, or at any rate your parents, now died out, heard it, and its imperative force is exactly the same now as I repeat this injunction—and, again, it will be the same when these words of Moses are read out to their audience in the seventh century or later.
In the very next verse, 1:19, the deictic phrase functions in a more strictly narrative, rather than legal, context: “And we journeyed from Horeb and we went through all that great and fearful wilderness which you have seen, by way of the high country of the Amorite… .” Now, narrative report in the Bible is famously laconic, and one could plausibly argue that it would be more in keeping with characteristic biblical style for this verse to read, “And we journeyed from Horeb and we went through the wilderness, by way of the high country of the Amorite.” What is the difference between this pared-down version and the one that is actually used in Deuteronomy? My more terse formulation follows a fairly typical biblical procedure of registering space traversed in a narrative report as essentially blank space: the idea is to get from point A to point B—say, to get Abraham and Isaac in a three days’ journey from Hebron to Mount Moriah—without drawing attention to the spatial reality that lies in between because it is not deemed essential to the story. The Deuteronomic summary at this point of the Wilderness wanderings has a very different purpose. The demonstrative pronoun “that” which is attached to “wilderness” is both a temporal and an emotional deictic. Temporally, it points to something that has been undergone but that is now over and done with. The Israelites have completed their long and arduous trajectory through the wilderness and now stand before Moses in the Arabah, just east of the land of Canaan. Emotionally, the wilderness is a place to be remembered with fear and trembling, a place that tried the soul of the nation—“all that great and fearful wilderness,” kolhamidbar hagadol wehanoraʾ hahuʾ, and the deictic “that” serves to keep it at arm’s length as a haunting memory of a very palpable experience recently undergone. (The terror of the wilderness will be carried forward in Deuteronomy all the way to the Song of Moses, which speaks of “the wilderness land, … the waste of the howling desert [tohu yeleil yeshimon]” [32:10].) The little subordinate clause, again ostensibly gratuitous, that is added to the impressive phrase about the wilderness, is equally characteristic of the rhetorical strategy of national recollection in Deuteronomy. It is the wilderness, Moses says, ʾasher reʾitem, “which you have seen.” Again and again, the audience of this national assembly is reminded that they have seen—or in a frequent variation, that their very eyes have seen, ʿeyneikhem haroʾot—the portentous events that Moses is rehearsing. At one remove, the members of the historical audience of the Book of Deuteronomy are implicitly invited to imagine what their forebears actually saw, to see it vicariously. The midrashic notion that all future generations of Israel were already present as witnesses at Sinai is adumbrated, perhaps actually generated, by this rhetorical strategy of the evocation of witnessing in Deuteronomy.
In precisely this connection, it should be noted that there is a purposeful ambiguity of reference in the use of the second person, whether plural as here, or singular as often elsewhere, in Moses’s address. Since we are reminded of the episode of the spies early in the first discourse (1:22–45), with the consequent death sentence on the Wilderness generation, we know that all the people standing before Moses now would have been under the age of twenty, perhaps most of them, indeed, as yet unborn, at the time of the events recalled in his speech. Yet Moses repeatedly speaks as though they were all direct participants in or observers of the episodes he mentions. There is, I would say, a slide of identification between one generation and another. Most of those listening to Moses’s words could not literally have seen the things of which he speaks, but the people is imagined as a continuous entity, bearing responsibility through historical time as a collective moral agent. It is this assumption that underwrites the hortatory flourish, repeated in several variations, “Not with our fathers did the LORD seal this covenant but with us—we who are here today, all of us alive” (5:3). Thus Moses can say of the witnessing, “you have seen” (my choice of a present perfect verb in the translation attempts to suggest the temporal doubleness of the seeing), and, in reporting actions, he can flatly state, referring to the route of Israel by the Amorites at Hormah, “you came back and wept before the LORD, and the LORD did not listen to your voice” (1:45), though it was the fathers, now deceased, not the living members of the audience, who did the weeping and were rebuffed by God. The implicit next link in this chain of identification is the generation in the twilight of the First Commonwealth, or perhaps immediately after it, which is invited to see itself experiencing what the Wilderness generations underwent, or at any rate, to see the experience of their forebears as a compelling model for its own historical predicament.
It is the unique event at Sinai that is the very matrix of collective memory in Deuteronomy. The Ten Words enunciated in Exodus are of course proclaimed again here, and though there are certain famous divergences in wording between the two texts, the restatement of these ten foundational imperatives reflects nothing of the strongly revisionary impulse that is so evident in the reformulation of antecedent laws elsewhere in the book. (One infers that the Decalogue was too fundamental to revise substantively.) Moses’s valedictory transmission of God’s commands to Israel is a second Sinai, and the written text that records his final discourses is in turn understood to be the permanent vehicle through which an approximation of the Sinai experience can be reenacted (thus laying the ground, one might observe, for the pervasive textualization of Jewish culture that would evolve in later centuries). As Israel’s past is laid out in Moses’s oratory, there is a sudden leap from summary to imaginative evocation when the story arrives at Sinai. The origins of the people in the Patriarchal period are almost entirely reduced to the reiterated reference to God’s having sworn the land to “your fathers.” The great signs and portents of the Exodus itself are mentioned in just those terms, but there are no vivid representations of the Ten Plagues or of the splitting of the Sea of Reeds. The Sinai epiphany, on the other hand, in all its terror and wonder, is a moment to which Moses’s speech repeatedly reverts. Thus, the proclamation of the Decalogue in chapter 5 is prefaced by these words: “Face-to-face did the LORD speak with you on the mountain from the midst of the fire. I was standing between the LORD and you at that time to tell you the word of the LORD—for you were afraid in the face of the fire and did not go up the mountain” (5:4–5). Although the parallel account in Exodus has thunder and lightning and the whole mountain smoking, Deuteronomy chooses to emphasize the purer and even more unapproachable substance of divine fire from which God’s words are emitted. Concomitantly, the issue of the separation of the people from the divine presence and the necessary role of Moses as mediator is reframed. In Exodus, God issues an explicit command before the epiphany that the people must keep their distance, that they are not so much as to touch the edge of the mountain. It is only after the tremendous fact of revelation that, awestruck, they implore Moses to act as their spokesman, thus confirming the rightness of the spatial restriction that God has already imposed on them. In Deuteronomy’s version, there is no mention of a prior order from God that the people stay at a distance. On the contrary, their initial experience of the epiphany is almost too close for comfort: “Face-to-face did the LORD speak with you on the mountain from the midst of the fire.” Moses here is obliged to interpose himself because the people are terrified by the fire and afraid to go up the mountain. The motive for keeping their distance is visceral response rather than divine taboo: their own eyes have seen, as future generations will be reminded, the full fearsome force of God’s descent upon the mountain, and this sight is too much to bear. Indeed, after the enunciation of the Decalogue, they are afraid to hear as well as to see: “And now, why should we die, for this great fire will consume us. If we hear again the voice of the LORD our God, we shall die” (5:22). In this fashion, the Deuteronomic story conveys both the indelible fact of witnessing and the indispensability of the lawgiver as mediator, including in that mediation “this book of teaching” that he will leave as legacy and implying the further need for authoritative mediation through those who will promulgate and expound the text he leaves.
The conjuring up of the Sinai experience through the powerful language of this oratory is brilliantly linked with the Deuteronomic polemic against the worship of images. Moses takes pains to remind his audience that the revelation they were vouchsafed was auditory, and in no way visual (another contrast to Exodus, where after the Decalogue is given, the elders of Israel come partway up the mountain and “beheld God” [Exodus 24:11]). This is how Moses here evokes the moment before the epiphany: “And you came forward and stood at the bottom of the mountain, and the mountain was burning with fire to the heart of the heavens—darkness, cloud, and dense fog. And the LORD spoke to you from the midst of the fire. The sound of words you did hear but no image did you see except the sound” (4:11–12). This is a moment of mystery, compounded of impenetrable obscurity—“darkness, cloud, and dense fog”—and blinding effulgence. The eye, which has seen so much from Egypt until this moment, can see nothing; the ear alone can receive the commanding divine words. The abiding residue of this voice is, as one might expect in Deuteronomy, a text:
And He told you His covenant that He charged you to do, the Ten Words, and He wrote them on two tablets of stone. And me did the LORD charge at that time to teach you statutes and laws for you to do in the land into which you are crossing over to take hold of it. And you shall be very watchful of yourselves, for you saw no image on the day the LORD spoke to you from the midst of the fire, lest you act ruinously and make you a sculpted image of any likeness, the form of male or of female, the form of any beast that is on the earth, the form of any winged bird that flies in the heavens, the form of anything that crawls on the ground, the form of any fish that is in the waters under the earth, lest you raise your eyes to the heavens and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the array of the heavens, and you be led astray and bow down to them and worship them, for the LORD your God allotted them to all the peoples under the heavens. But you did the LORD take and He brought you out from the iron’s forge, from Egypt, to become for Him a people in estate as this day (4:13–20).
I have in this instance quoted at length because one needs the length in order to get a sense of Deuteronomy’s sweeping oratorical power. Indeed, the heart of this passage is one grand sentence that rolls on, according to the conventional verse division, from the beginning of verse 15 to the end of verse 19. There are few biblical instances of this sort of sentence length outside of Deuteronomy, where the grand sentence is devised to catch up the listener in its sheer momentum of insistence. Let us try to follow the stages of the effort of persuasion inscribed in the language. God writes the text of the Ten Words in stone, then designates Moses, the continuing intermediary, as the leader and expounder of the laws—presumably, the reference is not to the Decalogue itself but to the code of laws, what in Exodus is the so-called Book of the Covenant, and to its counterpart in the code of laws in Deuteronomy. The narrative report of the Sinai experience in Exodus also emphasizes sound and speech, excluding any direct visual image of God, with the limited exception of the post-epiphanic vision on the mountain by the elders of Israel. Here, however, the imageless character of the revelation at Sinai is moved to the thematic center. The defining memory of the people of Israel is at once an overwhelming revelation of God and a memory of the absence of any image. That memory of an absence then becomes the warrant for an enduring imperative to avoid all worship of images, never to confuse the representation of any living thing in the created world with the exclusive divinity of the Creator. The language of the long central sentence here is profuse both in emphatic synonymity in regard to representations of deities—“a sculpted image of any likeness,” pesel temunat kol-samel, and “form,” tavnit—and in the hammering insistence of anaphora, tavnit standing at the head of five consecutive noun phrases. The catalogue of images of things not to be worshipped also pointedly harks back to the Creation story, leading one to infer that the writer was familiar with the Priestly version of creation or some textual ancestor of it. Male and female, every beast that is on the earth, every winged bird that flies in the heavens, things crawling on the ground, and fish in the waters under the earth are all part of the hierarchy of creation called into being by the Creator at the beginning of Genesis and not to be revered as though they had autonomous power as gods. The injunction not to raise one’s eyes to the heavens and worship the celestial bodies probably had special urgency in the late First Commonwealth period when, particularly through Assyrian influence, the cult of astral deities had become widespread in the Israelite populace, at least according to one prevalent historical inference. Here, too, the language of the Priestly account of creation has special resonance: the eyes that have beheld God’s portentous presence in history—but not His image—should avoid the temptation to see “the sun and the moon and the stars, all the array of the heavens … and bow down to them,” for in the authoritative story all these celestial entities were ordained by God to exist in cosmic orderliness, with the process culminating when “the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their array” (Genesis 2:1). Israel, because of its unique historical experience from Egypt to Sinai, has been provided with an unprecedented vantage point to see that its imageless God is the God of all things. Fire plays a role both in Egypt and at Sinai—in Egypt, figuratively, where the torment of slavery is represented as “the iron’s forge,” kur habarzel, and at Sinai, literally, where the mountain burns with fire to the heart of the heavens and God speaks from the midst of the fire. It is not the image of God but His incandescent presence that the people of Israel experience through their history, and the powerful rhetoric of the book is the means that evokes this presence.
1These are the words that Moses spoke to all the Israelites across the Jordan in the wilderness in the Arabah opposite Suph between Paran and Tophel and Laban and Hazeroth and Di-Zahab, 2eleven days from Horeb by way of Mount Seir to Kadesh-Barnea. 3And it was in the fortieth year in the eleventh month on the first of the month that Moses spoke to the Israelites according to all that the LORD had charged him concerning them, 4after he had struck down Sihon king of the Amorite who dwelled in Heshbon and Og king of the Bashan who dwelled in Ashtaroth in Edrei. 5Across the Jordan in the land of Moab did Moses undertake to expound this teaching, saying:
6“The LORD our God spoke to us in Horeb, saying, ‘Long enough you have stayed at this mountain. 7Turn and journey onward and come to the high country of the Amorite and to all his neighbors in the Arabah, in the high country, and in the lowland and in the Negeb and on the shore of the sea, the land of the Canaanite, and the Lebanon, as far as the Great River, the River Euphrates. 8See, I have given the land before you. Come and take hold of the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their seed after them.’ 9And I said to you at that time, saying, ‘I cannot carry you by myself. 10The LORD your God has multiplied you, and here you are today like the stars of the heavens in multitude. 11May the LORD God of your fathers add to you a thousand times more than you are and bless you as He has spoken concerning you. 12O, how can I carry by myself your trouble and your burden and your disputing? 13Get you wise and understanding and knowing men according to your tribes, and I shall set them at your head.’ 14And you answered me and said, ‘The thing that you have spoken is good to do.’ 15And I took the heads of your tribes, wise and knowing men, and I made them heads over you, captains of thousands and captains of hundreds and captains of fifties and captains of tens and overseers for your tribes. 16And I charged your judges at that time, saying, ‘Hear between your brothers, and you shall judge rightly between a man and his brother or his sojourner. 17You shall recognize no face in judgment. You shall hear out the small person like the great one. You shall have no terror of any man, for judgment is God’s. And the matter that will be too hard for you, you shall bring forward to me and I shall hear it.’ 18And I charged you at that time all the things that you must do. 19And we journeyed from Horeb and we went through all that great and fearful wilderness which you have seen, by way of the high country of the Amorite, as the LORD our God had charged us, and we came as far as Kadesh-Barnea. 20And I said to you, ‘You have come to the high country of the Amorite which the LORD our God is about to give us. 21See, the LORD your God has given the land before you. Go up, take hold, as the LORD God of your fathers has spoken to you. Be not afraid nor be dismayed.’ 22And you came forward to me, all of you, and you said, ‘Let us send men before us that they probe the land for us and bring back word to us of the way on which we should go up and the towns into which we should come.’ 23And the thing was good in my eyes, and I took from you twelve men, one man for each tribe. 24And they turned and went up to the high country and came to Wadi Eshcol and spied it out. 25And they took in their hand from the fruit of the land and brought it down to us and brought back word to us, and they said, ‘The land that the LORD our God is about to give us is good.’ 26And you did not want to go up and you rebelled against the word of the LORD your God. 27And you grumbled in your tents and said, ‘In the LORD’s hatred of us He took us out of the land of Egypt to give us into the hand of the Amorite to destroy us. 28Where are we going up? Our brothers have made our heart faint, saying, “A people greater and loftier than we, towns great and fortified to the heavens; and also giants did we see there.”’ 29And I said to you, ‘You shall not dread and you shall not fear them. 30The LORD your God Who goes before you, He it is Who will battle for you as all that He did with you in Egypt before your very eyes, 31and in the wilderness that you have seen, where the LORD carried you as a man carries his son all the way that you went as far as this place. 32And despite this thing you do not trust the LORD your God, 33Who goes before you on the way to search out for you a place for you to camp in the fire by night to show you the way that you should go and in the cloud by day.’ 34And the LORD heard the sound of your words, and He was furious and swore, saying, 35‘Not a man of these men, this evil generation, shall see the land that I swore to give to their fathers, 36save Caleb son of Jephunneh. He shall see it, and to him I will give the land on which he has trod, and to his sons, inasmuch as he fulfilled the behest of the LORD.’ 37Against me, too, the LORD was incensed because of you, saying, ‘You, too, shall not come there. 38Joshua son of Nun, who stands before you, he it is who will come there. Him you must strengthen, for he will give it in estate to Israel. 39And your little ones of whom you said they will become prey, and your sons who know not this day good or evil, they it is who will come there, and to them I will give it, and they will take hold of it. 40As for you, turn you and journey on to the wilderness by way of the Red Sea.’ 41And you answered and said to me, ‘We have offended the LORD. We ourselves will go up and do battle as all that the LORD our God has charged us.’ And you girded, each man, his weapons and you presumed to go up to the high country. 42And the LORD said to me, ‘Say to them: “You shall not go up and you shall not do battle, for I am not in your midst, lest you be routed by your enemies.”’ 43And I spoke to you, and you did not heed, and you rebelled against the LORD’s word and you were defiant and went up to the high country. 44And the Amorite who dwells in the high country came out to meet you, and then pursued you as the bees do, and they pounded you in Seir as far as Hormah. 45And you came back and wept before the LORD, and the LORD did not listen to your voice and did not give ear to you 46And you stayed in Kadesh many days, as the days that you stayed. 2:1And we turned and journeyed on to the wilderness on the way to the Red Sea, as the LORD had spoken to me, and we swung round the high country of Seir many days.”
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
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1. the words. The prevalent Hebrew title for Deuteronomy, following the convention of using the first significant word in the text as title, is Devarim, “Words.” The title Deuteronomy, which is the Greek equivalent of an alternate ancient Hebrew name for the book, means “second law” or “repetition of the law” and is based on the Hebrew phrase in 17:18, mishneh hatorah hazoʾt, “a copy [or repetition] of this teaching [or, law, torah].” Since Deuteronomy is in fact a recapitulation of the law and narrative of the three preceding books (as well as in certain important respects a revision of them), the Greek title is perfectly apt. But Devarim as a title has the advantage of highlighting the preeminently rhetorical character of this book, which is structured as a series of long speeches delivered by Moses to Israel, and which also incorporates, as the opening chapter illustrates, prominent elements of dialogue—words of speech framed by words of oratory. More than any other biblical text, it is a book of words, as the Hebrew title suggests.
2. eleven days from Horeb. Horeb is the alternate name for Sinai. These introductory verses of Deuteronomy swiftly situate Moses’s discourse in time, place, and sequence of events: at the end of the forty years’ wandering, on the east bank of the Jordan, where the Israelites were seen encamped at the conclusion of the Book of Numbers, and after the military victories over the trans-Jordanian kings reported toward the end of Numbers.
5. to expound this teaching. The verb beʾer, “to expound” or “to explain,” provides a central rationale for the whole book. The teaching, torah, that has already been enunciated is represented as requiring further exposition or explaining, and hence the need for “the repetition of this teaching.” Torah here is still a verbal noun that means “teaching,” but the repeated stress of Deuteronomy on its own textual character begins to push Torah in the direction of the meaning it would subsequently have, the name not only of this book but of all the Five Books of Moses. The act of expounding and explaining, moreover, announces the intellectualist theme—in all likelihood, drawing on Hebrew Wisdom traditions—that sets off this book from the preceding four.
7. the Amorite. Deuteronomy uses this term to designate all the inhabitants of Canaan, perhaps because the Amorites, on the eastern perimeter of the country, were the first people encountered by the invading Israelites.
the Lebanon. This refers to the mountain range, not to a country.
as far as the Great River, the River Euphrates. Needless to say, this grandiose northeastern border does not correspond to the actual historical contours of any Israelite state.
8. See, I have given … you. Significantly, the very first speech of God in Moses’s initial discourse is a ringing confirmation of the promise of the land to the people. “I have given … you” has the legal force of a performative speech-act, as if to say, By these words I hereby confer to you.
9. And I said to you at that time. Although the adverbial phrase here does convey Moses’s retrospective viewpoint, looking back to an event that occurred four decades earlier, there is no connection, either narrative or thematic, between the preceding unit concerning the promise of the land and the unit now introduced, which reports the creation of a judiciary bureaucracy. It looks as though “at that time” is a rhetorical ploy used to camouflage a lack of transition.
10. and here you are today like the stars of the heavens in multitude. God’s reiterated promise to Abraham to make his seed a multitudinous people is now fully realized, and it confronts Moses with a grave practical problem of judicial oversight of these vast numbers.
11. May the LORD … add to you a thousand times. But Moses, not wanting to construe the blessing of national fecundity negatively, hastens to wish for Israel that it continue to proliferate in the spectacular fashion it already has done.
12. O, how can I carry. The Hebrew does not use the ordinary form for “how,” ʾeikh, but the elongated form ʾeikhah, which often marks the beginning of laments. The translation seeks to suggest this effect of threnody by adding “O.”
13. Get you wise and understanding and knowing men. This account of the establishment of a judicial bureaucracy differs from the one in Exodus 18 in several respects, all of which reflect the distinctive aims of Deuteronomy. Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law, who conceives the scheme in Exodus, is not mentioned here. Instead, the plan is entirely Moses’s idea, as this is the book of Moses. Having hit on the idea, he entrusts the choice of magistrates to the people, whereas in Exodus, he implements Jethro’s directive by choosing the judges himself. In Exodus the qualities to be sought in the judges are moral probity and piety, whereas here intellectual discernment is stressed. “Knowing” in the Hebrew is a passive form (“known”), which led both Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra to understand the term as “well-known,” but the word, given the immediate context, could well have an active sense here (or could be revocalized as an active verb), and it has been construed that way by many interpreters, from the Aramaic Targums to contemporary scholars.
16. Hear. The Hebrew uses an infinitive form of the verb to serve as an imperative—a well-attested idiomatic option in biblical Hebrew but also a form that nicely matches the impersonal rhetoric of authority in Deuteronomy, grammatically highlighting the action to be performed rather than those addressed.
17. You shall recognize no face in judgment. This vivid idiom, the meaning of which is illustrated in the next sentence of this verse, has the obvious sense of not showing partiality.
19. all that great and fearful wilderness which you have seen. This invocation of the terrors of the great wilderness, experienced firsthand by the wandering Israelites, emphatically recurs in Moses’s speech as the people camp at the edge of the wilderness at the end of the forty years looking into the land they are about to enter.
22. Let us send men before us. This version strikingly revises the story of the twelve scouts reported in Numbers 13–14. There, the sending out of the scouts was an order from God. Here, it is strictly the people’s idea, their hesitant response to Moses’s flat imperative, “Go up, take hold.”
that they probe the land. More literally, “that they dig out the land.” This verb, which does not occur in Numbers 13–14, is in keeping with the strictly strategic purpose of the expedition here (“the way on which we should go up and the towns into which we should come”). In Numbers, the scouts are especially enjoined to ascertain the prosperity of the land and its natural resources. This difference, however, is not strictly a “revision” on the part of Deuteronomy because the present version is also a drastic abridgement of the story in Numbers, and it concentrates on what is deemed the essential matter of the episode.
27. In the LORD’s hatred of us. The extreme vehemence of this phrase, which does not appear in Numbers, again reflects the writer’s tendency to incriminate the people in this book of admonishments that is Deuteronomy.
30. The LORD your God Who goes before you, He it is Who will battle for you. In the version of the story in Numbers, it is Joshua and Caleb who defiantly declare that they can successfully undertake an assault against the Canaanites, “for they are our bread” (Numbers 14:9). In the more theologically pitched account here, the language of God’s battling on behalf of Israel is borrowed from the victory at the Sea of Reeds (Exodus 14:14). This notion of God’s overwhelming power is extended by Moses’s reminder (verse 33) of the pillars of fire and cloud, an fearsome phenomenon that in Numbers 14:14 is attributed to the rumor that has reached the terrified Canaanites.
36. Caleb. Curiously, for reasons that have been explained by many scholars as a drawing together of different sources, Joshua is not mentioned at all here but only in verse 38, in his function as Moses’s personal attendant.
the land on which he has trod. This phrase focuses the physical act of Caleb’s walking through the land—evidently, only as far as Wadi Eshcol in the future tribal territory of Judah and not, as in Numbers, to the far north—on the espionage mission. Walking through territory was also an act of taking legal possession of it in a sale.
37. Against me, too, the LORD was incensed because of you. No mention is made here of the incident in which Moses struck the rock, and this appears to be an entirely new explanation of why Moses never entered the land. Once more, the change reflects the tendency of Deuteronomy to inculpate Israel. Moses is doomed to die east of the Jordan not because of his own unfortunate momentary impulse on which he acted but because he acceded to the people’s plan to send out spies and was thus implicated in their subsequent guilt. Elsewhere in Deuteronomy, a different explanation will be offered for Moses’s dying outside the land.
43. you were defiant and went up. The choice of the verb here, hazid, “to be defiant,” “to act wickedly or maliciously,” may reflect the fact that the present text is a response to the one in Numbers. The previous verse is essentially a quotation of Numbers 14:42. At this point in the version in Numbers (14:44), an otherwise unattested verb, haʿapil (“to strive upward”?) is used, and this writer appears to gloss that enigmatic term by substituting a more familiar word.
46. many days, as the days that you stayed. The apparent sense of this Hebrew idiom is: as many days as you ended up staying.
2:1. the Red Sea. The Hebrew yam suf in all likelihood refers to two different bodies of water. In the Exodus story, it seems to be a lake or marshland in the north of Egypt, the Sea of Reeds. Elsewhere, it does designate the Red Sea, and here the Israelites are clearly being sent south toward Aqabah and the Red Sea, not back to Egypt. This summarizing notation of the movements of the Israelites makes it the conclusion of this whole literary unit, though the conventional chapter division sets it at the beginning of chapter 2.
2“And the LORD said to me, saying, 3‘Long enough you have swung round this high country. Turn you to the north. 4And charge the people, saying, “You are about to pass through the territory of your brothers the sons of Esau, who dwell in Seir. Though they fear you, you must take great care. 5Do not provoke them, for I will not give you of their land so much as a foot tread, for I have given the high country of Seir as an inheritance to Esau. 6Food you shall buy from them with silver, that you may eat, and water, too, you shall get from them with silver, that you may drink. 7For the LORD your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He has known your goings in this great wilderness these forty years. The LORD your God is with you. You have lacked nothing.”’ 8And we passed onward away from our brothers the sons of Esau, who dwell in Seir, from the way of the Arabah, from Elath and Ezion-Geber. And we turned and we passed through the Wilderness of Moab. 9And the LORD said to me, ‘Do not besiege Moab and do not provoke them to battle, for I will not give you his land as an inheritance, for to the sons of Lot I have given Ar as an inheritance. 10The Emim used to dwell there, a great and multitudinous people, and lofty as the giants. 11The Rephaim, they, too, are accounted as giants, and the Moabites call them Emim. 12And in Seir the Horites used to dwell, and the sons of Esau dispossessed them and destroyed them in their onslaught and dwelled in their stead, as Israel did to the land of its inheritance which the LORD gave them. 13Now, rise up and cross over the Wadi Zered.’ And we crossed the Wadi Zered. 14And the time that we went from Kadesh-Barnea until we crossed the Wadi Zered was thirty-eight years until the whole generation, the men of war, came to an end from the midst of the camp as the LORD had sworn concerning them. 15And the hand of the LORD, too, was against them to panic them from the midst of the camp until they came to an end. 16And it happened, when all the men of war had come to an end of dying from the midst of the people, 17that the LORD spoke to me, saying, 18‘You are passing beyond the territory of Moab today, beyond Ar, 19and you will approach opposite the Ammonites. You shall not besiege them and you shall not provoke them, for I will not give you an inheritance of the land of the Ammonites, for to the sons of Lot I have given it as an inheritance. 20It is also accounted as the land of the Rephaim. The Rephaim used to dwell there, and the Ammonites call them Zamzummim, 21a great and multitudinous people, and lofty as the giants. And the LORD destroyed them through the Ammonites’ onslaught, and they dwelled in their stead, 22as He did to the sons of Esau, who dwell in Seir, who destroyed the Horites in their onslaught and dispossessed them, and have dwelled in their stead to this day—23and the Avvim, who dwell in villages as far as Gaza, the Caphtorim, who came out of Crete, destroyed them and dwelled in their stead. 24Rise up, journey onward, and cross the Wadi Arnon. See, I have given in your hand Sihon the Amorite king of Heshbon, and begin, take hold of his land and provoke him to battle. 25On this day will I begin to put the fear of you and the dread of you over the peoples under all the heavens, so that when they hear rumor of you, they will quake and shudder before you.’
26“And I sent messengers from the Wilderness of Kedemoth to Sihon king of Heshbon—words of peace, saying, 27‘Let me pass through your land. On the road, on the road will I go. I will not swerve right or left. 28Food for silver you shall sell me that I may eat, and water for silver you shall give me, that I may drink. Only let me pass through on my own feet, 29as the sons of Esau, who dwell in Seir, and the Moabites, who dwell in Ar, did for me, until I cross the Jordan into the land that the LORD our God is about to give us.’ 30But Sihon king of Heshbon did not want to let me pass through it, for the LORD your God hardened his spirit and toughened his heart, in order to give him into your hand as on this day. 31And the LORD said to me, ‘See, I have begun to give Sihon and his land before you. Begin—take hold—to take hold of his land.’ 32And Sihon sallied forth to meet us, he and all his troops, to battle at Jahaz. 33And the LORD gave him before us, and we struck him down, and his sons, and all his troops. 34And we captured all his towns at that time and we put every town under the ban, menfolk and the women and the little ones, we left no remnant. 35Only the beasts did we plunder, and the booty of the towns that we captured. 36From Aroer which is on the bank of the Wadi Arnon and the town in the wadi as far as the Gilead, there was no city that loomed too high for us, everything did the LORD our God give before us. 37Only the land of the Ammonites you did not approach, all along the Wadi Jabbok and the towns of the high country, as all that the LORD our God had charged.”
CHAPTER 2 NOTES
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3. Long enough. This initial phrase pointedly echoes the one in 1:6, thus establishing a rhetorical link between God’s command to Israel to move on from Sinai and His command thirty-eight years later for Israel to move on to the conquest after its peregrinations to the southeast of Canaan.
4. Though they fear you. Richard Elliott Friedman aptly notes that in Genesis 32, as Jacob/Israel drew near his brother after long years of separation, it was Israel who feared Esau and not the other way around.
7. For the LORD your God has blessed you. The initial “for” (ki) marks a clear logic of causation: because God has blessed all your enterprises, you have abundant wherewithal to pay for food and drink.
He has known. The Hebrew verb “to know” often suggests intimate knowledge—hence its use for sexual intercourse—and caring attention.
these forty years. Again and again in Moses’s valedictory speech that constitutes this book, he invokes the palpable experience that the people has undergone in all its years of wandering “in this fearful wilderness.”
8. Elath and Ezion-Geber. These are port cities at the northern end of the Gulf of Aqabah.
10. The Emim. This designation, evidently of legendary creatures, is probably related to the noun ʾeymah, “fear” or “terror.” Rephaim in the next verse is a well-attested Hebrew and Ugaritic term for ghosts or dwellers of the underworld. In verse 20, we are informed that the Ammonite name for these huge creatures was Zamzummim. Jeffrey H. Tigay plausibly represents this as an onomatopoeic term, “the Buzz-buzzers”—that is, people who speak an unintelligible, and perhaps frightening, language. This could also be, as Abraham ibn Ezra proposes, the Hebraization of a foreign gentilic term. Moshe Weinfeld speculates that it was the presence of megaliths in the trans-Jordan region that inspired these traditions of an aboriginal race of giants there.
12. the sons of Esau dispossessed them … as Israel did to the land of its inheritance. The writer confronts a theological problem posed by political history. All around him, he sees a constant flux of warring peoples, one group laying waste to another and seizing its territory. Upon this Hobbesian moral chaos of history, he strives to impose at least a degree of monotheistic order: it is God Who determines the inheritance of peoples, not only in the case of Israel, which has been promised it will succeed in overcoming the indigenous Canaanites and possessing the land, but also in the case of the other peoples of the region. The period of imperial incursions from the east from the late eighth century to the late seventh century B.C.E. would have given special urgency to this effort to account for the violent movements of history.
in their onslaught. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “from before their face,” but the clear implication is fear, as from an attack, and this preposition is often used after a verb such as “to banish.”
14. came to an end. The Hebrew verb tum means both “to come to an end,” or “to perish,” and “to finish doing something.” In verse 16 it is used in the latter sense but coupled with “dying.” The stylistic justification for the triple repetition is to convey emphatically the idea that this generation had absolutely and entirely died out. This pattern of repetition is phonetically reinforced by the word in verse 15 that means “to panic them,” lehumam, which is a rime riche with the last word of the verse, tumam, “they came to an end.” Panicking is what God regularly does to Israel’s enemies in order to rout them in battle. Thus, the Wilderness generation is not just left to die out but stricken with terror, impelling it to self-destruction.
18. Ar. If this is a precise site, it has not been located, but the context suggests that it designates the whole region inhabited by the Moabites.
21. through the Ammonites’ onslaught. The Hebrew says only “from before their faces.” As before, the element of fearfulness in that preposition is represented by “onslaught,” and “Ammonites’” is added to clarify an otherwise ambiguous antecedent of the pronoun.
23. the Caphtorim, who came out of Crete. Caphtor is the biblical name for Crete. This notice is historically accurate. The coastal plain, including Gaza, was invaded from the Mediterranean and successfully occupied by the Philistines, one of the so-called Sea Peoples, in the later thirteenth century and twelfth century B.C.E. They are first referred to explicitly in an Egyptian inscription that has been dated to the 1180s or the 1170s. Although the Hebrew writer does not directly ascribe this invasion of a Hellenic people to the LORD’s granting the territory to them as an inheritance, it does participate in the general pattern he is observing in which one well-established people is conquered and displaced by another.
25. the peoples under all the heavens. The Septuagint opts for the more expected idiom, “all the peoples under the heavens,” and it is conceivable that the Greek translators in fact had a Hebrew text before them which read that way, but it is also quite possible that they decided to smooth out a little stylistic wrinkle actually chosen by the Deuteronomist, one that equally conveys the sense of “everywhere on earth.”
26. words of peace. The evident contradiction between this and verse 24, where Israel is enjoined to provoke Sihon, has not been satisfactorily resolved.
27. On the road, on the road. The repetition clearly conveys the sense of “strictly and exclusively.”
30. hardened his spirit and toughened his heart. The language is close enough to the reiterated formula concerning Pharaoh in the Plagues narrative to suggest a typological connection between these two kings bent on Israel’s destruction. Sihon’s offensive against Israel, in the face of the Israelite proposal to pass through his territory peacefully and pay for food and water, is taken as justification for the implementation of the brutal practice of the ḥerem or “ban” (verse 34)—the massacre of the entire population. The persistence of the Amorites as a people suggests that this drastic report does not altogether reflect historical reality. The supposed application of the ḥerem to the Amorites may in fact have the function of defining political borders. The ḥerem was to be directed against the population of the promised land. In the parallel account in Numbers, where the ḥerem is not applied to Sihon’s people, the underlying assumption is that the promised land lies west of the Jordan, with only a special concession made to two and a half tribes to settle in trans-Jordan. As Moshe Weinfeld convincingly argues, the extension of Israelite dominion east of the Jordan chiefly occurred during Davidic and Solomonic times (tenth century B.C.E.), making it a long-established political reality by the time our later writer framed his account, in which this region is included in the promise of the land.
36. the town in the wadi. A wadi is a dry riverbed that fills with water during the rainy season, but in this case, the reference seems to be to a riverbed, or perhaps some small branch of it, that is no longer the site of seasonal inundation.
there was no city that loomed too high for us. The looming high (a single verb in the Hebrew, sagvah) reflects the perspective of the besieging army looking up at the fortified city situated on a height. Looming high is also stressed as a response to the reiterated perception that the indigenous peoples are “lofty,” a race of giants.
37. Only the land of the Ammonites you did not approach. This would be the hilly region farther to the east, whereas the Israelite advance is along the plain just east of the Jordan. Some recent scholars have accepted Jacob Milgrom’s proposal that here the verb q-r-b (“approach”) is used in a political extension of its cultic meaning, “to encroach upon,” though there is no compelling necessity to see that sense of the word in this verse.
1“And we turned and we went up on the way to the Bashan, and Og king of Bashan sallied forth to meet us in battle, he and all his troops, at Edrei. 2And the LORD said to me, ‘Do not fear him, for into your hand I have given him and all his troops and his land, and you shall do to him as you did to Sihon the Amorite king who dwells in Heshbon.’ 3And the LORD our God gave into our hand Og king of the Bashan, too, and all his troops, and we struck him down until no remnant was left. 4And we captured all his towns at that time. There was not a city that we did not take from them, sixty towns, all the district of Argob, the kingdom of Og in the Bashan. 5All these were fortified towns with high walls, double gates, and bolt, besides the very many open towns. 6And we put them under the ban as we had done to Sihon king of Heshbon, putting under the ban every town, menfolk, the women, and the little ones. 7But all the beasts and the booty of the towns we plundered for ourselves. 8And we took the land at that time from the hand of the two Amorite kings who were across the Jordan, from the Wadi Arnon as far as Mount Hermon. 9The Sidonians call Hermon Sirion, and the Amorites call it Senir. 10All the towns of the plateau and all the Gilead and all the Bashan as far as Salcah and Edrei, the towns of the kingdom of Og in the Bashan. 11For only Og king of the Bashan remained from the rest of the Rephaim. Look, his bedstead, an iron bedstead, is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? Nine cubits its length and four cubits its width by the cubit of a man. 12And this land we took hold of at that time. From Aroer which is on the Wadi Arnon and half the high country of the Gilead and its towns, I gave to the Reubenite and to the Gadite. 13And the rest of the Gilead and all of the Bashan, the kingdom of Og, I gave to the half-tribe of Manasseh—all the district of Argob. All of that Bashan is called Land of the Rephaim. 14Jair son of Manasseh took all the district of Argob as far as the border of the Geshurite and the Maacathites, and he called them—the Bashan—after his own name, Jair’s Hamlets, until this day. 15And to Machir I gave the Gilead. 16And to the Reubenite and to the Gadite I gave from the Gilead as far as Wadi Arnon, with the middle of the wadi the boundary, as far as Wadi Jabbok, the boundary of the Ammonites, 17and the Arabah with the Jordan the boundary, from Chinnereth as far as the Arabah Sea, the Dead Sea, beneath the slopes of Pisgah to the east. 18And I charged you at that time, saying, ‘The LORD your God has given you this land to take hold of it. As vanguard troops you shall cross over before your brothers the Israelites, all the warriors. 19Only your wives and your little ones and your livestock—I know you have much livestock—shall stay in your towns that I have given to you, 20until the LORD your God grants repose to your brothers as to you, and they, too, take hold of the land that the LORD your God is about to give to them across the Jordan. Then you may go back, each man to his inheritance that I have given to you.’ 21And I charged Joshua at that time, saying, ‘Your own eyes have seen all that the LORD your God did to these two kings. So shall the LORD do to all the kingdoms into which you are about to cross. 22You shall not fear them, for it is the LORD your God Who does battle for you.’
23“And I pleaded with the LORD at that time, saying, 24‘My Master, LORD, You Yourself have begun to show Your servant Your greatness and Your strong hand, for what god is there in the heavens and on the earth who could do like Your deeds and like Your might? 25Let me, pray, cross over that I may see the goodly land which is across the Jordan, this goodly high country the Lebanon.’ 26And the LORD was cross with me because of you, and He did not listen to me. And the LORD said to me, ‘Enough for you! Do not speak more to Me of this matter. 27Go up to the top of the Pisgah, and raise your eyes to the west and to the north and to the south and to the east and see with your own eyes, for you shall not cross this Jordan. 28And charge Joshua and strengthen him and bid him take heart, for he shall cross over before this people and he shall give them in estate the land that you will see.’ 29And we stayed in the valley over against Beth Peor.”
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
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2. Do not fear him, for … you shall do to him as you did to Sihon. Although Moses has already prevailed over Sihon, he has special reason to be afraid of Og, for, as we learn in verse 11, Og, alone among these trans-Jordanian kings, is a gigantic figure, the last scion of a legendary race.
5. fortified towns with high walls, double gates and bolt. The looming aspect of the trans-Jordanian towns, which was stressed before, is here given architectural specification: despite the high walls and the firmly bolted gates, the Israelites found ways to breach the defenses and capture every one of the enemies’ towns. These passages might well be a wishful turning around of the strategic telescope, for in the period in which they were composed—the last century of the First Commonwealth—it was the towns of Israel and Judah that repeatedly faced assault and sometimes succumbed.
open towns. That is, without walls or other fortifications.
8. as far as Mount Hermon. Repeatedly in these rehearsals of the Israelite conquest, the eye of the narrator—Moses—swings in a grand panorama from trans-Jordan, where he and the people are standing and where the first victories took place, across the Jordan, and all the way to the fertile mountainous region in the north of Canaan. The lushness of the Mount Hermon region is attested by its invocation in erotic contexts in the Song of Songs.
11. For only Og king of the Bashan remained from the rest of the Rephaim. Since the Rephaim, as we had occasion to note in 2:10, are a race of giants, and also dwellers of the underworld, this makes Og virtually a mythological figure. In a Phoenician mortuary inscription from the sixth or fifth century B.C.E., would-be violators of the tomb are warned that the great Og will exact retribution from them. He would appear to be some sort of fierce underworld god or demon in the common lore of the region, and our text seeks to historicize him while clinging to his legendary lineaments. Because of the link between the Rephaim and the Nephilim of Genesis 6:4, several traditional commentators see Og as the last of the antediluvians.
his bedstead, an iron bedstead. The Hebrew noun ʿeres is a poetic term for bed, perhaps used here (instead of the more prosaic mishkav or mitah) to give this declaration an epic flourish. Moshe Weinfeld proposes that it means “bier,” a secondary meaning that mitah has. Several scholars have noted that late in the second millennium B.C.E., iron had been only recently introduced and was still regarded as a rare metal. But the sheer hardness of the substance might be meant to indicate the martial toughness of the gigantic king.
is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? The speaker points to this relic of the gargantuan Og as concrete evidence of his actual existence, available for inspection by the curious tourist.
by the cubit of a man. The disproportion between the giant and an ordinary man is highlighted by giving the measurements of his bed according to “the cubit of a man,” that is, the length in an average man from the elbow to the beginning of the knuckles. (The royal cubit was longer.) This would make the bedstead around thirteen and a half feet long and approximately as wide as a modern queen-size bed (in an era when all beds were single couches).
12. And this land we took hold of at that time. One of the earmarks of the Deuteronomic style is the fondness it exhibits for demonstrative pronouns. Moses, recapitulating the recent history of the Israelites for the benefit of the people, likes to use what linguists call deictics—“pointing words”—to indicate what is before their eyes, the familiar objects of their collective experience.
14. until this day. This little flourish is an inadvertent hint that for the moment the writer is probably not thinking of Moses’s time but of his own.
17. the Arabah Sea, the Dead Sea. The latter designation in the Hebrew is literally the Salt Sea.
Pisgah. The other name for this mountain, from whose peak Moses will look out on the promised land and then die, is Nebo.
19. Only your wives and your little ones and your livestock. Most of the details here of the military role assigned to the trans-Jordanian tribes correspond to the account in Numbers 32, though this version is a good deal more succinct and omits the indications of divine instruction in Numbers.
22. it is the LORD your God Who does battle for you. This clause, picked up from Exodus 14:14, serves as a kind of refrain through this whole narrative of the conquest.
23. I pleaded. Richard Elliott Friedman, noting the linkage between this verb and “did not listen” in verse 26, interestingly detects an allusion to Genesis 42:21, where Joseph’s brothers recall how he pleaded to them and they did not listen when they sold him into slavery. Perhaps the point of the allusion is that it recalls the moment when Joseph is violently thrust away from his homeland of Canaan: Moses, who began where Joseph ended, in Egypt, will not be permitted to enter the homeland though, as we may recall, Joseph’s bones will be carried into the promised land to be buried there.
24. My Master, LORD. The Hebrew, as it is vocalized in the Masoretic Text, reads ʾadonai YHWH, the first of these two words being another appellation of God. This translation follows Weinfeld’s persuasive suggestion that either the original vocalization of the first word was ʾadoni, “my Master,” a form of address often used in supplications, or that the plural suffix ʾadonai is a plural of majesty.
for what god is there in the heavens and on the earth. Given the Deuteronomist’s rigorous monotheism, the plausible sense of these words is that the supposed gods of heaven and earth have no real substance and therefore no power to perform any acts. Nevertheless, the formulation, perhaps as a kind of verbal fossil, carries a trace of the older view that there may be other gods, but ones that are no match for YHWH.
25. this goodly high country. Still again one sees the Deuteronomist’s fondness for the demonstrative pronoun, here used with considerable poignancy as Moses points verbally to the sweet land before him that he will not be allowed to enter.
26. And the LORD was cross. Although the verb used in this translation—as by Friedman—is a little too mild for the Hebrew hitʿaber, which is closer to “was angered,” it has the virtue of preserving the pun, transparent in the Hebrew, on the same verb (ʿ-b-r) in the qal conjugation, “to cross” or “cross over,” used both for the advance of the Israelites (verse 21) and in Moses’s plea to God (verse 25). Such punning switches of meaning are a regular technique of biblical narrative employed to effect transitions and do not necessarily reflect thematic significance. (Compare, for example, Judges 3, in which Ehud first stabs [taqaʿ] the Midianite king Eglon in the belly and then, having effected his escape, blasts [taqaʿ] the ram’s horn to muster the Israelites to rebellion.)
Enough for you. This impatient phrase, rav lekha, pointedly echoes rav lakhem, “Long enough you …” addressed by God to the Israelites in 1:6 and 2:3.
1“And now, Israel, hear the statutes and the laws that I am about to teach you to do, so you may live, and you shall come and take hold of the land that the LORD God of your fathers is about to give to you. 2You shall not add to the word that I charge you and you shall not subtract from it, to keep the commands of the LORD your God which I charge you. 3Your own eyes have seen that which the LORD did at Baal Peor, for every man that went after Baal Peor did the LORD your God destroy from your midst. 4But you, the ones clinging to the LORD your God, are all of you alive today. 5See, I have taught you the statutes and the laws as the LORD my God has charged me, to do thus within the land into which you are about to come to take hold of it. 6And you shall keep and do, for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the eyes of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and will say, ‘Only a wise and understanding people is this great nation.’ 7For what great nation is there that has gods close to it like the LORD our God whenever we call to Him? 8And what great nation is there that has just statutes and laws like all this teaching that I am about to set before you today? 9Only be you on the watch and watch yourself closely lest you forget the things that your own eyes have seen and lest they swerve from your heart—all 10the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your sons and to your sons’ sons: the day that you stood before the LORD your God at Horeb when the LORD said to me, ‘Assemble the people to Me that I may have them hear My words, so that they learn to fear Me all the days that they live on the soil, and so that they teach their sons.’ 11And you came forward and stood at the bottom of the mountain, and the mountain was burning with fire to the heart of the heavens—darkness, cloud, and dense fog. 12And the LORD spoke to you from the midst of the fire. The sound of words you did hear but no image did you see except the sound. 13And He told you His covenant that He charged you to do, the Ten Words, and He wrote them on two tablets of stone. 14And me did the LORD charge at that time to teach you statutes and laws for you to do in the land into which you are crossing over to take hold of it. 15And you shall be very watchful of yourselves, for you saw no image on the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire, 16lest you act ruinously and make you a sculpted image of any likeness, the form of male or of female, 17the form of any beast that is on the earth, the form of any winged bird that flies in the heavens, 18the form of anything that crawls on the ground, the form of any fish that is in the waters under the earth, 19lest you raise your eyes to the heavens and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the array of the heavens, and you be led astray and bow down to them and worship them, for the LORD your God allotted them to all the peoples under the heavens. 20But you did the LORD take and He brought you out from the iron’s forge, from Egypt, to become for Him a people in estate as this day. 21And the LORD was incensed with me because of your words and He swore not to let me cross the Jordan and not to let me come into the goodly land that the LORD your God is about to give you in estate. 22For I am about to die in this land, I am not to cross the Jordan, but you are to cross over and you will take hold of this goodly land. 23Be you on the watch, lest you forget the covenant of the LORD your God which He has sealed with you, and you make for yourselves a sculpted image of any sort, against which the LORD your God has charged you. 24For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous god. 25When you beget sons and sons of sons and are long in the land, and you act ruinously and make a sculpted image of any sort and do evil in the eyes of the LORD your God to anger Him, 26I have called to witness against you the heavens and the earth that you shall surely perish quickly from upon the land into which you are about to cross the Jordan to take hold of it. You shall not long endure upon it, for you will surely be destroyed. 27And the LORD will scatter you among the peoples and you shall be left men few in number among the nations where the LORD will drive you. 28And you shall worship there their gods that are human handiwork, wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. 29And you shall search for the LORD your God from there, and you shall find him when you seek Him with all your heart and with all your being. 30When you are in straits and all these things find you in time to come, you shall turn back to the LORD your God and heed His voice. 31For the LORD your God is a merciful god. He will not let you go and will not destroy you and will not forget your fathers’ covenant that He swore to them. 32For, pray, ask of the first days that were before you, from the day God created a human on the earth and from one end of the heavens to the other end of the heavens, has there been the like of this great thing or has its like been heard? 33Has a people heard God’s voice speaking from the midst of the fire, as you yourself have heard, and still lived? 34Or has God tried to come to take Him a nation from within a nation in trials and signs and portents and in battle and with a strong hand and an outstretched arm and with great terrors, like all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? 35You yourself were shown to know that the LORD is God, there is none besides Him. 36From the heavens He made you hear His voice to reprove you, and on the earth He showed you His great fire, and His words you heard, from the midst of the fire. 37And since He did love your fathers He chose their seed after them and brought you out from Egypt through His presence with His great power, 38to dispossess nations greater and mightier than you from before you, to bring you to give to you their land in estate as on this day. 39And you shall know today and take to your heart that the LORD, He is God in the heavens above and on the earth below, there is none else. 40And you shall keep His statutes and His commands which I am about to charge you today, that He do well with you and with your sons after you and so that you long endure on the soil that the LORD your God is about to give you for all time.”
41Then did Moses divide off three towns across the Jordan where the sun rises 42for a murderer to flee there who murdered his fellow man without knowing and he was not his enemy in time past, that he might flee to one of those towns and live: 43Bezer in the wilderness in the land of the plain for the Reubenite, and Ramoth in the Gilead for the Gadite, and Golan in the Bashan for the Manassite.
44And this is the teaching that Moses set before the Israelites. 45These are the treaty terms and the statutes and the laws that Moses spoke to the Israelites when they came out from Egypt, 46across the Jordan in the valley opposite Beth Peor in the land of Sihon king of the Amorite whom Moses, and the Israelites, struck down when they came out from Egypt. 47And they took hold of his land and the land of Og king of the Bashan, the two kings of the Amorite who are across the Jordan where the sun rises, 48from Aroer which is on the bank of the Wadi Arnon as far as Sion, which is Hermon, 49and all the Arabah across the Jordan to the east as far as the Arabah Sea, at the foot of the Pisgah slopes.
CHAPTER 4 NOTES
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1. And now, Israel, hear. The first Hebrew word here, weʿatah, “and now,” is often used in a logical rather than a temporal sense, to introduce a conclusion or mark a transition in the stages of a discourse. At this point, it introduces the grand sermon that concludes this whole preamble to the main body of the Book of Deuteronomy (chapters 5–31). The verb “to hear,” often, as here, in the imperative (shemaʿ), is one of the signature terms of Deuteronomy. The Hebrew verb means “to hear,” “to listen,” “to heed,” and “to understand,” and quite frequently all those meanings come into play. In this preeminently didactic book, the Israelites are repeatedly enjoined to devote careful attention to the exhortations and the laws that Moses delivers to them—to listen, absorb, understand, and obey.
so you may live. This is another verbal refrain that punctuates the sermon. For the Deuteronomist, with deportations and the destruction of nations vividly on the political horizon, history has become a very dangerous realm, and Moses repeatedly urges Israel to follow the only path that, according to the Deuteronomic view, will avert impending disaster.
2. You shall not add … you shall not subtract. Jeffrey H. Tigay proposes that this strict-constructionist view of the Mosaic teaching is intended to be limited to the injunction to worship a single God: one is not free to add other objects of worship nor to remove YHWH as the object of worship. But such a cultic sense of “subtract” is rather strained, and it is more likely that Moses here is represented enjoining strict construction precisely in order to diminish any impression (in fact, an abundantly warranted impression) that Deuteronomy is effecting a revision of a good many earlier laws and traditions.
4. you, the ones clinging to the LORD your God, are all of you alive today. The very physical existence of the audience for Moses’s sermon is palpable proof of the principle he announced at the beginning of the sermon, “so you may live.”
6. Only a wise and understanding people is this great nation. The primacy of wisdom in the worldview of Deuteronomy is sharply reflected here. Israel’s greatness as the other nations come to recognize it is not in its fecundity and military might (as, for example, in Balaam’s oracles in Numbers) but in its wisdom, demonstrated by its adherence to a set of just statutes and laws. The next lines (verses 7–8) are testimony to God’s decision to be close to Israel through the statutes and teachings He reveals to them.
10. the day that you stood before the LORD. “The day” or “on the day” is an epic locution for “when.” Having begun with a general exhortation to cling to God’s laws, the sermon now focuses in on the defining moment four decades earlier when Israel stood at the foot of Mount Sinai and God revealed to them his law in thunder and lightning.
12. The sound of words you did hear but no image did you see. The account of the Sinai epiphany in Exodus is less rigorous about excluding the aspect of sight. The Israelites there are enjoined to keep their distance precisely in order that they will see nothing, and then the seventy elders in the sacred feast on the mountain are vouchsafed a vision of the effulgence surrounding God. The Deuteronomist, by contrast, is sternly aniconic, in keeping with his steady polemic against all cults of divine images; he is a writer who insists on hearing the divine, and seeing only God’s portentous acts in history.
except the sound. Abraham ibn Ezra ingeniously connects this slightly odd turn of phrase with the synesthetic “and all the people were seeing the sounds [i.e., the thunder]” (Exodus 20:18).
15. be very watchful of yourselves. It should be noted that the Hebrew freely swings between second-person plural and second-person singular, an oscillation perfectly idiomatic in biblical Hebrew and by no means to be attributed to a collation of different sources. It may be that the speaker on occasion switches to the singular form in order to emphasize the effect of imperative address to each individual, but that is not certain.
16. a sculpted image of any likeness, the form. Philologists have sought to draw technical differences among these terms, but the manifest point of their deployment here is the stylistic force of their synonymity: any manner or shape of image or icon will lead Israel on the path to ruin.
16–18. the form of male or of female … of any beast … on the earth … of any winged bird … in the heavens … of anything that crawls on the ground … of any fish that is in the waters under the earth. The ringing language of the sermon here is a grand evocation of the account of creation in Genesis 1, and the precise recapitulation of phrases compels the conclusion that that account, attributed to P, was familiar to the Deuteronomist in a textual form resembling the one we know. The hierarchy of creation was ordained by God for human’s use and dominion, and man in turn was to recognize the single divine source of all creation. The elevation of any component of the created world to an object of worship is thus seen as a perversion of the whole plan of cosmogonic harmony and hierarchy.
18. the waters under the earth. In keeping with the picture of the cosmos in Genesis 1, water is imagined to be under the earth (“the great abyss”), beyond the perimeters of the dry land (the sea), and erupting from within the dry land itself in rivers and lakes.
19. lest you raise your eyes to the heavens and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the array of the heavens. Once again, the language harks back to the first account of creation, which concludes with the completion of the earth and the heavens “and all their array.” In a historical period rife with religious syncretism and cultural assimilation, the writer stresses the dangerous enchantment of the beauty of the natural world, which could easily lead people to deify and worship the various manifestations of that beauty.
for the LORD your God allotted them to all the peoples under the heavens. This notion, which will be picked up again in the Song of Moses (chapter 32), is a curious one by the lights of later monotheism. To Israel the worship of the one overmastering God was assigned, whereas the other nations were entrusted to the supervision of lesser celestial beings, beney haʾelohim (“the sons of God”) and came to worship these intermediary beings as though they were autonomous deities. Polytheism, in this view, is a reflection of the fact that the sundry nations, unlike Israel, have not been chosen by the one God to serve Him.
20. But you did the LORD take and He brought you out from the iron’s forge. The argument of the sermon now moves another step back in time, from Sinai to the Exodus. The origins of Israel as a people subject to another people in whose land it dwelled, rescued from the crucible of slavery by God, are adduced as further evidence of God’s unique election of Israel.
a people in estate. Literally, a people-estate—God’s special property.
21. the LORD was incensed with me because of your words. Again, the barring of Moses from the promised land is attributed not to any act or gesture of his—for here he is the impeccable leader, God’s mouthpiece—but to the mistrustful words of the Israelites in the incident of the spies.
26. I have called to witness against you the heavens and the earth. It was conventional in ancient Near Eastern treaties to invoke heaven and earth as witnesses, but the word pair here also nicely echoes the allusions to the Creation story in previous verses. God’s heaven and earth are everlasting, but Israel will be all too ephemeral if it worships images of the natural world.
27. And the LORD will scatter you among the peoples. This dire prospect, which is not within the purview of the Book of Exodus, haunts the Deuteronomist, writing in a period after the Neo-Assyrian empire had instituted a policy of deporting substantial elements of subjugated populations in order to clear the conquered territory for colonization. Indeed, some sections of the book, including this one, may have been written in the Babylonian exile.
28. And you shall worship there their gods that are human handiwork. The ultimate catastrophe of exile is viewed as assimilation into the local pagan cults—the fate, one may reasonably surmise, of most of those exiled from the ten northern tribes after the Neo-Assyrian conquest in 721 B.C.E. and some of those exiled in 586 by the Babylonians.
wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. In the earlier books of the Torah, the gods worshipped by the other nations are imagined as lesser entities, impotent in the face of YHWH’s overwhelming superiority and bound to be reduced to nullity in any competition with the God of Israel. In the antipagan polemic of Deuteronomy, as in some of the contemporaneous and slightly later Prophets, polytheism is jeeringly represented as imbecile fetishism.
29. with all your heart and with all your being. This phrase, with its revivalist fervor, is a recurrent one in the rhetoric of Deuteronomy.
30. heed His voice. The primary meaning of the verb, which has already appeared several times in this sermon, is “hear,” but the preposition bE that follows it requires the specific sense of “heed.”
32–33. from the day God created a human on the earth … Has a people heard God’s voice speaking from the midst of the fire. These sentences bind together in a summarizing flourish the topics of creation and the Sinai epiphany that were underscored earlier in this speech.
33. still lived. The “still” is added in the translation for clarity. The obvious sense of the verb is “survived” but the level of diction of that English term would betray the monosyllabic plainness of the Hebrew. “Still lived,” it should be noted, takes us back to “so you may live” at the very beginning of the sermon.
34. to take Him a nation from within a nation. In the almost musical structure of this oratory, we now move back to the invocation of the Exodus as testimony in verse 20.
37. their seed after them. The Hebrew says literally “his seed after him,” but there is no real confusion because the usage has simply moved to a grammatical singular for a collective entity.
39. take to your heart. The literal sense of the verb before “heart” is “bring back,” aligning this usage with the references to turning back to God in exile.
41–43. This brief unit on the towns of asylum, repeating a regulation laid down in greater detail in Numbers, appears to be out of place here and may have originally belonged with the material on the apportioning of the land in chapter 3.
44. And this is the teaching. The preamble to Deuteronomy was completed at verse 40. Verses 44–49 are a formal introduction to the long discourse that follows, which will begin with a reiteration of the Decalogue, to be followed by exhortations to obey God’s teaching and then by a series of specific laws.
1And Moses called to all Israel and said to them, “Hear, Israel, the statutes and the laws that I am about to speak in your hearing today, and you shall learn them and watch to do them. 2The LORD your God sealed a covenant with us at Horeb. 3Not with our fathers did the LORD seal this covenant but with us—we who are here today, all of us alive. 4Face-to-face did the LORD speak with you on the mountain from the midst of the fire. 5I was standing between the LORD and you at that time to tell you the word of the LORD—for you were afraid in the face of the fire and did not go up the mountain,—saying,
“‘6I am the LORD your God Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves. 7You shall have no other gods beside Me. 8You shall make you no carved likeness, no image of what is in the heavens above or what is on the earth below or what is in the waters beneath the earth. 9You shall not bow to them and you shall not worship them, for I am the LORD your God, a jealous god, reckoning the crime of fathers with sons, and with the third generation and with the fourth, for my foes, 10and doing kindness to the thousandth generation for My friends and for those who keep My commands. 11You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not acquit whosoever takes His name in vain. 12Keep the sabbath day to hallow it as the LORD your God has charged you. 13Six days you shall work and you shall do your tasks, 14but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. You shall do no task, you and your son and your daughter and your male slave and your slavegirl and your ox and your donkey and all your beasts and your sojourner who is within your gates, so that your male slave and your slavegirl may rest like you. 15And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore did the LORD charge you to make the sabbath day. 16Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God charged you, so that your days may be long and so that He may do well with you on the soil that the LORD your God has given you. 17You shall not murder. And you shall not commit adultery. And you shall not steal. And you shall not bear vain witness against your fellow man. 18And you shall not covet your fellow man’s wife, and you shall not desire your fellow man’s house, his field, or his male servant or his slavegirl, his ox or his donkey, or anything that your fellow man has.’ 19These words did the LORD speak to your whole assembly at the mountain from the midst of the fire, the cloud, and the dense fog, in a great voice, and nothing more. And He wrote them on two tablets of stone and gave them to me. 20And it happened, when you heard the voice from the midst of the darkness, with the mountain burning in fire, that you came forward to me, all the heads of your tribes and your elders. 21And you said, ‘Look, the LORD our God has shown us His glory and His greatness, and we have heard His voice from the midst of the fire. This day we have seen that the LORD can speak to man and he may live. 22And now, why should we die, for this great fire will consume us. If we hear again the voice of the LORD our God, we shall die. 23For who is mortal flesh that has heard the voice of the living God speaking from the midst of the fire as we did and has lived? 24You go near and hear all that the LORD our God says, and you it is who will speak to us all that the LORD our God speaks to you, and we shall hear and do.’ 25And the LORD heard the sound of your words when you spoke to me, and the LORD said to me, ‘I have heard the sound of the words of this people which they spoke to you. They have done well in all that they have spoken. 26Would that they had this heart of theirs to fear Me and to keep My commands for all time, so that it would go well with them and with their sons forever. 27Go, say to them, Return you to your tents. 28And you, stand here by Me and I shall speak to you all the commands and the statutes and the laws that you will teach them, and they will do them in the land that I am about to give them to take hold of it. 29And you shall watch to do as the LORD your God has charged you. 30You shall not swerve to the right or left. In all the way that the LORD your God has charged you shall you go, so that you may live and it will be well with you, and you will long endure on the land of which you take hold.’”
CHAPTER 5 NOTES
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2. sealed a covenant. As everywhere in biblical Hebrew, the literal sense of this idiom is “cut a covenant.” The use of that verb may originate in the cutting of pieces of animals in the covenantal ritual, as in the solemn pact between Abraham and God in Genesis 15.
3. with us—we who are here today, all of us alive. The heavy emphasis of Moses’s language, in which, exceptionally, “us” in the accusative is followed by “we” in the nominative and then the triple language of spatial and temporal presence, “here,” “today,” “alive,” powerfully dramatizes the logic of reenactment at the heart of Deuteronomy. This book is framed as a renewal, through rehearsal, of the law. Its initial seventh-century B.C.E. audience is constantly invited to imagine itself in the shoes, or sandals, of the Israelites who stood before Moses just east of the Jordan as he repeated the law. Moses’s rhetoric, in turn, repeatedly evokes the physical, witnessing presence of the audience he addresses as he reiterates the divine law revealed a generation earlier at Sinai.
5. I was standing between the LORD and you … for you were afraid. The seeming contradiction between this verse and the immediately preceding one (“Face-to-face did the LORD speak with you”) has occasioned much exegetical ingenuity, but there is actually strong thematic and narrative logic in the movement from verse 4 to verse 5. The parallel account in Exodus 19 places reiterated emphasis on the idea that the people must remain at a distance, not even touching the base of the mountain, while Moses acts as their intermediary and goes up to the heights to hear God’s words. The Deuteronomist scarcely wants to discard this notion of Moses’s necessary mediation, but, with his own concern for dramatizing Israel as the living aural witnesses of the great epiphany, he introduces two distinct, successive moments in the Sinai experience. God actually addresses the people face-to-face, conveying to them from the midst of the fire the words of revelation that they and their descendants are to remember perpetually. The people, however, cannot tolerate the fearsome directness of this divine address; they recoil from the ascent to the mountaintop and instead allow Moses to act as their intermediary.
in the face of. The verb “to fear” often is followed by a simple direct object. The preposition mipney, “in the face of,” pointedly glances back at “face-to-face” and also amplifies the experience of fear because it suggests a frightened drawing back from before, from the presence, from the face of, the feared object
6–18. This version of the Decalogue is in most respects textually identical with the one that appears in Exodus 20:2–17. For elucidation of many of the significant details, see the commentary on those verses in Exodus. The comments here will be limited to the points where the present version differs from the one in Exodus.
8. no carved likeness, no image. The Hebrew syntax could also be construed as a construct state—i.e., “no carved likeness of an image.” The version in Exodus reads “no carved likeness and no image,” which is probably a difference without an important distinction.
9. and with the third generation. The initial “and” is an addition of our text. Its absence in Exodus 20:5 produces a tighter rhythmic effect.
12. Keep the sabbath day. The Exodus version has “remember” (that is, be mindful of) rather than “keep.” The Midrash Mekhilta famously announced, “‘keep’ and ‘remember’ in a singular utterance,” and the two acts are, indeed, joined in a tight nexus: because we remember or are mindful of something, we keep it. But shamor, “keep,” “observe,” “watch,” is a recurrent term in the didactic rhetoric of Deuteronomy, and so it is hardly surprising that this verb would be favored here.
as the LORD your God has charged you. This Deuteronomic clause of divine injunction is absent in Exodus 20.
14. and your male slave. Again, the initial “and” is added in this version. Similarly, each of the last four commandments here (verses 17–18) is introduced by an “and” lacking in the Exodus text. Though the difference is not major, the lapidary abruptness of the version without the “and’s” lends support to the assumption that it is the primary text while the one here is a secondary elaboration, although one that in most respects hews very close to the original.
your ox and your donkey. Exodus has only “your beast.” Ox and donkey are a kind of synecdoche for all beasts of burden, and part of the legal vocabulary of Deuteronomy.
so that your male slave and your slavegirl may rest like you. This entire clause is absent in Exodus. It serves as a lead-in to the next verse, also lacking in Exodus, in which the liberation from Egypt and the memory of slavery are invoked as the grounds for the sabbath. In Exodus, on the other hand, the sabbath is explained as imitatio dei—just as God rested after the six days of creation, Israel is enjoined to rest on the seventh day. The difference between these two rationales is at least in part a difference in narrative location. The initial iteration of the Decalogue occurs in the direct narration of the awe-inspiring Sinai epiphany, when God, descending from the heavens to make His words known to Israel, powerfully manifests Himself as Creator of heaven and earth. The present reiteration of the Decalogue takes place at the moment Israel is poised to enter the promised land, establish a society, and exercise power over others.
16. as the LORD your God charged you. Precisely as in verse 12, this clause is added to the formulation of the corresponding commandment in Exodus.
and so that He may do well with you. This entire clause is absent in the Exodus version of this commandment, and, with its didactic emphasis of synonymity with the previous clause, is a strong indication that this formulation of the Decalogue is a secondary elaboration.
17. vain witness. The Exodus version reads “false witness.” The present formulation chooses a synonym for “false,” “empty,” “lying” that is the same word used in “You shall not take [literally, bear] the name of the LORD your God in vain.” This translation preserves that repetition of terms.
18. his field. This specification is not part of the Exodus version.
his ox. This is one of only two points in this version of the Decalogue where an initial wE (“and” or “or”) present in Exodus is deleted, rather than the other way around.
19. and nothing more. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “and He did not add.”
21. we have heard His voice from the midst of the fire. This speech of the people is a detailed unpacking of what was indicated compactly, and proleptically, in verse 5. The people in this version of the story that stresses immediate witnessing have actually heard God’s voice speaking the Ten Words from the summit of the mountain engulfed in fire. They draw back in terror—presumably, to the very bottom of the mountain or the approach to it—and make it clear, as they implore Moses to serve henceforth as their intermediary, that this is not an experience they would venture to undergo a second time. Thus the story succeeds in having it both ways—representing the people as having heard God’s words with their own ears and firmly establishing Moses in his role as teacher and necessary intermediary between Israel and God.
23. mortal flesh. Literally, “all flesh.”
the living God … has lived. There is a striking play between God’s overwhelmingly powerful, incandescent, eternal life and the fragile life of ephemeral man exposed to this terrific presence of the deity. Some scholars have also seen in the epitaph “living God” a counterpoint to the lifeless fetishes that the Deuteronomist often mocks.
25. They have done well in all that they have spoken. At the conclusion of the episode, God resoundingly confirms the rightness of the people’s entreaty that Moses stand as gobetween in all communications from the deity. One may detect in all this the interest of a royal scribal elite promoting itself as the necessary authoritative mediators of God’s words for the people.
30. so that you may live and it will be well with you, and you will long endure on the land. This didactic flourish reflects an underlying view of history in Deuteronomy. In this era of incursions by great empires, of deportations and destruction of kingdoms, Israel’s endurance on the land promised to it is constantly, dangerously, contingent on its faithfully hewing to all that God has commanded.
1“And this is the command, the statutes and the laws that the LORD your God has charged you to teach you to do in the land into which you are about to cross to take hold of it. 2So that you will fear the LORD your God to keep all His statutes and His commands which I charge you—you and your son and your son’s son, all the days of your life; and so that your days will be long. 3And you shall hear, Israel, and you shall keep to do, that it may go well with you, and that you may greatly multiply, as the LORD God of your fathers has spoken concerning you, a land flowing with milk and honey.
4Hear, Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your being and with all your might. 6And these words that I charge you today shall be upon your heart. 7And you shall rehearse them to your sons and speak of them when you sit in your house and when you go on the way and when you lie down and when you rise. 8And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as circlets between your eyes. 9And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and in your gates.
10“And it shall come about when the LORD your God brings you to the land that He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to you—great and goodly towns that you did not build, 11and houses filled with all good that you did not fill, and hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant, you will eat and be sated. 12Watch yourself, lest you forget the LORD Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slaves. 13The LORD your God you shall fear, and Him shall you serve, and by His name shall you swear. 14You shall not go after other gods, from the gods of the people who are all around you. 15For the LORD your God is a jealous god in your midst. Lest the wrath of the LORD your God flare against you and He destroy you from the face of the earth. 16You shall not try the LORD your God as you tried Him at Massah. 17You shall surely keep the command of the LORD your God, and His treaty terms and His statutes with which He charged you. 18And you shall do what is right and good in the eyes of the LORD, so that it may go well with you, and you shall come and take hold of the good land that the LORD swore to your fathers 19to drive back all your enemies before you, as the LORD has spoken.
20“Should your son ask you tomorrow, saying, ‘What are the treaty terms and the statutes and the laws with which the LORD our God has charged you?’ 21You shall say to your son, ‘Slaves were we to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the LORD brought us out with a strong hand. 22And the LORD wrought great and evil signs and portents against Egypt, against Pharaoh and against all his house, before our eyes. 23But us did He take out from there, so that He might bring us to give us the land that He swore to our fathers. 24And the LORD charged us to do these statutes, to fear the LORD our God for our own good always, to keep us in life as on this day. 25And it will be a merit for us if we keep to do all this that is commanded before the LORD our God as He has charged us.’”
CHAPTER 6 NOTES
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3. that it may go well with you. Again and again, the Deuteronomist stresses the causal link between loyalty to God and prospering in the land. This notion is variously adumbrated in earlier biblical texts but never given the central emphasis it enjoys here as an overriding conception of history.
a land flowing with milk and honey. The syntactic connection of this phrase with the whole clause is a little obscure, or at least elliptic. Some scholars supply “in” before “a land.” The Septuagint and the Peshitta read, “to give you a land.”
4. Hear, Israel. This entire passage, through to verse 9, has been aptly described as a catechism, and it entirely fits its character as an exhortation to hew to God’s teachings that it later should have been incorporated in the daily liturgy, recited twice each day in Jewish worship. Some translators render ʾeḥad, “one,” as “alone,” but the evidence that this common Hebrew numeral term ever meant that is questionable. The statement stands, then, as it has been traditionally construed, as a ringing declaration of monotheism. Both Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra point to Zechariah 14:9 as an indication that in days to come the LORD our God will be recognized as the one God by all.
5. And you shall love the LORD your God. It is a new emphasis of Deuteronomy to add to the traditional fear of the LORD the emotion of love, perhaps in an effort to deepen psychologically the conception of monotheism. Ibn Ezra links this injunction with the immediately preceding declaration of God’s oneness: “Since we have no other god but only Him alone, you have to love Him, for we have no other god.” In this view, the lack of rivals obliges us to make this divine suitor the object of our affection. But “love” also belongs to the ancient Near Eastern language of international relations, appearing in treaties in which fealty is sworn to a political overlord.
with all your heart. The heart is the seat of understanding in biblical physiology, but it is also associated with feelings.
with all your being. The Hebrew nefesh means “life-breath” or “essential self.” The traditional translation of “soul,” preserved in many recent versions, is misleading because it suggests a body-soul split alien to biblical thinking.
with all your might. The Hebrew meʾod elsewhere is an adverb (“very”), not a noun. It is not clear whether this distinctive Deuteronomic usage reflects stylistic inventiveness in converting one part of speech to another or rather records an idiomatic sense of the word that is simply not used elsewhere in the biblical corpus.
7. rehearse. The Hebrew verb shinen is construed here, in accord with Jeffrey H. Tigay, as a variant of shanah, “to repeat.” Many commentators, medieval and modern, insist on the fact that the root elsewhere means “sharp,” and thus that the meaning here would be “to teach incisively” or even “to incise upon.” It may well be that the writer is punning on the two phonetically related verbal roots in order to suggest something like “to rehearse with incisive effect.”
house … way … lie down … rise. These two pairs of terms, each of which is what is technically called a merism, two opposing terms that also imply everything between them, obviously have the sense of wherever you are, whatever you do.
8. a sign on your hand … circlets between your eyes. Perhaps the original meaning is metaphorical, but inscribed amulets were in fact common in the ancient Near East, and early rabbinic Judaism would interpret these words literally as the injunction for wearing tephillin, small leather boxes on hand and forehead containing this and other biblical passages written on parchment. The denotation and etymology of “circlet,” totafot, are not entirely certain, though the precedent of Egyptian ornaments worn on the forehead suggests itself. See the comment on Exodus 13:9.
9. in your gates. These would be the gates of the city, since houses did not have gates.
11. you will eat and be sated. The full belly is the enemy of faith in Deuteronomy. The comforts of prosperity are thought of as leading to complacency, or perhaps even to cultic assimilationism—worshipping the gods of the previous inhabitants who planted those groves and vineyards and hewed those cisterns. Thus the history of Israel teeters on the edge of a precarious balance: if Israel punctiliously adheres to the commands of its God, it will prosper; but when it prospers, it runs the danger of falling away from its loyalty to God.
15. For the LORD your God is a jealous God. As in similar contexts elsewhere, it is quite likely that the adjective qanaʿ refers to jealousy, even in the sexual sense, rather than to “passion,” as some have claimed, for what is at stake is that the LORD will brook no rivals.
the face of the earth. The Hebrew ʾadamah could also mean “soil” or “land,” referring to the tenure of this agricultural people in the land of Israel, but it may be more plausible to see this verse as a threat of total destruction, thus warranting the translation of ʾadamah as “earth.”
16. You shall not try the LORD your God. For the incident at Massah (a name that means “trial”), see Exodus 17:1–7. The trial in Exodus was the people’s lack of faith that God would provide for them in the wilderness. In this prospective instance, all sorts of bounty would have already been provided to them, and yet, with far less warrant than their ancestors, they would “try” or provoke God by casting aside their obligations of loyalty to Him.
20. Should your son ask you. The didactic impulse of Deuteronomy is here made perfectly explicit in the catechistic form of the entire passage. Appropriately, the passage was incorporated into the text of the Passover Haggadah as part of the rationale for the ritual retelling of the Exodus story.
22. before our eyes. The verse concluded by this phrase is a stringing together of formulaic locutions repeatedly used in the Plagues narrative in Exodus. What this final phrase adds is the reiterated emphasis in Deuteronomy on Israel’s having been ocular witness to God’s saving power.
25. a merit. This is the most likely meaning here of the Hebrew tsedaqah, which also means “righteousness” and “innocence.” (For the sense of “merit,” compare Genesis 15:6.) But it also occasionally means something like “bounty” (see Judges 5:11), and that sense could also work here.
1“When the LORD your God brings you to the land to which you are coming to take hold of it, He will cast off many nations from before you—the Hittite and the Girgashite and the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Perizzite and the Hivvite and the Jebusite, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you. 2And the LORD your God will give them before you and you shall strike them down. You shall surely put them under the ban. You shall not seal a covenant with them and shall show them no mercy. 3You shall not intermarry with them. You shall not give your daughter to his son, nor shall you take his daughter for your son. 4For he will make your son swerve from following Me, and they will worship other gods, and the LORD’s wrath will flare against you and He will swiftly destroy you. 5Rather, thus shall you do to them: their altars you shall smash and their cultic pillars you shall shatter and their sacred trees you shall chop down and their images you shall burn in fire. 6For you are a holy people to the LORD your God. You the LORD has chosen to become for Him a treasured people among all the peoples that are on the face of the earth. 7Not because you are more numerous than all the peoples did the LORD desire you and choose you, for you are the fewest of all the peoples. 8But because of the LORD’s love for you and because of His keeping the vow that He swore to your fathers He has brought you out with a strong hand and ransomed you from the house of slaves, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. 9And you shall know that the LORD your God, He is God, the steadfast god keeping the covenant and the faith for those who love Him and keeping His commands to the thousandth generation, 10but He pays back those who hate Him to their face to make them perish. He will not delay—him who hates Him to his face He will pay back. 11And you shall keep what is commanded and the statutes and the laws that I charge you today to do.
12“And it shall come about in consequence of your heeding these laws when you keep and do them, that the LORD your God will keep the covenant and the faith for you that he swore to your fathers. 13And He will love you and bless you and multiply you and bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your soil, your grain and your wine and your oil, the spawn of your herds and the calvings of your flock, upon the soil that He swore to your fathers to give to you. 14Blessed shall you be more than all the peoples. There shall be no sterile male nor female among you nor among your beasts. 15And the LORD shall turn away from you all illness, and all the evil ailments of Egypt which you knew He will not put upon you but will set them on all who hate you. 16And you shall devour all the peoples that the LORD your God is about to give to you. Your eye shall not pity them and you shall not worship their gods, for it is a snare to you. 17Should you say in your heart, ‘These nations are more numerous than I. How can I dispossess them?’ 18You shall not fear them. You shall surely remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh, and to all Egypt, 19the great trials that your own eyes saw, the signs and the portents and the strong hand and the outstretched arm with which the LORD your God brought you out. So will the LORD your God do to all the peoples whom you fear. 20And the hornet, too, will the LORD your God send against them, until those who remain and hide from you perish. 21You shall not be terrified by them, for the LORD your God is in your midst, a great and fearsome god. 22And the LORD your God will cast off these nations from before you little by little. You will not be able to put an end to them swiftly, lest the beasts of the field multiply against you. 23And the LORD your God will give them before you and panic them with a great panic until they are destroyed. 24And He will give their kings into your hand, and you shall make their name perish from under the heavens. No man will stand up before you, until you destroy them. 25The images of their gods you shall burn in fire. You shall not covet the silver and gold upon them and take it for yourself, lest you be snared by it, for it is an abhorrence to the LORD your God. 26And you shall bring no abhorrent thing into your house or you will be under the ban like it. You shall surely despise it and shall surely abhor it, for it is under the ban.”
CHAPTER 7 NOTES
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1. cast off. The verbal root n-sh-l is elsewhere used for slipping off one’s sandals or for an axehead slipping out of its haft.
nations more numerous and mightier than you. In earlier biblical accounts, the almost preternatural numerical growth of the Hebrew people is stressed. In the historical reality of the later seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., a writer would have been keenly aware that Israel was a tiny nation surrounded by large and powerful peoples.
2. You shall surely put them under the ban. The verb haḥarim implies both total destruction and a solemn vow to carry out that grim purpose without taking prisoners as slaves and with no secular exploitation of the booty. Moshe Weinfeld calls the emphasis on ḥerem (the ban) in Deuteronomy “utopian” and “wishful thinking.” There is, thankfully, no archaeological evidence that this program of annihilation was ever implemented, but the insistence on it here reflects an agenda of absolute separation of Israelite and Canaanite populations for the purpose of preserving cultic purity (compare verses 3–4).
3. You shall not give your daughter to his son. A moment before, the Canaanites were a plural, “them.” But this characteristic easy switch from plural to singular is a way of focusing on the specific act of the individual Israelite about to marry off his daughter to a Canaanite son. Marriages, of course, were arranged by the families, not by the bride and groom.
4. he will make your son swerve. The antecedent is ambiguous: it could be the just mentioned son who would marry your daughter, or it could be the singular, generic “Canaanite.”
from following Me. Literally, “from after me.”
5. their altars you shall smash. This string of short clauses is a vivid instance of the powerful rhetoric of iconoclastic theology that informs Deuteronomy. In quasipoetic semantic parallelism, the statement moves from one verb of violent destruction to another, more intense one, ending with the utter consummation by fire of all pagan icons.
6. a treasured people among all the peoples. This is a variant formulation of the phrase that appears in Exodus 19:5. The term for “treasure,” segulah, is one that is used in other ancient Semitic languages to designate a relationship of privileged vassalage.
7. Not because you are more numerous than all the peoples. See the comment on the related formulation in verse 1.
8. ransomed. This verb is chosen for the liberation from Egypt because it is what one does to free a captive. In the event, God pays for the liberation not with ransom money but with terrible acts of retribution.
9–10. These verses amount to a summarizing paraphrase of the revelation to Moses of the divine attributes in Exodus 34 and in Numbers 14.
12. in consequence of. The relatively unusual Hebrew preposition ʿeqev literally means “on the heel[s] of.”
13. multiply … bless the fruit. These terms hark back to the injunction in Genesis, here reinterpreted as a blessing actively initiated by God, to be fruitful and multiply.
grain … wine … oil … spawn … calvings. Each of these five terms is not the common one for the thing it designates. While redolent of the concrete reality of agriculture and animal husbandry, each of these words is also the name of a pagan deity associated with fertility. This usage is most evident in the exceptional ʿashterot tsoʾnekha, “the calvings of your flock,” for ʿashterot is transparently the plural form of Ashtoreth, the Canaanite fertility goddess. In the antipagan polemic impetus of the Deuteronomic oration, the God of Israel supersedes all these agricultural deities as the source of fertility, reducing them to mere common nouns.
18. You shall surely remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh. Again and again in Deuteronomy, the Exodus story of the founding of the nation through liberation from slavery is invoked in order to exhort the people to confront their own frightening historical reality: threatened by overwhelmingly greater powers—most urgently, by the Assyrian and then the Babylonian empire—they are enjoined to recall the great narrative in which God’s intervention enabled them to triumph over Egypt’s imperial might. Hence the contemporary relevance of “these nations are more numerous than I,” which surely goes beyond the immediate reference to the Canaanite peoples.
20. the hornet. The meaning of the Hebrew term tsirʿah is uncertain. See the philological comment on Exodus 23:28, where it is suggested that it might be a supernatural agency, the Smasher. Alternately, since the verb at the beginning of the next verse, “be terrified,” reflects the same three consonants in reversed order (ʿ-r-ts) and appears to play on the sound of tsirʿah, it might mean the Terror. Abraham ibn Ezra ingeniously identifies it as some kind of epidemic by relating it to tsaraʿat (which also has the root ts-r-ʿ), a contagious skin disease.
22. lest the beasts of the field multiply against you. The biblical writers had to confront the repeated contradiction between the promise of a grand conquest of the Canaanite peoples and the historical fact that the conquest was only partial and gradual. Various explanations are offered in Exodus and in Judges, but this is one of the most strained.
26. you shall bring no abhorrent thing into your house … for it is under the ban. Anything under the ban (ḥerem) is taboo and marked for utter destruction. The antipagan polemic of Deuteronomy here extends to a fear that the material allure of the gold and silver images may lead Israelites to appropriate them, an appropriation perhaps not initially intended for cultic purposes but that could lead to the worship of the images.
1“All the command which I charge you today you shall keep to do, in order that you may live and multiply and come and take hold of the land which the LORD has sworn to your fathers. 2And you shall remember all the way on which the LORD your God led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to afflict you, to try you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commands or not. 3And He afflicted you and made you hunger and fed you the manna, which you did not know nor did your fathers know, in order to make you know that not on bread alone does the human live but on every utterance of the LORD’s mouth does the human live. 4Your cloak did not wear out upon you nor did your foot swell these forty years. 5And you knew in your heart that as a man chastises his son the LORD your God chastises you. 6And you shall keep the commands of the LORD your God, to walk in His ways and to fear Him. 7For the LORD your God is about to bring you to a goodly land, a land of brooks of water, springs and deeps coming out in valley and in mountain, 8a land of wheat and barley and vines and figs and pomegranates, a land of oil olives and honey, 9a land where not in penury will you eat bread, you will lack nothing in it, a land whose stones are iron and from whose mountains you will hew copper. 10And you will eat and be sated and bless the LORD your God on the goodly land that He has given you. 11Watch yourself, lest you forget the LORD your God and not keep His commands and His laws and His statutes that I charge you today. 12Lest you eat and be sated and build goodly houses and dwell in them. 13And your cattle and sheep multiply, and silver and gold multiply for you, and all that you have multiply. 14And your heart become haughty and you forget the LORD your God Who brings you out of the land of Egypt from the house of slaves, 15Who leads you through the great and terrible wilderness—viper-serpent and scorpions, and thirst, where there is no water—Who brings water out for you from flintstone. 16Who feeds you manna in the wilderness, which your fathers did not know, in order to afflict you and in order to try you, to make it go well with you in your later time. 17And you will say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand made me this wealth.’ 18And you will remember the LORD your God, for He it is Who gives you power to make wealth, in order to fulfill His covenant that He swore to your fathers as on this day. 19And it will be, if you indeed forget the LORD your God and go after other gods and worship them and bow to them, I bear witness against you today that you shall surely perish. 20Like the nations that the LORD causes to perish before you, so shall you perish, inasmuch as you would not heed the voice of the LORD your God.”
CHAPTER 8 NOTES
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2. these forty years in the wilderness. As in many previous passages, the deictic “these” (Hebrew zeh) positions Moses’s audience as the group that has just undergone the long trial of wandering in the wilderness and has witnessed God’s providential power. By implication, the writer’s seventh-century B.C.E. audience is invited to imagine itself vicariously in the same position.
in order to afflict you, to try you. “To afflict” (ʿinah) is a verb that in other contexts means “to debase” or “to abuse.” “To try’’ is precisely what the Israelites were warned not to do to God (6:16). It is also the verb used for what God does to Abraham in the story of the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1). In both cases, either this is a God lacking the absolute foreknowledge ascribed to the deity by later theology, or the trial is essentially a means for man to show his mettle.
3. the human. The Hebrew haʾadam (literally, “the human”) is grammatically masculine but refers to both sexes. (See the comment on Genesis 1:26.) “Man,” ʾish, in verse 5, is unambiguously masculine because in this society it is the father’s role to discipline his son.
4. Your cloak. The Hebrew simlah is not the general term for “garment,” as many English versions render it, but the very outer garment that the fleeing Hebrews “borrowed” from their Egyptian neighbors and laundered before the Sinai epiphany. Thus, the concreteness of the recollected experience of the Exodus is sustained through the precise choice of terms.
7. a goodly land, a land of brooks of water. As a complement to the insistent rhetoric of admonition in Deuteronomy (“watch yourself,” “and you shall keep the commands,” etc.), one also finds a rhetoric of fulfillment, grandly evoking the abundance of the rich land that God is giving to Israel. This long sentence, which some scholars have characterized as “hymnic,” rolls on resonantly all the way to the end of verse 9, punctuating its catalogue of the bounty of Canaan with an anaphoric reiteration of “land.” The Israelites have been wandering through a parched wilderness “where there is no water” (verse 15), so the catalogue strategically begins with “brooks of water, springs and deeps” before going on to enumerate the agricultural produce and mineral resources of the land.
9. not in penury. The term misken (“poor man,” here with the ut suffix of abstraction) is an Akkadian loanword that is quite rare in the Bible, occurring only here and in the late Ecclesiastes. Hence the choice in the translation of a relatively uncommon word for poverty.
10. And you will eat and be sated and bless the LORD. This verse became the kernel for the grace after meals in later Jewish tradition, a practice, as the Qumran scrolls reveal, that goes back as far as the late Second Temple period. But from the Deuteronomic viewpoint, the pleasure of eating one’s fill carries with it the danger of forgetting one’s dependence on God—hence the quick transition to “watch yourself” at the beginning of the next verse.
12. build goodly houses. In the related passage in 6:10–14, the houses and all the other material benefits are the work of others, taken over by the Israelites. As Moshe Weinfeld notes, the emphasis in the earlier passage is on forgetting God through sheer effortless affluence, whereas here it is rather the Israelites’ satisfaction in the abundance achieved through their own effort that leads them to imagine (verse 17), “My power and the might of my hand made me all this wealth.”
15. viper-serpent. For a catastrophic episode involving these creatures, see Numbers 21:6–9, and note the comment on Numbers 21:6 for an explanation of this term.
16. manna in the wilderness … in order to afflict you and in order to try you. These phrases of course mirror verse 3. The rhetorical structure of this whole chapter, as several modern commentators have noted, is carefully contrived in a large chiasm: a: injunction to observe God’s commands and live (verse 1); b: trial in the wilderness and the gift of manna (verses 2–5); a': injunction to keep God’s commands; c: prospering in the land and thanking God (verses 7–10); c': danger of forgetting God through prosperity (verses 11–14); b': gift of manna and trial in the wilderness (verses 15–16); a”: danger of forgetting God’s commands and perishing (verses 17–20).
1“Hear, Israel, you are about to cross the Jordan to dispossess nations greater and mightier than you, great towns, and fortified to the heavens, 2a great and lofty people, sons of giants, as you yourself knew and you yourself heard: Who can stand up before the sons of giants? 3And you shall know today that the LORD your God, He it is crossing over before you, a consuming fire. He Himself will destroy them and He will lay them low before you, and you will dispossess them and make them perish swiftly as the LORD has spoken to you. 4Do not say in your heart when the LORD your God drives them back before you, saying, ‘Through my merit did the LORD bring me to take hold of this land and through the wickedness of these nations is the LORD dispossessing them’ before you. 5Not through your merit nor through your heart’s rightness do you come to take hold of their land but through the wickedness of these nations is the LORD your God dispossessing them before you and in order to fulfill the word that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. 6And you shall know that not through your merit is the LORD your God giving you this goodly land to take hold of it, for you are a stiff-necked people. 7Remember, do not forget, that you infuriated the LORD your God in the wilderness from the very day you came out of the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the LORD. 8And in Horeb you infuriated the LORD, and the LORD was incensed with you enough to destroy you. 9When I went up the mountain to take the stone tablets, the tablets of the Covenant that the LORD sealed with you, and I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights, no bread did I eat nor water did I drink. 10And the LORD gave me the two stone tablets, written with the finger of God, and on them all the words that the LORD spoke with you from the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly. 11And it happened at the end of forty days and forty nights, the LORD gave me the two stone tablets, the tablets of the Covenant. 12And the LORD said to me, ‘Arise, go down quickly from here, for your people that you brought out of Egypt has acted ruinously, they have quickly swerved from the way that I charged them, they have made them a molten image.’ 13And the LORD said to me, saying, ‘I have seen this people and, look, it is a stiff-necked people. 14Leave Me be, that I may destroy them and wipe out their name from under the heavens and make you into a greater and mightier nation than they.’ 15And I turned and came down from the mountain, the mountain burning in fire, and the two tablets of the Covenant in my two hands. 16And I saw and, look, you offended against the LORD your God, you made you a molten calf, you swerved quickly from the way that the LORD charged you. 17And I seized the two tablets and flung them from my two hands and smashed them before your eyes. 18And I threw myself before the LORD as at first, forty days and forty nights—no bread did I eat nor water did I drink—for all your offense which you committed, as you had offended, to do what was evil in the eyes of the LORD, to anger Him. 19For I was terrified of the blazing wrath with which the LORD was furious enough with you to destroy you, and the LORD listened to me that time as well. 20And the LORD was greatly enough incensed with Aaron to destroy him, and I interceded in behalf of Aaron, too, at that time. 21And your offense that you made, the calf, I had taken and burned it in the fire and crushed it, grinding it well, till it was fine, into dust, and I had flung its dust into the wadi that came down from the mountain. 22And at Taberah and at Massah and at Kibroth-Hattaavah you infuriated the LORD. 23And when the LORD sent you from Kadesh-Barnea, saying, ‘Go up and take hold of the land that I have given to you,’ you rebelled against the word of the LORD your God and you did not trust Him, and you did not heed His voice. 24You have been rebellious against the LORD from the day I knew you. 25And I threw myself before the LORD the forty days and the forty nights that I threw myself, for the LORD had intended to destroy you. 26And I interceded with the LORD and said, ‘My Master, LORD, do not bring ruin on Your people and on Your estate that you ransomed through Your greatness, that you brought out from Egypt with a strong hand. 27Remember your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Turn not to the stiffness of this people nor to its wickedness and its offense. 28Lest the peoples of the land to which you brought us out from there say, “From the LORD’s inability to bring them into the land of which He spoke to them or from His hatred of them He brought them out to put them to death in the wilderness.” 29And they are Your people and Your estate that you brought out with Your great power and Your outstretched arm.’”
CHAPTER 9 NOTES
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1. fortified to the heavens. Literally, “in the heavens.” The obvious force of this recurring phrase is that to the Israelite invaders these lofty fortified cities loom high as the sky.
3. a consuming fire. This epithet for God, which is coordinate with the repeated emphasis on the notion that at Sinai God spoke from the midst of the fire and that the mountain itself was continuously burning forty days and forty nights (a detail not part of Exodus), reflects the fiercely militant monotheism of Deuteronomy: the one God, Who is the God of Israel, will consume all adversaries.
4. before you. Logically this should read “before me,” and for that reason the two words are placed here outside the quotation marks, as a reversion to Moses’s perspective. One proposed emendation changes mipanekha, “before you” to mipanai ki, yielding “before me. For [not through your merit] the LORD did bring.”
5. merit … wickedness. Perhaps these antonyms are meant to be understood in their judicial sense, referring to the respective attributes of the person in the right and the person in the wrong in a legal conflict.
6. stiff-necked. This idiom for stubbornness is characteristically associated with the episode of the Golden Calf, which will follow here. Various proposals have been made about the origins of the idiom, but the simplest explanation is in its suggestion of rigid pride: instead of bowing the head when submission is appropriate, the stiff-necked person remains presumptuously, defiantly, erect.
8. enough to destroy you. “Enough” is merely implied in the Hebrew, as it is again in the recurrence of this idiom in verses 19 and 20.
9. the tablets of the Covenant. Of the two equivalent Hebrew terms for “covenant,” Exodus favors ʿedut and Deuteronomy berit. Perhaps the Deuteronomist prefers berit because it means only “covenant,” whereas ʿedut has other meanings as well, and Deuteronomy presents itself in the most explicit terms as the great text of the renewal of Israel’s Covenant with God.
10–21. This retelling of the story of the Golden Calf, as the Israeli Bible scholar Moshe Tzippor has justly observed, presupposes the audience’s familiarity with the more elaborate account in Exodus 32–33. It is not a consecutive report of the incident, and some significant details are elided. It is, moreover, Moses’s first-person account, reflecting what he is told by God on the mountain and then what he sees when he descends from the summit while not directly conveying information that he learns only afterward.
10. all the words. The Masoretic Text reads “as all the words” but several ancient versions lack the initial “as.”
12. for your people that you brought out of Egypt. As Jeffrey H. Tigay and others have noted, God here dissociates himself from Israel—indeed, attributes even the liberation from Egypt to Moses rather than to Himself.
13. And the LORD said to me. According to the biblical convention, this reiteration of the formula for introducing speech, with no indication of an intervening response by the interlocutor, suggests that Moses is dumbfounded by the devastating news God reports to him and doesn’t know what to say. Now God proceeds beyond announcing this one act of betrayal to a general condemnation of the character of Israel and to the proposal, as in Exodus, to annihilate the people and to begin again with Moses. In this first-person version, Moses does not immediately implore God to renounce the project of destruction as he does in Exodus. Instead, he must go down and see for himself; only afterward will he turn back to God and intercede for Israel.
16. a molten calf. God had given Moses the more general information that Israel had made a molten image, masekhah. Now, descending into the camp, Moses sees that it is the molten image of a calf, ʿegel masekhah, as the report continues to be faithful to his point of view.
18. threw myself before the LORD. This verb of prostration, hitnapel, is a technical term for supplication, both in biblical and rabbinic Hebrew.
19. the blazing wrath. This phrase reflects a hendiadys in the Hebrew, literally “the wrath and the hot-anger.”
20. incensed with Aaron to destroy him. In this elliptical version of the Golden Calf episode, there is no direct report that it was Aaron who presided over the making of the icon, though that narrative datum is clearly implied by the divine wrath directed against Aaron which is mentioned here. In the parallel account in Exodus, we hear nothing of Aaron’s being threatened with death for his complicity. It is likely that this detail is added here in keeping with the fervor of Deuteronomy’s polemic against idol worship: any leader of Israel who fostered even a semblance of such cultic defection was worthy of a death sentence.
21. your offense that you made, the calf. It is characteristic of Deuteronomy’s anti-iconic rhetoric to turn the negative terms “offense,” “abhorrence,” “abomination” into epithets for idols.
crushed it, grinding it well, till it was fine, into dust. Although the language of the parallel account in Exodus 32:20 is approximately repeated, this version is more thoroughgoing in detailing the process of pulverization and utter destruction—again, in accordance with the vehemence with which Deuteronomy in general conjures up the prospect of obliterating the paraphernalia of pagan worship. Moshe Weinfeld notes linguistic similarities to a Ugaritic account of the destruction of Mot, the god of death.
I had flung its dust into the wadi that came down from the mountain. This detail is a notable departure from the story in Exodus, which has the Israelites forced to drink the water into which the ashes of the burnt idol have been cast. Whatever the reason for that act—both medieval and modern commentators have proposed a trial by ordeal—the very notion of imbibing the residue of an object of wayward worship seems to be repugnant to the Deuteronomist, who prefers to have the residue swept away by a mountain freshet.
24. You have been rebellious. The “rebellious” here and the “rebellious” in verse 7 are not mere repetitions but a formal frame (inclusio) that defines Israel’s behavior from the Exodus down to the episode of the spies.
27. stiffness. The Hebrew qeshi could also be rendered “hardness,” but in all likelihood it is an elliptical form of qeshi ʿoref, the quality of being stiff-necked.
28. the peoples of the land. The Masoretic Text says only “the land,” which would normally require a singular feminine verb, whereas the verb “say” here is conjugated as a masculine plural. The Samaritan Bible, the Septuagint, and some other ancient versions have “the peoples of,” beney, which seems plausible.
From the LORD’s inability … or from His hatred of them. This sentence is a citation of the parallel story in Numbers 14:15–16, but no mention is made there of hatred. Since the two alternatives are mutually contradictory, it is best to construe the waw that introduces the second alternative not as “and” but as “or.”
29. Your people and Your estate. The conjunction of the two nouns, ʿam and naḥalah, which we have noted before in Deuteronomy, is probably a hendiadys, suggesting “Your very own people,” “the people that is Your special acquisition.”
1“At that time the LORD said to me, ‘Carve you two stone tablets like the first ones and come up to Me on the mountain, and you shall make you a wooden ark, 2that I may write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets which you smashed, and you shall place them in the Ark.’ 3And I made an ark of acacia wood and I carved two stone tablets like the first ones, and I went up the mountain, the two tablets in my hand. 4And He wrote on the tablets, like the first writing, the Ten Words that the LORD had spoken to you on the mountain from the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly, and the LORD gave them to me. 5And I turned and came down from the mountain and I put the tablets in the Ark that I had made, and they were there as the LORD had charged me.”
6“And the Israelites journeyed onward from Beeroth-Bene-Jaakan to Moserah. There Aaron died and he was buried there, and Eleazar his son served as priest in his stead. 7From there they journeyed on to Gudgod and from Gudgod to Jotbath, a land of brooks of water. 8At that time the LORD divided off the tribe of Levi to bear the Ark of the LORD’s Covenant, to stand before the LORD, to minister unto Him and to bless in His name, until this day. 9Therefore Levi has had no portion and estate with his brothers, the LORD is his estate, as the LORD your God had spoken to him. 10As for me, I stood on the mountain as on the first days forty days and forty nights, and the LORD heard me that time, too, He did not want to bring ruin upon you. 11And the LORD said to me, ‘Rise, go upon the journey before the people, that they may come and take hold of the land that I swore to their fathers to give to them.’
12“And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all His ways, to love Him, and to worship the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your being, 13to keep the LORD’s commands and His statutes that I charge you today for your own good? 14Look, the LORD your God’s are the heavens and the heavens beyond the heavens, the earth and all that is in it. 15Only your fathers did the LORD desire to love them, and He chose their seed after them, chose you from all the peoples as on this day. 16And you shall circumcise the foreskin of your heart, nor shall you show a stiff neck anymore. 17For the LORD your God, He is the God of gods and the Master of masters, the great and mighty and fearsome God Who shows no favor and takes no bribe, 18doing justice for orphan and widow and loving the sojourner to give him bread and cloak. 19And you shall love the sojourner, for sojourners you were in the land of Egypt. 20The LORD your God you shall fear, Him you shall worship, and to Him you shall cleave, and in His name you shall swear. 21He is your praise and He is your God Who did with you these great and fearsome things that your eyes have seen. 22With seventy persons did your fathers go down to Egypt, and now the LORD your God has set you like the stars of the heavens for multitude.”
CHAPTER 10 NOTES
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3. And I made an ark of acacia wood. In the parallel account in Exodus, it is Bezalel, the master craftsman, who fashions the Ark. The version here may elide Bezalel simply to keep an uninterrupted focus on Moses, or—since this is, after all, Moses’s first-person, abbreviated report of the earlier events—he may deem it unnecessary to mention the chief artisan who was, in effect, his agent in carrying out God’s instructions for the making of the Ark.
6. There Aaron died. Abraham ibn Ezra notes a connection with the previous report of Moses’s intercession on behalf of Aaron after the sin of the Golden Calf. He was not killed then, but after forty years he paid the price for his complicity when he died before the people crossed into the promised land.
8. to stand before the LORD, to minister unto Him. The first of these two phrases has the idiomatic sense of “stand in attendance,” so the two phrases are virtual synonyms, deployed to underscore the role of the Levites as authorized officiants in the LORD’s cult.
10. As for me. The initial, emphatic first-person pronoun, weʾanokhi, here serves to mark a transition, taking us back to Moses’s narration of his time on the mountain before God after the interruption of the unit that begins with the death of Aaron and ends with the designation of the Levites for cultic duties. Perhaps a contrast may be suggested between the regularized ministrations of the Levites “standing before the LORD” in the established cult and Moses’s lonely stand before God on the mountain, desperately pleading on behalf of Israel.
12. And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you. These words signal the beginning of a new unit: after Moses’s narrative report of the events at Sinai, we have an exhortation or sermon. Several commentators have noted the similarity between these words and those of the prophet Micah: “It was told you, man, what is good and what the LORD demands of you—only doing justice and loving kindness and walking humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).
14. the heavens and the heavens beyond the heavens. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “the heavens of the heavens.” This structure often indicates a superlative (as in “the Song of Songs,” which is to say, the finest of songs). The basic meaning of the phrase, then, is something like “the utmost heavens,” but it is important to retain the repetition of “heavens” in order to suggest the powerful rhetorical flourish the Hebrew achieves through repetition.
15. Only your fathers did the LORD desire. Deuteronomy touches here on a fraught theological paradox: its version of Creator and creation is resoundingly monotheistic—YHWH is no local deity but the God of all the heavens and the earth, and yet, unaccountably, He has decided to choose this one people and show it special affection.
chose you. This second “chose” is added in the translation in order to clarify the syntax, which otherwise would be confusing in English.
16. you shall circumcise the foreskin of your heart. This bold metaphoric application of the idea of circumcision to the organ of understanding and feeling amounts to a symbolic reinterpretation of the meaning of circumcision. Here it is not merely the sign in the flesh of Abraham’s covenant with God, as enjoined in Genesis 17, but it also betokens the removal of an impeding membrane, achieving a condition of responsive openness to God’s word. Paul surely had this verse in mind when he announced the replacement of the circumcision of the flesh by the circumcision of the heart in Romans.
17. the God of gods and the Master of masters. Although both these epithets in all likelihood are linguistic fossils of an earlier view in which YHWH was conceived as the most powerful god, not the only one, the plausible sense here is a superlative (as in “the heavens of the heavens”), i.e., “supreme God and supreme Master.”
the great and mighty and fearsome God. The imperial monotheism of Deuteronomy often is expressed in this sort of hymnic style, and it is scarcely surprising that this book should have been mined by later Jewish liturgy (this string of divine epithets appears at the beginning of the Amidah prayer recited three times daily).
shows no favor and takes no bribe. There may be a causal connection between this affirmation about God and the previous one: because He is the absolute master of all things, He is absolutely disinterested as judge of humankind since He is beyond all dependence on human gifts and human attempts to curry favor.
18. doing justice for orphan and widow and loving the sojourner. Divine disinterestedness is joined with divine compassion for those in the society who are most vulnerable to exploitation—the widow and the orphan and the resident alien. Israel is then exhorted (verse 19) to emulate this attribute of compassion on the grounds of its own experience as an exploited alien people in Egypt.
21. He is your praise. Probably, this means that it is Israel’s glory to worship the one great God, though the phrase could also mean that the LORD is the object of Israel’s praise.
22. With seventy persons. This concluding sentence is an orchestrated invocation of three antecedent texts: the report of Jacob’s descent into Egypt with seventy persons in Genesis 46 and in Exodus 1 and the promise to Abraham that his seed would be multitudinous as the stars in Genesis 15.
1“And you shall love the LORD your God and keep His watch and His statutes and His laws and His commands for all time. 2And you shall know today that it was not with your sons who did not know and did not see the LORD your God’s chastisement, His greatness, His strong hand and His outstretched arm, 3and His signs and His deeds that He did in the midst of Egypt to Pharaoh king of Egypt and to all his land, 4and that He did to Egypt’s force, its horses and its chariots, when He made the waters of the Sea of Reeds flood over their faces as they pursued after them, and the LORD made them perish to this day, 5and that He did for you in the wilderness until you came to this place, 6and that He did to Dathan and to Abiram, the sons of Eliab son of Reuben, when the earth gaped open with its mouth and swallowed them and their households and their tents and everything existing that was at their feet, in the midst of all Israel, 7for your own eyes have seen the LORD’s great deed that He has done. 8And you shall keep all the command which I charge you today, so that you may be strong and come and take hold of the land into which you are about to cross to take hold of it, 9and so that you may long endure on the soil that the LORD your God swore to your fathers to give to them and to their seed, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10For the land into which you are coming to take hold of it is not like the land of Egypt from which you went out, where you sow your seed and water it with your foot like a garden of greens. 11But the land into which you are crossing to take hold of it is a land of mountains and valleys. From the rain of the heavens you will drink water—12a land that the LORD your God seeks out perpetually, the eyes of the LORD your God are upon it from the year’s beginning to the year’s end.
13And it shall be, if you indeed heed My commands with which I charge you today to love the LORD your God and to worship Him with all your heart and with all your being, 14I will give the rain of your land in its season, early rains and late, and you shall gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. 15And I will give grass in your field to your beast, and you shall eat and be sated. 16Watch yourselves, lest your heart be seduced and you swerve and worship other gods and bow to them. 17And the LORD’s wrath flare against you, and He hold back the heavens and there be no rain and the soil give not its yield and you perish swiftly from the goodly land that the LORD is about to give to you. 18And you shall set these words on your heart and in your very being and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall become circlets between your eyes. 19And you shall teach them to your sons, to speak of them, when you sit in your house and when you walk on the way and when you lie down and when you arise. 20And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and in your gates. 21So that your days may be many, and the days of your sons, on the soil that the LORD swore to your fathers to give to them, as the days of the heavens over the earth. 22For if you indeed keep all this command which I charge you to do it, to love the LORD your God to walk in all His ways and to cleave to Him, 23the LORD will dispossess all these nations before you and you will dispossess nations greater and mightier than you. 24Every place where the sole of your foot treads, yours will be, from the wilderness and the Lebanon, from the River, the Euphrates River, and as far as the Hinder Sea, this will be your territory. 25No man will stand up before you. Your fear and your dread the LORD your God will set over the face of the land in which you tread, as He has spoken to you.
26“See, I set before you today blessing and curse: 27the blessing, when you heed the command of the LORD your God with which I charge you today; 28the curse, if you heed not the command of the LORD your God and swerve from the way that I charge you today, to go after other gods which you did not know. 29And it shall be, when the LORD your God brings you to the land into which you are coming to take hold of it, I shall set the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal. 30Are they not across the Jordan beyond the sunset way in the land of the Canaanite in the Arabah opposite the Gilgal beside the Terebinths of Moreh? 31For you are about to cross the Jordan to come to take hold of the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall take hold of it and dwell in it. 32And you shall keep to do all the statutes and the laws that I set before you today.”
CHAPTER 11 NOTES
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2. it was not with your sons. The particle ʾet that prefixes banim, “sons,” either is a sign of the accusative or means “with.” In either case, the verb that should go along with ʾet is absent. Rashi plausibly infers an ellipsis, the implied phrase being “I speak today.” The omission of the verb may well be because the writer has lost track of the verb as he is caught up in the grand sweep of this sentence, which is quite uncharacteristic of nonoratorical biblical prose and one of the longest sentences in the biblical corpus: the long chain of clauses, gathering in a headlong rush the whole story of the Exodus and the forty years of wandering, does not reach its period until the end of verse 7.
5. and that He did for you. The preposition lakhem could mean either “for you” or “to you.” Jeffrey H. Tigay argues for the latter alternative because the following clause mentions the rebels Dathan and Abiram (see Numbers 16), who were the target of God’s devastating punishment. But the phrase “until you came to this place” is a strong indication that the preposition refers chiefly to God’s benevolent preservation of Israel through its adversities in the wilderness. Perhaps the writer may have also wanted to exploit the ambiguity of the preposition, quickly indicating, in a manner quite in keeping with Deuteronomic theology, that the flip side of divine protection, if Israel rebels, is divine retribution: what God does for Israel can easily turn into what God does to Israel.
6. to Dathan and to Abiram. Korah is not mentioned, probably because the Deuteronomist is interested in the popular tradition of a rebellion of Reubenites for political power rather than in the priestly account of a rebellion of the Korahite clan for sacerdotal privilege. In Numbers 16–17 the two rebellions are intertwined. But the absence of Korah simply stems from the fact that the Deuteronomist seems to have been familiar with J and E but not P.
10. water it with your foot. It is not entirely certain what this phrase means. Some scholars have understood it as a reference to some sort of foot pedal used in the Egyptian system of irrigation. Because “foot water” is a biblical euphemism for urine, it has also been proposed that this might be a derisive reference to irrigation with urine, though it is unclear that the Egyptians actually did this. In any case, the lush Nile Valley is elsewhere figured in the Bible as a fertile garden. The fertility of the more rugged land of Israel is more precarious.
11. a land of mountains and valleys. It is thus quite unlike the flat terrain of Egypt, and not amenable to the sort of irrigation system used in Egypt.
12. the eyes of the LORD your God are upon it. Against the reiterated assertion that “your own eyes have seen” the LORD’s great acts, the eyes of the LORD will keep this land under constant watch. The phrase is double-edged: the LORD attends to this land in order to bestow special bounty on it, causing the fructifying rains to fall (verse 14), and the LORD scrutinizes the land, withholding the rains when the people is unfaithful (verse 17). The geographical fact, then, that the land of Israel is dependent on rainfall rather than on irrigation from a central river is both a blessing and a curse. Thus the reflections on divinely guided meteorology set the stage for the binary opposition of the mountain of the blessing and the mountain of the curse in verse 29.
24. the Hinder Sea. The reference is to the Mediterranean. The basic orientation—an English term which itself means facing the east—was toward the east, so one word for east was qedem, before, and a (relatively rare) term for west was ʾaḥaron, “hinder,” what is behind.
29. the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal. Moshe Weinfeld, ever attentive to Mediterranean parallels, notes that the Greeks as well had foundation ceremonies when they entered into new territories. These ceremonies included inscribing divine instructions on steles, building commemorative stone pillars, and offering sacrifices. All of these elements appear in the ceremony involving the two mountains that is elaborated in chapter 27. The invocations of the mountains of the blessing and of the curse here and in chapter 27 frame the code of laws that constitutes the long central section of Deuteronomy. Weinfeld proposes two reasons for the association of these mountains respectively with the blessing and with the curse: in keeping with the orientation to the east, Gerizim is on the favored right hand and Ebal on the suspect left, and Gerizim is covered with vegetation whereas Ebal is desolate. The theology of Deuteronomy is beautifully concretized in the stark opposition of these two mountains, for the book repeatedly stresses the forking alternatives of prosperity and disaster, depending on Israel’s faithfulness to God’s laws.
30. the sunset way. That is, the westward way, a road leading from trans-Jordan westward into Canaan.
1“These are the statutes and the laws that you shall keep to do in the land that the LORD, God of your fathers, has given you to take hold of it all the days that you live on the soil. 2You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations whom you are to dispossess worshipped their gods—on the high mountains and in the valleys and under every lush tree. 3And you shall smash their altars and shatter their sacred pillars, and their cultic poles you shall burn in fire, and the images of their gods you shall chop down, and you shall destroy their name from that place. 4You shall not do thus for the LORD your God. 5But to the place that the LORD your God will choose of all your tribes to set His name there, to make it dwell, you shall seek it and come there. 6And you shall bring there your burnt offerings and your sacrifices and your tithes and your hand’s donation and your votive offerings and your freewill gifts and the firstborn of your herd and your flock. 7And you shall eat there before the LORD your God and you shall rejoice in all that your hand reaches, you and your households, in which the LORD your God has blessed you. 8You shall not do as all that we do here today, each man what is right in his eyes. 9For you have not come as yet to the abiding estate that the LORD your God is about to give to you. 10And you shall cross the Jordan and dwell in the land that the LORD your God is about to grant you in estate and He will give you abiding haven from all your enemies around, and you shall dwell securely. 11And it will be, the place that the LORD your God will choose in which to make His name dwell, there you shall bring all that I charge you, your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and your hand’s donation and all your choice votive offerings that you vow to the LORD. 12And you shall rejoice before the LORD your God, you and your sons and your daughters and your male slaves and your slavegirls and the Levite who is within your gates, for he has no portion or estate with you. 13Watch yourself, lest you offer up your burnt offerings in any place that you see. 14Rather, in the place that the LORD will choose, in one of your tribes, there you shall offer up your burnt offerings and there you shall do all that I charge you. 15Only wherever your appetite’s craving may be you shall slaughter and eat meat, according to the blessing of the LORD your God that He has given you within all your gates. The unclean and the clean shall eat it, like the deer or like the gazelle. 16Only the blood you shall not eat. On the earth you shall spill it like water. 17You shall not be able to eat within your gates the tithe of your grain and of your wine and of your oil and the firstborn of your herd and your flock and all your votive offerings that you vow and your freewill gifts and your hand’s donation. 18But before the LORD your God you shall eat it in the place that the LORD your God will choose, you and your son and your daughter and your male slave and your slavegirl and the Levite who is in your gates, and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God in all that your hand reaches. 19Watch yourself, lest you abandon the Levite all your days on your soil. 20When the LORD your God enlarges your territory as He has spoken to you, and you say, ‘Let me eat meat,’ when your appetite craves eating meat, wherever your appetite’s craving may be, you shall eat meat. 21Should the place be far away from you that the LORD your God will choose to set His name there, you shall slaughter from your herd and from your flock that the LORD has given you as I have charged and you shall eat within your gates wherever your appetite’s craving may be. 22Yet, as the deer or as the gazelle is eaten, thus you shall eat it, the unclean and the clean together shall eat it. 23Only be strong not to eat the blood, for the blood is the life and you shall not eat the life with the meat. 24You shall not eat it. On the earth you shall spill it like water. 25You shall not eat it, so that it will go well with you and with your sons when you do what is right in the eyes of the LORD. 26Only your holy things that you will have and your votive offerings you shall bear and come to the place that the LORD will choose. 27And you shall do your burnt offerings, the meat and the blood, on the altar of the LORD your God, and the blood of your sacrifices shall be spilled on the altar of the LORD your God, but the meat you may eat. 28Watch and heed all these things that I charge you, so that it will go well with you and with your sons after you for all time when you do what is good and right in the eyes of the LORD your God. 29When the LORD your God cuts off before you the nations which you are coming there to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, 30watch yourself, lest you be ensnared after them, after they are destroyed before you, and lest you seek out their gods, saying, ‘How do these nations worship their gods? Let me, too, do thus.’ 31You shall not do thus for the LORD your God, for every abhorrence of the LORD that He hates they have done for their gods. For even their sons and their daughters they burn in fire to their gods.
13:1“Everything which I charge you, that shall you keep to do. You shall not add to it and you shall not subtract from it.”
CHAPTER 12 NOTES
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2. You shall utterly destroy all the places. The noun maqom is a general term for “place,” both in biblical and postbiblical Hebrew, but it also has the more specialized sense in the ancient period of “cultic site,” and that is its meaning throughout this passage. There have been exhortations earlier in Deuteronomy to eradicate all vestiges of the local pagan cults, but here that imperative of iconoclasm is coupled with a revolutionary insistence on the centralization of the Israelite cult (verse 5 and repeatedly thereafter). In point of historical fact, what the Israelite religion did was to take over places of Canaanite worship and adapt them for the worship of the God of Israel. (Abraham in Genesis similarly is reported to have built altars at a series of sites that were old Canaanite places of worship.) Later, as Christianity spread through Europe and then to the New World, it would follow the same practice. For the Deuteronomist, the very existence of such local places of worship carries with it the danger of syncretism—the mingling of pagan rituals and concepts with the worship of the one God, and, especially, a leakage of the adoration of natural deities (“on the high mountains and in the valleys and under every lush tree”) into the cult of YHWH. Thus, the whole apparatus of the local cults must be utterly destroyed, and instead, one central, exclusive place is to be designated for the worship of Israel’s God.
4. You shall not do thus for the LORD your God. The preposition lE can mean either “for” or “to.” If it had the latter meaning here, it would refer to smashing idols and cultic pillars and poles, but in any case one is not supposed to use such appurtenances in the worship of YHWH. The reference, then, is to the idea that the LORD is not to be worshipped in local sites (and in dangerously seductive natural settings), as the Canaanites worshipped their gods, but rather in a single central sanctuary. Compare verse 31, where lE can mean only “for.”
5. to set His name there, to make it dwell. It is characteristic of Deuteronomy’s scrupulous avoidance of pagan concretizations of the deity that God is not said to dwell in the sanctuary He will choose, as He is represented repeatedly doing in Exodus, but rather an intermediary agency, God’s name, dwells there.
you shall seek it. For clarity’s sake, “it” is added.
7. And you shall eat there before the LORD. The burnt offerings were wholly consumed by fire on the altar, but in the case of other categories of sacrifice, only some sections of the animal were burned and the rest were reserved for the person bringing the sacrifice to be consumed in a sacred feast, after the sacrifice proper, “before the LORD.”
in all that your hand reaches. Still more literally, “all the reach of your hand.” The phrase mishlaḥ-yad clearly refers to “undertakings,” and to the material yield of the undertaking. Appropriately, the phrase has come to mean “vocation” in modern Hebrew.
9. the abiding estate. The Hebrew is a hendiadys, hamenuḥah wehanaḥalah, literally, “the haven [or the rest] and the estate,” meaning secure, permanent inheritance in the land.
10. grant you in estate … give you abiding haven. The writer now plays with the hendiadys introduced in the previous verse by breaking it apart and using each of the roots as a verb instead of the two nouns. “Abiding” is added in the translation to “give haven” (hiniaḥ) in order to preserve this play on the previous word pair.
12. the Levite … for he has no portion or estate with you. The Levites, as we are repeatedly reminded, had no tribal territory. As long as the countryside was dotted with local shrines, most Levites had a source of living close to hand, officiating at the local cult and taking their share of the offerings brought by the worshippers. One may infer that the centralization of the cult between the late eighth century B.C.E. (Hezekiah’s reform) and the late seventh century (Josiah’s reform) created a serious economic problem for Levites not employed in the Jerusalem temple, and so they are included here in the category of vulnerable people who need to be the object of benefaction. The phrase “within your gates” means “wherever you may live,” and so refers to Levites outside of Jerusalem.
15. wherever your appetite’s craving may be. The versatile Hebrew nefesh (“life,” “life-breath,” “person,” and also an intensive form of the personal pronoun) is most plausibly construed here as “appetite,” the sense it has in Psalms 107:9. The other problem in understanding this phrase turns on the meaning of the initial particle bE. Most translators understand it to refer to the degree of craving (Richard Elliott Friedman: “As much as your soul desires”) or to the frequency of the craving (New Jewish Publication Society: “whenever you desire”). But bE (primary meaning, “in”) is more naturally a locative, and for an indication of degree one would expect ke, “as.” The noun phrase itself, ʾawat nefesh, suggests intense appetite, and the instructions that follow have to do chiefly with place—that henceforth the Israelites will be allowed to slaughter and eat meat wherever they happen to be, though sacrificial slaughter can take place only on the central altar.
you shall slaughter and eat meat. The verbal root z-b-ḥ means both “to slaughter” and “to sacrifice” because in ancient religion the two acts were inseparable. But now that sacrifice at local shrines has been abolished, some mechanism must be established to enable the Israelites to eat meat even when they cannot come to the central place of worship. What follows are innovative regulations for the practice that the rabbis called sheḥitat ḥulin, “secular slaughter.”
The unclean and the clean shall eat it. In the case of sacrificial meals, only the ritually clean are allowed to partake. For secular meals the restriction does not apply.
like the deer or like the gazelle. The one category of meat always permitted outside the cult was game, neither deer nor gazelle being among the animals specified for sacrificial use. Now, animals otherwise devoted to the cult (sheep, bulls, goats, rams) may be eaten without sacrifice, just as game is eaten.
16. On the earth you shall spill it like water. The draining of the blood on the ground stands in contrast to sacrificial slaughter, in which the blood, as part of the ritual, is splashed on the altar by the officiant. The reason for the draining of the blood is spelled out in verse 23.
23. Only be strong not to eat the blood. The use of the verb “be strong” in conjunction with the prohibition against the consumption of blood is unusual, something Rashi registers by offering two opposite interpretations (that it is tempting to consume blood, that it is necessary to make a special effort even for a prohibition of something altogether unappetizing). Given the repeated emphasis on strong appetite, one may infer that the writer assumed that the consumption of blood had some special attraction, either because of its appeal to the palate (as, say, in blood sausages) or because, as the end of this verse may suggest, there was a fetishistic belief that imbibing the blood meant imbibing the life-force of the slaughtered beast.
30. lest you be ensnared after them. The slightly odd preposition might simply mean “by them,” or it could suggest, as it sometimes does elsewhere, “following them,” taking up their practices.
31. You shall not do thus for the LORD your God. This echo of verse 4 marks a formal inclusio structure that frames this whole unit. It begins and now ends with an injunction to avoid all contact with the practices of the local pagan cults. To the paraphernalia of idol worship mentioned at the beginning the writer here adds a moral abomination of pagan religion—child sacrifice. There is at least some archaeological evidence that child sacrifice was practiced among the West Semites, and at the Phoenician colony of Carthage in North Africa large numbers of urns have been unearthed containing the charred bones of children.
13:1. This verse clearly belongs at the end of this unit as a concluding summary, a placement recognized in the New King James Version, which lists it as verse 32 of chapter 12. Most Hebrew Bibles, however, set it as the first verse of chapter 13.
2“Should there arise in your midst a prophet or a dreamer of dreams and give you a sign or a portent, 3and the sign and the portent which he speaks to you come about—saying, ‘Let us go after other gods that you do not know and worship them,’ 4you shall not heed the words of that prophet or of that dreamer of dreams, for the LORD your God will be trying you to know whether you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your being. 5After the LORD your God shall you go and Him shall you fear and His commands shall you keep and His voice shall you heed and Him shall you worship and to Him shall you cleave. 6And that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, for he has spoken falsehood against the LORD your God Who brought you out of the land of Egypt and Who ransomed you from the house of slaves, to thrust you from the way on which the LORD your God charged you to go, and you shall root out the evil from your midst. 7Should your brother, your mother’s son, or your son or your daughter or the wife of your bosom or your companion who is like your own self incite you in secret, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ that you did not know, neither you nor your fathers, 8from the gods of the peoples that are all around them, the ones close to you or the ones far from you from the end of the earth to the end of the earth, 9you shall not assent to him and you shall not heed him and your eye shall not spare him and you shall not pity and shall not shield him. 10But you shall surely kill him. Your hand shall be against him first to put him to death and the hand of all the people last. 11And you shall stone him and he shall die, for he sought to thrust you away from the LORD your God Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slaves. 12And all Israel will hear and see, and they will not do this evil thing again in your midst. 13Should you hear in one of your towns which the LORD your God is about to give you to dwell there, saying, 14‘Worthless men have come out from your midst and they have thrust away the inhabitants of their town, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” that you do not know.’ 15And you seek and inquire and ask well, and, look, the thing is true and well-founded, this abhorrence has been done in your midst, 16you shall surely strike down the inhabitants of that town by the edge of the sword, putting it under the ban, it and everything in it, and its beasts, by the edge of the sword. 17And all its booty you shall collect in the middle of its square and burn in fire—the town and all its booty—altogether to the LORD your God, and it shall be an everlasting mound, it shall never be rebuilt. 18And nothing shall cling to your hand from the ban, so that the LORD may turn back from His blazing wrath and give you compassion, and be compassionate to you and make you multiply as He swore to your fathers, 19when you heed the voice of the LORD your God to keep His commands with which I charge you today, to do what is right in the eyes of the LORD your God.”
CHAPTER 13 NOTES
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2. a dreamer of dreams. This would be a designation for a person who claims to have received a revelation from the deity through the medium of a dream. The Hebrew phrase ḥolem ḥalom does not mean a “diviner” or “interpreter of dreams,” as some scholars have claimed. The term for someone with the special skill of deciphering the meaning of otherwise enigmatic dreams is poter ḥalom, as in the Joseph story.
3. and the sign and the portent which he speaks to you come about. This clause creates a certain theological problem because it suggests that the false prophet may have supernatural powers. Abraham ibn Ezra tries to solve the difficulty by proposing that the “sign” is merely a demonstrative gesture on the part of the prophet, as when Isaiah has his servants go naked and barefoot and gives his sons symbolic names. But the term “come about” argues for the fulfillment of some prediction. The idea stated in the next verse that God is “trying” Israel may intimate that He has allowed the fulfillment of the prediction as an element of the trial: even if the false prophet can show you a portent, the falsehood of his message should be evident in his urging you to worship other gods.
Let us go after other gods that you do not know. As Jeffrey H. Tigay aptly observes, this is “not a literal quotation of the prophet’s proposal but Moses’s pejorative paraphrase of it.” To generalize the underlying stylistic principle, in Deuteronomy the boundaries between quoted speech and the framing speech of Moses are fluid (much more so than the boundaries between quoted speech and narrator’s discourse elsewhere in the Bible) because everything here is thematically and structurally dominated by Moses’s oratory: he quotes others but readily bends the quotations to his own didactic purpose, quickly slipping from the words of others to his own words. The example here of verses 7–8 is even more extreme.
5. After the LORD your God … Him shall you fear and His commands shall you keep … Him shall you worship … to Him shall you cleave. This sentence is a vivid example of the vigorous hortatory style of Deuteronomy. God, or a personal pronoun standing in for God, is emphatically set at the head of each brief clause, and the clauses themselves are a series of overlapping interlocked imperatives.
6. spoken falsehood. This is the clear meaning of diber sarah, as parallel uses in Jeremiah 28:16, 29:32, and in Isaiah 59:13 demonstrate, two of them coupling the unusual sarah with the more common sheqer, “lie.”
10. But you shall surely kill him. Your hand shall be against him first. The vehemence of this is startling, especially because the Hebrew does not use the word for judicial execution, hamit, “put to death,” but harog, “kill.” No mention is made of a process of judicial review, as in the case of the town seduced into idolatry (verse 15). The impelling idea seems to be that in cases of incitement to idolatry, a person must overcome all natural feelings of compassion (verse 8), even for his own offspring, for a best friend, for a brother (who came out of the same womb), or for the woman who has shared his bed, and carry out justice at once. In the three successive instances here of incitement to idolatry, there is a progression in the enormity of the crime—from an individual who is a false prophet to the betrayal by close kin or beloved friend to the seduction by a paganizing group of an entire community.
11. And you shall stone him. The verb by itself, saqol, means “to stone,” but here added to it is baʾavanim, “with stones,” in a gesture of rhetorical emphasis.
16. strike down the inhabitants of that town … putting it under the ban. This command of implacable, total destruction made the sages of the Talmud (Sanhedrin 10:4–5 and elsewhere) sufficiently uneasy that they proposed a whole series of preconditions to the implementation of the injunction which rendered it nearly impossible to carry out. As in the case of the total destruction of the Canaanite peoples, there is no evidence that the Israelites went about wiping out their own cities when they discovered pagan practices, so this grim law, too, must be understood as “utopian.” It is, in other words, a legal expression of the unswerving antipagan polemic that animates Deuteronomy. The eighteenth-century North African Hebrew commentator Or Hayim shows sensitivity to the darkest aspect of this law: its human executors, he observes, are liable to become addicted to the frenzy of bloodthirstiness unleashed in the massacre, captive to the “power of cruelty.” (Or Hayim cites the murderous Islamic sect of Assassins as an example.) He then imaginatively cites the phrase “give you compassion” in the verse 18 to argue that God’s compassion for Israel will be to save them, even in these terrible circumstances, from the “power of cruelty” and to imbue them with compassion. This is scarcely a likely historical scenario of mob psychology, but it is at least an exegetical effort to conceive an ethos beyond bloodlust even in the midst of this theological militancy.
17. an everlasting mound. The Hebrew noun tell specifically designates the mound of piled-up earth under which the remnants of a destroyed city are buried. It has been appropriately adopted as a technical term by archaeologists.
1“You are children to the LORD your God. You shall not gash yourselves nor shall you make a bald place on the front of your head for the dead. 2For you are a holy people to the LORD your God, and you has the LORD chosen to be a treasured people to Him of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.
3“You shall eat no abhorrent thing. 4These are the beasts that you may eat: ox, lamb of sheep and lamb of goat, 5gazelle and deer and roebuck and bison and antelope and mountain sheep, 6and every beast that has hooves, that has hooves split in two, bringing up the cud; among beasts, it you may eat. 7But this you shall not eat from those that bring up the cud or have a split hoof: the camel and the rock-badger and the hare, for they bring up the cud but they have no hoof. They are unclean for you. 8And the pig, for it has a hoof but no cud. It is unclean for you. Of their flesh you shall not eat and their carcass you shall not touch. 9This you may eat of all that is in the water: whatever has fins and scales you may eat. 10And whatever has no fins and scales you shall not eat. It is unclean for you. 11Every clean bird you may eat. 12And this you shall not eat of them: the eagle and the vulture and the black vulture, 13and the kite and the falcon and the buzzard according to its kind, 14and every raven according to its kind, 15and the ostrich and the nighthawk and the seagull and the hawk according to its kind, 16the horned owl and the puff owl and the hoot owl, 17and the pelican and the fish hawk and the cormorant, 18and the stork and the heron according to its kind and the hoopoe and the bat. 19And every swarming thing among winged creatures is unclean for you. They shall not be eaten. 20Every clean winged creature you may eat. 21You shall not eat any carcass. To the sojourner within your gates you may give it and he may eat it, or sell it to a foreigner, for you are a holy people to the LORD your God. You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.
22“You shall surely tithe all the yield of your seed that comes out in the field year after year. 23And you shall eat before the LORD your God in the place that He chooses to make His name dwell the tithe of your grain, of your wine, and of your oil, and the firstborn of your cattle and your sheep, so that you may learn to fear the LORD your God at all times. 24And should the way be too much for you, for you cannot carry it, as the place that the LORD your God chooses to make His name dwell there will be too far for you, when the LORD blesses you, 25then you shall give in silver, and you shall bundle the silver in your hand and you shall go to the place that the LORD your God chooses. 26And you may give the silver for whatever your appetite craves—cattle and sheep and wine and strong drink and whatever your appetite may prompt you to ask—and you shall eat there before the LORD your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your household. 27And the Levite who is within your gates, you shall not abandon him, for he has no share and estate with you. 28At the end of three years you shall take out all the tithe of your yield in that year and set it down within your gates. 29And the Levite shall come, for he has no share and estate with you, and the sojourner and the orphan and the widow who are within your gates, and they shall eat and be sated, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hand that you do.”
CHAPTER 14 NOTES
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1. You shall not gash yourselves nor shall you make a bald place on the front of your head. The consensus is that these were pagan rituals of mourning, specifically prohibited because they involved disfiguring the mourner’s body, which as the body of one of God’s “children,” should be guarded in its integrity. Ritual gashing is attested in the comportment of the Baal priests on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18, although there the intention seems to be not mourning but sympathetic magic (encouraging the descent of divine fire by spilling blood). The Ugaritic texts do reflect gashing as a gesture of mourning. The bald place “on the front of your head” (literally, “between your eyes”) appears to be some sort of tonsure, something that Abraham ibn Ezra, with an eye to his Christian neighbors, registers when he observes, “like the practice of the gentiles to this day.”
6. hooves split in two, bringing up the cud. While the governing principles that determine what creatures may not be eaten are not entirely consistent, there appears to be a recoil from consuming land animals or birds that are predators or scavengers. Thus, permissible animals must have genuine, split hooves and nothing resembling claws, and they must be ruminants, as a kind of guarantee that they are not carnivores. Some structuralist critics have proposed that the Hebrews also had a strong predilection to keep things in neat categories: a sea creature without fins or scales seemed to them, it is inferred, a violation of appropriate categories and hence was forbidden. In any event, as many commentators have noted, the dietary restrictions, coming as they do after the prohibition of two prominent pagan mourning practices, are part of a program for separating Israel from the surrounding peoples.
7–19. the camel and the rock-badger and the hare. In the long list that follows of prohibited animals, once we get beyond the camel and the hare and the pig (the rock-badger being a more questionable identification), it should be kept in mind that most of the English equivalents are approximations or guesses that reflect the tradition of translations more than ancient Hebrew zoology. In verse 16, for example, the three birds mentioned, kos, yanshuf, and tinshemet, may indeed be different kinds of owls (though even that is not entirely certain for all three), but no one really knows precisely what they are. The present translation improvises its own guesses, in the case of the second and third terms guided by the suggestion of breathing, puffing, or emitting some sort of respiratory sound in the Hebrew verbal roots of yanshuf and tinshemet (puff owl and hoot owl). Other translations represent these as “the little owl, the great owl, and the white owl,” with scant evidence for the choices.
12. And this you shall not eat. The list comprises birds of prey and scavengers.
21. You shall not eat any carcass. The Hebrew nevelah refers to the body of an animal that has died of natural causes.
To the sojourner … you may give it. The resident alien, generally unable to possess real property, is thought of here, as elsewhere in Deuteronomy, as economically disadvantaged and hence an appropriate object of charity. The foreigner, by contrast, is only a temporary resident or wayfarer and may bring with him economic resources from elsewhere, so he is assumed to be in a position to pay for the carcass.
You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk. See the comment on the identical prohibition in Exodus 23:19.
22. You shall surely tithe. Ibn Ezra proposes a link with the preceding section in regard to prohibited eating. The dietary restrictions forbid categories of animals, sea creatures, and birds; the Israelites are forbidden to eat the tithes except “in the place that He chooses”—that is, in the central temple.
23. so that you may learn to fear the LORD your God. This clause is most plausibly linked with the overriding principle of the centralization of the cult: the pilgrim, by experiencing the cult at the central sanctuary and by contact with the priestly caste there, will learn to fear the LORD.
24. And should the way be too much for you. The centralization of the cult entailed a practical difficulty, which was the problem of carrying large quantities of agricultural produce over long distances to the central sanctuary. The solution (verse 25) is to convert the tithed produce into easily portable silver, which then could be reconverted at the sanctuary site into either comestible animals or agricultural produce. (Hence the pragmatic need for money changers in the Temple.)
the LORD blesses you. As very often, this phrase refers to material bounty, a specific meaning that the context makes clear.
25. bundle. The weighted pieces of silver were carried in a leather bundle or purse (tsror, the noun cognate with the verb used here). The husband of the wayward wife in Proverbs 7 goes off on a long trip having taken “the purse of silver” (tsror hakesef) in his hand.
the silver. Coins did not come into use in ancient Israel until the Second Temple period, so the reference is not to money but to readily exchangeable weights of silver.
26. may prompt you to ask. More literally, “may ask you.” In any case, the silver equivalent of 10 percent of the annual agricultural yield would give the pilgrim a great deal of money to spend in a few days, and thus enable him to purchase abundantly whatever he craved.
1“At the end of seven years you shall make a remission. 2And this is the matter of the remission, the remitting by every loan holder, who holds a loan against his fellow man, he shall not dun his fellow man and brother, for a remission to the LORD has been proclaimed. 3The foreigner you may dun, but that of yours which is with your brother your hand shall remit. 4Yet, there will be no pauper among you, for the LORD will surely bless you in the land which the LORD your God is about to give you in estate to take hold of it—5only if you surely heed the voice of the LORD your God to keep to do all this command that I charge you today. 6For the LORD your God has blessed you as He spoke to you, and you shall lend to many nations but you yourself shall not borrow, and you shall dominate many nations, but you they shall not dominate. 7Should there be a pauper among you, from one of your brothers within one of your gates in your land that the LORD your God is about to give you, you shall not harden your heart and clench your hand against your brother the pauper. 8But you shall surely open your hand to him and surely lend to him enough for his want that he has. 9Watch yourself, lest there be in your heart a base thing, saying, ‘The seventh year, the year of remission is near,’ and you look meanly at your brother the pauper and you do not give to him, and he call to the LORD against you and it be an offense in you. 10You shall surely give to him, and your heart shall not be mean when you give to him, for by virtue of this thing the LORD your God will bless you in all your doings and in all that your hand reaches. 11For the pauper will not cease from the midst of the land. Therefore I charge you, saying, ‘You shall surely open your hand to your brother, to your poor, and to your pauper, in your land.’ 12Should your Hebrew brother or sister be sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall send him out from you free. 13And when you send him out from you, you shall not send him out empty-handed. 14You shall surely provide him from your flock and from your threshing floor and from your winepress, as the LORD your God has blessed you, you shall give to him. 15And you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the LORD your God ransomed you. Therefore I charge you with this thing today. 16And it shall be, should he say to you, ‘I will not go out from you,’ for he loves you and your household, as it is good for him with you, 17you shall take an awl and put it through his ear and into the door, and he shall be your perpetual slave. And to your slavegirl, too, thus you shall do. 18Let it not seem hard in your eyes when you send him out from you free, for twice the value of a hired man he served you six years, and the LORD your God will bless you in all that you do. 19Every firstborn that is born in your herd or in your flock, the male you shall consecrate to the LORD your God. You shall not work the firstborn of your oxen nor shall you shear the firstborn of your flock. 20Before the LORD you shall eat it, year after year, in the place that the LORD chooses, you and your household. 21And should there be a defect in it, lameness or blindness or any bad defect, you shall not sacrifice it to the LORD your God. 22Within your gates you may eat it, the unclean and the clean together, like the gazelle and like the deer. 23Only its blood you shall not eat. On the ground you shall spill it like water.”
CHAPTER 15 NOTES
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1. At the end of seven years. The Hebrew does not say “at the end of the seventh year” because the phrase, as Abraham ibn Ezra notes, is meant to indicate the beginning of the year that marks the end of the seven-year cycle.
a remission. The parallel passage in Exodus 23:10–11 has a verb with the root sh-m-t but not, as here, the noun shemitah. The basic meaning of the root is “to release,” “to let slip out of one’s hand.” In the strictly agricultural context of Exodus 23, it was simply translated as “let it go,” referring to the cultivated land. Deuteronomy’s shemitah regulations, on the other hand, address a new urban and mercantile reality, and the focus of the law is consequently on debts rather than on allowing the land to lie fallow. For this business-oriented regulation, a more abstract English equivalent such as “remission” is required.
2. dun. The Hebrew verb is the same one reflected in the term for “taskmasters” in Exodus.
his fellow man and brother. These are equivalent terms here, and the one that will be favored through the rest of the passage is “brother.” That word focuses the social ethic of Deuteronomy: whatever the social and economic differences, all Israelites should regard each other as brothers. The collocation “your brother the pauper” is especially telling in this regard—however wretched the pauper, he is still your brother.
4. there will be no pauper among you. This extravagant statement, which may have fueled the imaginations of some later social revolutionaries, seems flatly contradicted, first, by “Should there be a pauper among you” (verse 7) and then, more blatantly, by “For the pauper will not cease from the midst of the land” (verse 11). Ibn Ezra neatly catches the utopian character of the pronouncement: “Know that I charged you not to dun your brother—there would be no need for this if all Israel or most of them would heed God’s voice, then there would be no pauper among you who needs you to lend to him.” As a realist, ibn Ezra registers the unlikelihood that a majority of the people will ever actually heed God’s words, hence “the pauper will not cease from the midst of the land.”
6. you shall lend to many nations. The Hebrew verb indicates a loan given against security, with the pawned object of worth thus placing the borrower in a palpable relationship of dependence to the lender.
dominate. In the present context, the force of the verb mashol is obviously economic rather than political domination.
7. harden your heart. The more literal sense is “strengthen your heart.” Though this is not one of the verbs used for Pharaoh’s heart in the Exodus story, the meaning is virtually the same.
clench your hand. The language of this chapter focuses on the hand as the synecdochic image of agency: debts are remitted when the hand releases or lets them go (see verse 3); parsimony toward the indigent is figured as a clenching tight of the hand, generosity as an opening of the hand.
9. a base thing. Elsewhere, the Hebrew bliyaʿal is translated as “worthless,” but the present context requires something like “base.”
you look meanly. Literally, “your eye is evil.”
10. your heart shall not be mean. Literally, “your heart shall not be evil.”
12. your Hebrew brother or sister. Unlike the regulations concerning Hebrew slaves in Exodus 21, where distinctions are made between the sexes, evidently because the case in view is one in which the young woman has been sold into slavery with the intention of her becoming a concubine, here male and female slaves are regulated by an identical set of laws. Grammatically, masculine gender remains dominant, so even though both men and women have been mentioned, the text goes on to speak of “he” (as does this translation) representing both.
14. You shall surely provide him. The notion of what amounts to severance pay at the end of the period of indentured servitude is an innovation of Deuteronomy, again reflecting its humanitarian social ethos.
as the LORD your God has blessed you. That is, the bounty bestowed on the freed slave will be proportionate to the material “blessings” enjoyed by the slave owner.
17. put it through his ear and into the door. In Exodus 21:6, this ceremony is performed when the slave is made to “approach the gods” (or “God”), but the frame of reference now is secular. If the phrase in Exodus refers to a local sanctuary, the programmatic elimination of that institution in Deuteronomy would necessitate the secularization of the ceremony as a practical matter. The meaning, symbolic or otherwise, of the ceremony has been variously interpreted (see the first comment on Exodus 21:6).
perpetual slave. At least according to rabbinic exegesis, even this condition of servitude was abrogated in the jubilee year.
18. twice the value of a hired man. The word rendered as “value” usually means “pay”—logically, what the employer would render to the hired man rather than what he would extract from the laborer. But the most plausible sense is that a paid worker over a period of six years would cost his employer twice what the employer would have to lay out for the acquisition and upkeep of an indentured servant.
21. lameness or blindness. The Hebrew literally says “lame or blind.” These physical impairments render the animal unfit as an offering to God, but since they do not necessarily involve any disease that might taint the flesh of the animals, the beasts are still fit for strictly secular consumption, “like the gazelle and like the deer,” which involves no restriction of ritual purity.
1Keep the month of Abib, and you shall make a Passover to the LORD your God, for in the month of Abib the LORD your God brought you out of Egypt in the night. 2And you shall sacrifice a Passover offering to the LORD your God, sheep and cattle, in the place that the LORD chooses to make His name dwell there. 3You shall not eat unleavened stuff with it. Seven days you shall eat with it flatcakes, poverty’s bread, for in haste you did go out from the land of Egypt; so that you will remember the day of your going out from Egypt all the days of your life. 4And no leavening will be seen with you in all your territory seven days, and nothing of the meat that you slaughter in the evening shall be left overnight on the first day till the morning. 5You shall not be able to sacrifice the Passover offering within one of your gates that the LORD your God is about to give you. 6But to the place that the LORD your God chooses to make His name dwell, there shall you sacrifice the Passover offering in the evening, as the sun comes down, the hour of your coming out of Egypt. 7And you shall cook and eat in the place that the LORD your God chooses, and you shall turn in the morning and go to your tents. 8Six days you shall eat flatbread, and on the seventh day an assembly to the LORD your God. You shall do no task.
9Seven weeks you shall count for yourself, from when the sickle begins in the standing grain you shall begin to count seven weeks. 10And you shall make a festival of weeks to the LORD your God, tribute of your hand’s freewill gift that you give as the LORD your God has blessed you. 11And you shall rejoice before the LORD your God, you and your son and your daughter and your male slave and your slavegirl and the Levite who is within your gates and the sojourner and the orphan and the widow who are in your midst in the place that the LORD your God chooses to make His name dwell there. 12And you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and you shall keep and do these statutes.
13A festival of huts you shall make for yourself seven days, when you gather in from your threshing floor and from your winepress. 14And you shall rejoice in your festival, you and your sons and your daughter and your male slave and your slavegirl and the Levite and the orphan and the widow who are within your gates. 15Seven days you shall celebrate to the LORD your God in the place that the LORD chooses, for the LORD your God will bless you in all your yield and in all the work of your hands, and you shall be only joyful.
16Three times in the year every one of your males shall appear in the presence of the LORD your God in the place that He chooses: on the Festival of Flatbread and on the Festival of Weeks and on the Festival of Huts, and he shall not appear in the presence of the LORD empty-handed. 17Each man according to the gift of his hand, according to the blessing of the LORD your God that He gives him.
18Judges and overseers you shall set for yourself within all your gates that the LORD your God is about to give to you according to your tribes, and they shall judge the people with just judgment. 19You shall not skew judgment. You shall recognize no face and no bribe shall you take, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the innocent. 20Justice, justice shall you pursue, so that you may live and take hold of the land that the LORD your God is about to give you. 21You shall plant you no cultic pole, no tree, by the altar of the LORD your God which you will make you. 22And you shall set you up no pillar which the LORD your God hates.
CHAPTER 16 NOTES
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1. Keep the month of Abib. As noted in the commentary on Exodus, Abib, the month that corresponds to March–April, means “new grain” (in modern Hebrew, it comes to mean “spring”). The rabbis took the name as a warrant for introducing leap months in order to keep the lunar calendar in phase with the solar calendar. One could infer that some rudimentary mechanism of calendric correction was in place even in the early biblical period, or else the month of new grain would have fallen sometimes in midwinter, sometimes in late summer or fall. Unlike other biblical texts on the festivals, the law here does not specify which day in Abib marks the beginning of the festival—unless one interprets “month” as “new moon,” a construction found among some ancient and modern commentators.
2. sheep and cattle. The option of cattle is new, perhaps reflecting a more sedentary form of animal husbandry than the earlier nomadic model.
3. poverty’s bread. The noun ʾoni has the basic meaning of a lowly condition, and so it could equally refer to poverty, affliction, or debasement.
5. You shall not be able to sacrifice … within one of your gates. This reiterated emphasis in connection with Passover is understandable. Passover, unlike the other festivals, was primarily a home ritual: each household sacrificed a paschal lamb, and, at least in the earliest period, apotropaic blood was probably smeared on the lintel. Deuteronomy thus must take pains to relocate even this domestic festival in the central sanctuary. The reiteration of the obligation to go “to the place that the LORD your God chooses” contributes to the lengthiness of the Passover section in comparison with the sections on the other two pilgrim festivals, although critical scholarship has also detected here a successive layering into a single law of injunctions regarding a passover (pesaḥ) and injunctions regarding a festival of flatbread (matsot), once separate observances.
6. the hour of your coming out of Egypt. Most traditional Hebrew commentators understand moʿed in its frequent sense of “fixed season,” i.e., the date in the month of Abib on which Israel left Egypt. The context, however, with the stress on the time of sunset suggests that here the term means hour of the day.
7. cook. In other contexts, bashel means “boil,” a mode of preparing the meat prohibited by the Passover laws in Exodus, which insists that the meat be fire-roasted. This may be another instance in which this legislation edges the observance away from its archaic origins, not enjoining the preparation of the meat in the old Bedouin fashion.
you shall turn in the morning and go to your tents. Although Deuteronomy must insist on the pilgrim obligation to celebrate at the central sanctuary, it also recognizes it could be a hardship for these agriculturalists to have to remain at the temple site a whole week, so the pilgrims are permitted (in contrast to later laws about travel on the festivals) to return home the morning after the sunset sacrifice. “Your tents” is a linguistic fossil; the actual fact of fixed settlement is reflected in the more prevalent idiom, “within your gates.”
8. Six days you shall eat flatbread. One would have expected “seven.” Either it is implied that the seventh day, the day of assembly, is included in the injunction, or the number six assumes a count that begins after the first day, on which the Passover sacrifice is offered.
9. from when the sickle begins in the standing grain. Although Passover is not mentioned, other biblical texts understand the counting to begin the day after the first day of Passover (interpreted by some Jewish sectarians to mean the first Sunday after the first day of Passover).
10. your hand’s freewill gift. The repeated emphasis here, addressing a population of farmers and animal husbanders that is expected to enjoy a degree of prosperity, is on voluntary gifts to the cult in proportion to the “blessing” that the donor has enjoyed. The Priestly predilection for lists of stipulated sacrifices is entirely absent.
13. A festival of huts. The holiday is called Succoth, “huts” (others, “booths,” “tabernacles”), because as a harvest festival, there was evidently a celebration at the site of huts in the field (feasting and perhaps in the earliest period some sort of sacrifice). The Deuteronomist preserves the popular name (in Exodus it is called the Festival of Ingathering) but makes no reference to any observance in huts, following his usual line on the obligation of pilgrimage to the central sanctuary, the sole legitimate place to celebrate the festival.
15. Seven days you shall celebrate … in the place that the LORD chooses. Unlike on Passover, the pilgrim is to remain at the temple site for the full seven days. Perhaps this is because after the completion of the autumn harvest, which this festival marks, the farmer has no urgent further work to do right away, as he would in the spring.
16. Three times in the year every one of your males shall appear. This and the next verse summarize the obligation of the three pilgrim festivals. As elsewhere, the phrase yeraʾeh ʾet pney-YHWH, “will appear [or be seen] in the presence of the LORD,” is a euphemistic revocalization of yirʾeh, “will see,” to avoid the anthropomorphism of the notion that the celebrant sees the presence, or face, of God. It should be noted that the pilgrim obligation, with the attendant hardships of travel, falls only on the male, but, in fact, the Israelite is encouraged to include his daughter and his slavegirl as well as male dependents (verses 11, 14) in the celebration.
18. overseers. The term shotrim is used in Exodus for the Hebrew overseers or foremen of the slave population. Since the word derives from a root meaning to “write down” or “record” (compare the Aramaic shtar, “document”), its meaning here might be an amanuensis, secretary, or administrator working alongside the judge.
19. You shall recognize no face. As in Deuteronomy 1:17, not recognizing someone you know, or about whose guilt or innocence you might have some presumption, means showing no partiality.
for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the innocent. As Jeffrey H. Tigay justly observes, this declaration takes the form of a semantically balanced aphorism of the sort one finds in the Book of Proverbs. The parallel verse in Exodus 23:8 has “sighted” instead of “wise.” The change here might be a kind of explanatory gloss on the original formulation because “sighted” could refer merely to physical sight: Deuteronomy, with its intellectualist bent, wants to stress that even the wise lose the guidance of their wisdom if they succumb to bribery (whether shoḥad is construed as bribery proper or as a fee paid a judge for his services).
20. Justice, justice. Though much ingenuity has been exercised by exegetes to explain the repetition, its function as a verbal gesture of sheer emphasis is self-evident: justice, and justice alone, shall you pursue.
21. no cultic pole, no tree. The ʾasherah may have been a carved pole. Either “tree” could be in apposition to ʾasherah, an extended meaning of the word to include artifacts made from trees, or it could refer to the sacred trees actually planted at the sites of Canaanite worship and reflected in the Patriarchal stories in Genesis.
22. you shall set you up no pillar. The patriarchs and Moses did precisely that. One way of resolving the contradiction (e.g., Abraham ibn Ezra) is to understand “which the LORD your God hates” as a restrictive clause—it is specifically the pillars (matsevot) associated with the pagan cult that are prohibited. But Rashi’s notion of a historical development seems more likely: “For it was a practice of the Canaanites. And even though it was favored [by God] in the period of the Patriarchs, now He hated it because these people made it a practice of idolatry.”
1You shall not sacrifice to the LORD your God a bull or a sheep in which there is a defect, anything wrong, for it is an abhorrence of the LORD, your God. 2Should there be found in your midst, within any of your gates that the LORD your God is about to give you, a man or a woman who does evil in the eyes of the LORD your God to transgress His covenant, 3and they go and worship other gods and bow to them, to the sun or to the moon or to any of the array of the heavens which I did not command, 4and it be told to you and you hear, and you inquire well and, look, the thing is true, well-founded, this abhorrence has been done in Israel, 5you shall take out that man or that woman who has done this evil thing to your gates, the man or the woman, and you shall stone them to death. 6By the word of two witnesses or three witnesses shall the one who dies be put to death, he shall not be put to death by the word of one witness. 7The hand of the witnesses shall be against him first to put him to death and the hand of all the people afterward and you shall root out the evil from your midst.
8Should the matter be beyond you to judge, between blood and blood, between case and case, and between injury and injury, affairs of grievances within your gates, you shall arise and go up to the place that the LORD your God chooses, 9and you shall come to the levitical priests and to the judge who will be in those days, and you shall inquire and they will tell you the matter of the judgment. 10And you shall do according to the thing that they tell you from that place which the LORD chooses, and you shall keep to all that they instruct you. 11According to the teaching that they instruct you and according to the judgment that they say to you, you shall do, you shall not swerve from the word that they tell you right or left. 12And the man who acts willfully not to heed the priest standing to minister there to the LORD your God, or to the judge, that man shall die, and you shall root out the evil from Israel. 13And all the people shall listen and fear, and they shall no longer be willful.
14When you come into the land that the LORD your God is about to give you, and you take hold of it and dwell in it, and you say, “Let me put a king over me like all the nations that are around me,” 15you shall surely put over you a king whom the LORD your God chooses, from the midst of your brothers you shall put a king over you, you shall not be able to set over you a foreign man who is not your brother. 16Only let him not get himself many horses, that he not turn the people back to Egypt in order to get many horses, when the LORD has said to you, “You shall not turn back again on this way.” 17And let him not get himself many wives, that his heart not swerve, and let him not get himself too much silver and gold. 18And it shall be, when he sits on his throne of kingship, that he shall write for himself a copy of this teaching in a book before the levitical priests. 19And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this teaching and these statutes, to do them, 20so that his heart be not haughty over his brothers and so that he swerve not from what is commanded right or left, in order that he may long endure in his kingship, he and his sons, in the midst of Israel.
CHAPTER 17 NOTES
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2. within any of your gates. The recurrent phrase “within your gates” is the characteristic designation in Deuteronomy of the local town, wherever in the country it may be, in contradistinction to the place of the central sanctuary. Its use in the present context after “in your midst” suggests a subversive source of pagan contamination lurking somewhere within the closed walls of the Israelite habitations. This would be in keeping with Abraham ibn Ezra’s neat observation that “after having mentioned the cultic pole by the altar, which is public to all, he comes back to warn the individual about worship of abominations.”
3. to the sun or to the moon or to any of the array of the heavens. There are some indications, both biblical and extrabiblical, that worship of astral deities, a practice probably influenced by the Assyrian cult, became especially widespread in Israel during the seventh century B.C.E.
which I did not command. This clause may be a rebuke to a popular syncretistic belief that YHWH enjoined the worship of astral deities alongside worship of Him.
6. By the word. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “by the mouth.”
7. The hand of the witnesses shall be against him first. The frequently made observation concerning this stipulation that it will compel the witnesses to be very cautious about their testimony seems rather apologetic. Why, after all, would this opportunity to be first among the executioners not encourage a zealot or a person with a private grudge to offer hasty or even false testimony against the accused idolator? The law in general reflects the antipagan animus of Deuteronomy in an effort to forge a seamless anti-idolatrous Israelite front in which a kind of “popular justice” is carried out by the whole community.
8. between blood and blood, between case and case, and between injury and injury. These three phrases are meant to mark out the whole range of nonritual law. “Between blood and blood” clearly indicates legal disputes or “grievances” (rivot) involving accusations of capital crimes, and murder in particular. The second category, “between case and case” (beyn din ledin), uses a general term for a legal case, but sandwiched in between “blood” and “injury” (negaʿ), it probably refers to torts involving property or money but not bodily injury.
go up to the place that the LORD your God chooses. This set phrase, used throughout the book to underscore the divine authorization of the centralized cult, here serves to authorize a complementary notion—the centralization of judicial power in a single court of appeals instituted at the site of the one chosen sanctuary.
9. the levitical priests. This somewhat odd designation—in the Hebrew it is, literally, “the priests, the Levites”—is distinctive of Deuteronomy. Scholarly consensus infers that in contradistinction to the three preceding books, which variously envisage a priestly class from a particular Levite clan officiating in the cult while the other Levites attend to maintenance chores in the sanctuary, Deuteronomy assumes that all Levites can potentially serve as priests.
and to the judge. The simplest construction is that judicial authority was shared by the priests and a layman jurist.
12. the man who acts willfully. Some interpreters take this as a reference to the judge in the inferior court who refuses to recognize the authority of the central court. The repetition, however, of “willful” in the next verse in connection with “all the people” suggests that it is rather an interested party in the case appealed, who has come to hear the opinion of the supreme court and then, when it proves unfavorable to him, has rejected it. Capital punishment in such a case seems severe, at least by modern standards, but the Deuteronomist, with his usual concern for the consolidation of power in one central place, is fearful that flouting a decision of the supreme court will undermine the whole system.
15. a king whom the LORD your God chooses. Thus, by using the same phrase for both temple and king, the Deuteronomist effects an alignment between the election of a central sanctuary and the election of the monarch. In keeping with the premise that all this is a Mosaic prediction, the fact that the king’s political capital and the sanctuary’s location are one and the same place is not spelled out, even though the seventh-century B.C.E. audience would of course have registered the connection.
16. let him not get himself many horses, that he not turn the people back to Egypt. The many horses, the many wives, the silver and gold, are all associated with the extravagances of royal—indeed, imperial—pomp. Egypt is linked with horses because of its celebrated chariot corps, prominent in the Exodus story, and because it actually was an exporter of horses in the region. (In fact, the Israelties were slow to adopt horses for travel and for warfare through much of the First Temple period, preferring donkeys as mounts.) But turning the people back to Egypt may refer to a condition of virtual or actual slavery to which a profligate monarch could reduce many of his overtaxed subjects through his expenditures.
You shall not turn back again on this way. No explicit statement to this effect is recorded in the preceding books, though, as the Israeli Bible scholar David Cohen-Zemach has proposed, there may be an approximation in Exodus 13:17: “Lest the people regret when they see battle and go back to Egypt.”
17. that his heart not swerve. The precedent of Solomon suggests that a large royal harem would involve a good many politically motivated marriages with foreign princesses, and these could lead the king astray, as in the egregious instance of Jezebel and Ahab.
18. he shall write for himself a copy of this teaching. The king is to be actively engaged in personally producing a text of the teaching (translations that embellish the simple verb “write” by representing it as “cause to be written” miss the point). The location of religious authority in a text, a revolutionary idea, is made dramatically clear. “A copy of this teaching,” which might also be construed as “a repetition of this teaching,” is in Hebrew mishneh hatorah hazoʾt and is the source of one of the Hebrew names as well as the Greek name for Deuteronomy.
in a book. The Hebrew sefer refers to anything written down, from letter to record to what we would call a book. (The form in any case, would be a scroll.) It may well designate here the whole book of Deuteronomy, the valedictory rehearsal of the law delivered by Moses before his death. Some interpreters want to restrict “this teaching” to the just enunciated instructions to the king, but that seems improbable, especially since the text goes on to say, “he shall read in it all the days of his life,” hardly something he would do with a few lines about keeping tight reins on the royal budget.
19. so that he may learn to fear the LORD his God. Many commentators have cited this whole section as a demonstration that the government of ancient Israel was in essence a constitutional monarchy. Instructional texts for kings had many precedents both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, as Moshe Weinfeld points out, so that element is scarcely an innovation. If the document that the king is enjoined here to write and repeatedly read is the entire Book of Deuteronomy, then he has not just a set of admonitions to a monarch but a whole complex of laws and a covenantal vision of history that are binding on him. This does make his regime a constitutional monarchy, but one founded on theocratic authority, the Torah or constitution to be expounded by the priests at the central sanctuary.
20. so that his heart be not haughty over his brothers. The language of brotherhood, earlier used to link affluent and indigent, here links monarch and subjects. Whatever power he exerts, he is not an absolute monarch, and he does not differ in caste or in his relation to the divine from those over whom he rules.
in order that he may long endure in his kingship. In the precarious historical circumstances of the seventh century B.C.E., Deuteronomy makes the continuation of the monarchy conditional on the king’s faithfulness to the words of God’s teaching, just as the people’s continuation in the land promised them is conditional on this fidelity to that same teaching.
1The levitical priests, all the tribe of Levi, shall have no share and estate with Israel. The fire offerings of the LORD and His estate they shall eat. 2And he shall have no estate in the midst of his brothers. The LORD is his estate, as He spoke to them. 3And this shall be the priests’ due from the people, from the offerers of sacrifice, whether bull or sheep: to the priest shall be given the shoulder and the cheeks and the stomach. 4The first of your grain, your wine, and your oil, and the first shearing of your flock you shall give to him. 5For him did the LORD your God choose of all your tribes to minister in the name of the LORD, him and his sons, always. 6And should the Levite come from one of your gates, from all of Israel, where he sojourns, he shall come as much as his appetite craves to the place that the LORD chooses, 7and shall minister in the name of the LORD his God like all his brothers, the Levites, who stand there in attendance before the LORD. 8Share for share they shall eat, besides his sales from the patrimony.
9When you come into the land that the LORD your God is about to give you, you shall not learn to do like the abhorrent things of these nations. 10There shall not be found among you one who passes his son or his daughter through fire, a speller of charms, a soothsayer, or a diviner or a sorcerer, 11or a chanter of incantations or an inquirer of ghost or familiar spirit or one who seeks out the dead. 12For whosoever does these is the LORD’s abhorrence, and because of these abhorrent things the LORD your God is about to dispossess them before you. 13You shall be wholehearted with the LORD your God. 14For these nations which you are about to dispossess heed soothsayers and spellers of charms, but you, the LORD your God has not given such. 15A prophet like me from your midst, from your brothers, the LORD will raise up. Him shall you heed. 16As all that you asked of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, saying, “Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God, and this great fire let me not see again, that I may not die.” 17And the LORD said to me, “Well have they spoken. 18A prophet I shall raise up for them from the midst of their brothers, like you, and I shall put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I charge him. 19And it shall be, the man who does not heed My words which he will speak in My name, I Myself will requite it of him. 20But the prophet who willfully speaks a word in My name, which I have not charged him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die. 21And should you say in your heart, ‘How shall we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?’ 22That which the prophet speaks in the name of the LORD and the thing does not happen and does not come about, this is the word that the LORD did not speak. Willfully did the prophet speak it: you shall have no dread of him.”
CHAPTER 18 NOTES
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1. The levitical priests. Abraham ibn Ezra, with his penchant for identifying connections between consecutive passages (what we would call editorial principles), observes that this section on priests immediately follows the section on kings: the king, who acts as supreme judicial authority, is enjoined to make himself a copy of the teaching, or Torah, which the priests make available and which is their responsibility to expound.
His estate. The reference is not entirely clear, though Rashi plausibly proposes that the term indicates categories of sacrifice other than the fire offering.
6. he shall come as much as his appetite craves to the place that the LORD chooses. It is possible that the polyvalent nefesh (“appetite”) here is simply an intensive substitute for the pronoun “he,” though even in this case there may be a consideration of appetite because the central sanctuary is the place where all the choice cuts of meat are available for the Levites. There is to be no hindrance for any Levite who desires to come to the central place, even though presumably the cult could not have really offered positions as officiants to all of them.
7. stand there in attendance. “In attendance” is not explicitly stated in the Hebrew but is implied by the idiom “stand before.”
8. Share for share. All the Levites at the sanctuary are to have an equal share of the animals, even those not directly employed in the cult.
besides his sales from the patrimony. The Hebrew is obscure. This translation assumes the following general meaning: besides what the Levite may have realized by selling off property he has inherited from his fathers (the literal meaning of the word rendered as “patrimony”). Others revocalize mimkaraw, “his sales,” as mimakaraw, “from his acquaintances”—i.e., funds or property the Levite has received from personal acquaintances, on top of whatever patrimony he has. That reading looks forced.
10. who passes his son or his daughter through fire. It is not certain whether this phrase refers to child sacrifice, elsewhere stringently forbidden, or to some pagan dedicatory rite in which the child was passed through or, more probably, over fire without harm.
a speller of charms, a soothsayer. The precise demarcations among these terms are no longer known, though the last three in the series all clearly refer to necromancy. Stylistically, the series may function not as a legislative list of discriminated terms but as a grand drumroll of synonyms, conveying the idea that no shape or manner of divination will be tolerated. Making predictions based on a variety of techniques, from the inspection of the liver and the entrails of a slaughtered animal to tapping the supposed knowledge of departed spirits, was a major industry throughout the ancient Near East, as thousands of divinatory texts from Egypt to Mesopotamia attest. The biblical abhorrence of these practices stems not so much from a disbelief in their efficacy as from a sense that they violate God’s prerogatives by establishing a technology of the realm of spirits, which is thus assumed to be wholly susceptible to human manipulation.
13. wholehearted. The word tamim means “whole,” “without blemish” but the root also appears in the collocation tom levav, “wholeness of heart.” The idea in context is that you cannot serve God and yet keep one foot in the pagan realm by having recourse to necromancy and divination.
15. A prophet like me. The envisaged future prophet is not necessarily like Moses in stature but in function—an intermediary between Israel and God (verses 16–17) and someone who hears and then transmits God’s words.
18. I shall put My words in his mouth. In contrast to the sundry techniques of deciphering arcane patterns in entrails or smoke and pronouncing incantations, the idea of prophecy is based on articulated speech—from God to prophet and from prophet to people—and hence the verb daber, “speak,” and the cognate noun davar, “word,” are insisted on again and again here.
22. the thing does not happen and does not come about. “Thing” here is also “word,” since davar refers both to speech and to the referent of speech, and in vatic contexts also has the technical sense of “oracle.” This criterion for detecting false prophecy presents notorious difficulties and seems to be put forth here chiefly out of some general sense that a true prophet will speak the truth. The literary prophets in the biblical canon are less in the business of prediction than of castigation. The predictions they make of national catastrophe are almost always conditioned on Israel’s failure to change its ways, and the predictions of glorious national restoration in the face of imminent disaster are always projected beyond the immediate future. It is conceivable that this text does not have in mind literary prophets but rather prophets who addressed mundane issues of everyday life, making short-range predictions that might be quickly verified or falsified by the events.
1When the LORD your God cuts off the nations whose land the LORD your God is about to give you and you dispossess them and dwell in their towns and in their houses, 2three towns you shall set aside for yourself within your land that the LORD your God is about to give you to take hold of it. 3You shall gauge for yourself the distance and divide in three the territory of your land that the LORD your God will grant you in estate, and it will be for every murderer to flee there. 4And this is the case of the murderer who will flee there and live—he who strikes down his fellow man unwittingly and who was not a foe to him in time past, 5and he who comes with his fellow man into the forest to hew wood and his hand slips on the axe cutting the wood and the iron springs from the wood and finds his fellow man and he dies, he shall flee to one of these towns and live. 6Lest the blood avenger pursue the murderer when his heart is hot and overtake him should the way be long, and strike him down mortally, when he has no death sentence since he was not his foe in time past. 7Therefore do I charge you, saying: three towns you shall set aside for yourself. 8And if the LORD your God enlarges your territory, as He swore to your fathers, and gives you all the land that He spoke to give to your fathers, 9when you keep all this command which I charge you today to do it, to love the LORD your God and to go in His ways for all time, you shall add for yourself another three towns to these three. 10And the blood of the innocent will not be shed in the midst of your land that the LORD your God is about to give to you in estate, and there would be bloodguilt upon you. 11And should a man be a foe to his fellow man and lie in wait for him and rise against him and strike him down mortally and he die, and that man flee to one of these towns, 12the elders of his town shall send and they shall take him from there and give him into the hand of the blood avenger, and he shall die. 13Your eye shall not spare him, and you shall root out the blood of the innocent from Israel, and it will go well with you.
14You shall not push back your fellow man’s landmark that the first ones marked out on your estate that you will inherit in the land which the LORD your God is about to give you to take hold of it. 15A single witness shall not rise up against a man for any crime and for any offense; in any offense that he may commit, by the word of two witnesses or by the word of three witnesses shall a case be established. 16Should a corrupt witness rise up against a man, to testify against him falsely, 17the two men who have a dispute shall stand before the LORD, before the priests and judges who will be in those days, 18and the judges inquire well and, look, the witness is a false witness, he has testified falsely against his brother, you shall do to him as he plotted to do to his brother, 19and you shall root out the evil from your midst. 20And those who remain will listen and be afraid, and they will no longer do the like of this evil thing in your midst. 21And your eye shall not spare—a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot.
CHAPTER 19 NOTES
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1. the LORD your God … the LORD your God. It is a stylistic peculiarity of Deuteronomy that the LORD, YHWH, very rarely occurs without “your God,” and even the substitution of a pronoun, as here, is generally avoided. This linguistic oddity reflects the didactic emphasis of the book, tirelessly reminding Israel that YHWH is its God.
2. three towns you shall set aside. This provision of towns of asylum for involuntary man-slayers parallels the law in Numbers 35. For a discussion of the concept, its connections with vendetta justice, and its ancient Near Eastern precedents, see the commentary on that chapter. As is often the case, Deuteronomy shifts some of the grounds of the older law, and the comments that follow will be limited to observing those changes as well as to elucidating verbal formulations distinctive to this passage.
3. You shall gauge for yourself the distance. The verb takhin, which commonly means “to make ready” and, in dynastic contexts, “to found firmly,” also has the occasional sense of “measure” or “gauge,” clearly the relevant sense here. “Distance” is literally “way,” an extended sense of that primary term current in many languages. It is important to survey the land in order to space the three towns equally from the centers of population. Too great a distance to the town of asylum could prove fatal to the fugitive (see verse 6).
5. and the iron springs from the wood. As Rashi observes, it is ambiguous as to whether “the wood” refers to the tree being chopped down, from which the axe inadvertently, and lethally, rebounds, or to the haft of the axe, from which the axehead breaks loose. The former possibility seems a bit more likely because otherwise the writer would be using “the wood” in quick sequence in two different senses, and the slipping of the hand on the axe suggests that the person has lost his grip, not that the axe has come apart.
6. Lest the blood avenger pursue the murderer … and strike him down mortally. In Numbers 35, if the fugitive is careless enough to be caught in flight by the blood avenger, he is considered fair game. Here, the act of vengeance outside the asylum precincts seems to be viewed as a crime, and all possible steps should be taken to prevent it. One may surmise that the text in Numbers is a half-step closer to the archaic institution of vendetta justice and concedes it just a little more legitimacy. Here, as throughout the passage, the inadvertent killer is referred to as the rotseaḥ, the murderer. There is no specialized biblical term for “manslayer,” but the use here of rotseaḥ may be meant to convey the gravity of having taken a human life, even unintentionally.
9. to love the LORD your God and to go in His ways. The constant reiteration of such formulaic phrases is still another manifestation of the didactic character of this book.
you shall add for yourself another three towns to these three. In Numbers, it is stipulated from the outset that there are to be three towns of asylum in trans-Jordan and three west of the Jordan. Harmonistic interpreters infer that the three trans-Jordanian sites are implied though not stated in verse 2, so that now we come to a grand total of nine. It is more plausible to conclude that the present law envisages only three towns of asylum, projecting the possibility of an additional three to some fortunate future moment when the Israelite territory will be sufficiently expanded to justify another three.
10. And the blood of the innocent will not be shed in the midst of your land. The innocent blood would be the blood of the manslayer, who, because he has killed unintentionally, does not deserve to die. In the parallel law in Numbers, the stress is on the idea that innocent blood shed pollutes the land, a sacral and archaic idea. Here, by contrast, the emphasis is social; innocent blood is not to be shed in “the midst of your land,” evil must be expunged “from Israel” (verse 13).
11. that man. The Hebrew merely says “he,” but English does not tolerate that degree of ambiguity in pronominal reference.
12. give him into the hand of the blood avenger. The prerogative of vendetta justice is recognized insofar as the blood avenger is allowed to execute the death sentence, but the implication is that the elders have first made a legal determination through a trial.
13. root out the blood of the innocent. This is an ellipsis for rooting out the one who has shed innocent blood.
it will go well with you. This Deuteronomic pragmatic note is absent from Numbers 35.
14. landmark. The Hebrew gevul means “border” and, by two different kinds of metonymy, the territory marked out by the border and the stone pile that marks the border.
the first ones. The early generations that established the division of the land.
15. by the word. Literally, “by the mouth.”
17. before the LORD, before the priests and judges. This apposition is not entirely transparent. The normative sense of “before the LORD” in Deuteronomy is at the central sanctuary, but it is doubtful that only a single court in the entire country is envisaged. Rashi’s proposal may capture the intended sense: “it should seem to them as though they were standing before God” when the litigants submit themselves to legal authority.
21. a life for a life, an eye for an eye … a foot for a foot. For a discussion of the biblical lex talionis, see the comment on Exodus 21:23–25. There, however, the reference is to someone who does bodily or mortal injury to another person. Here, the reference is to the intention of doing grave injury by bearing false witness. David Cohen-Zemach nicely observes that in our text first we have an abstract juridical formulation (“You shall do to him as he plotted to do to his brother.”) and then a more popular, probably proverbial statement of the idea (“a life for a life,” etc.). Exodus 21 uses a different preposition, taḥat (literally, “instead of”), whereas the present version employs bE, which in all likelihood expresses the function it sometimes has of “for the price of.” The two formulations might be semantically identical, but it is also possible that the version in Exodus assumes an archaic idea of a life taken or an injury inflicted literally “replacing” or balancing out (taḥat, “instead”) a life lost or an injury suffered, whereas here the talionis may be viewed in quasmonetary terms as payback.
1When you go out to battle against your enemy and you see horse and chariot, troops more numerous than you, you shall not fear them, for the LORD your God is with you, Who has brought you up from the land of Egypt. 2And it shall be, when you approach the battle, that the priest shall come forward and speak to the troops 3and say to them, “Hear, Israel, you are approaching the battle today against your enemies. Let your heart be not faint. Do not fear and do not quake and do not dread them. 4For the LORD your God goes before you to do battle with your enemies to rescue you.” 5And the overseers shall speak to the troops, saying, “Whatever man has built a new house and not dedicated it, let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man dedicate it. 6And whatever man has planted a vineyard and not enjoyed it, let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man enjoy it. 7And whatever man has betrothed a woman and not wed her, let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle and another man wed her.” 8And the overseers shall speak further to the troops and say, “Whatever man is afraid and faint of heart, let him go and return to his house, that he not shake the heart of his brothers like his own heart.” 9And it shall be, when the overseers finish speaking to the troops, they shall appoint the commanders of the armies at the head of the troops. 10When you approach a town to do battle against it, you shall call to it for peace. 11And it shall be, if it answers you in peace and opens up to you, all the people found within it shall become forced labor for you and serve you. 12And if it does not make peace with you, and does battle with you, you shall besiege it. 13And when the LORD gives it into your hand, you shall strike down all its males with the edge of the sword. 14Only the women and the little ones and the cattle and everything that is in the town, all its booty you shall plunder for yourself, and you shall consume the booty of your enemy that the LORD your God gives to you. 15Thus shall you do to all the towns far distant from you, which are not of the towns of these nations. 16Only, of the towns of these people that the LORD your God is about to give you in estate, you shall let no breathing creature live. 17But you shall surely put them under the ban—the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivvite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has charged you. 18So that they will not teach you to do like all the abhorrent things that they did for their gods, and you would offend the LORD your God. 19Should you besiege a town many days to do battle against it, you shall not destroy its trees to swing an axe against them, for from them you shall eat, and you shall not cut them down. For is the tree of the field a human, to come away from you in the siege? 20Only a tree that you know is not a tree for eating, it you may destroy and cut down and build a siege-work against the town that does battle against you, until its fall.
CHAPTER 20 NOTES
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1. see horse and chariot. As we are reminded elsewhere, especially in Exodus and Judges, chariots were the instruments of the great martial nations of the region, first the Egyptians and then the Canaanites, against whom the Israelites stood at a palpable disadvantage. In the early period of the conquest, the Israelites were mostly confined to the rocky high country of Canaan and often fought in what were essentially guerilla forces. This ancient equivalent of an armored corps could well have seemed terrifying to them. The allusion here to God’s bringing Israel up out of Egypt, as Jeffrey H. Tigay notes, is probably meant to recall the great victory over Pharaoh’s chariot corps at the Sea of Reeds.
troops. The collective noun ʿam, which has the more general meaning of “people,” regularly designates “troops” in military contexts.
3. Let your heart be not faint. Rashi translates these exhortations into vividly concrete battlefield terms: “Let your heart be not faint—from the neighing of horses. Do not fear—from the clanging of shields. And do not quake—from the sound of the horns. And do not dread—the sound of the battle-cries.” The “faint” heart is literally a “soft” heart in the Hebrew, but the obvious reference is to fear, not excessive compassion.
5. the overseers. These officials, shotrim, appear to be civilian authorities, empowered both to allow exemptions from military service and to appoint commanders (verse 9).
dedicated. The verb ḥanakh might refer to an actual ceremony of dedication, its fixed sense in later Hebrew usage, or might simply mean “to inaugurate,” “to initiate use.”
6. enjoyed it. The literal meaning of the Hebrew verb is “desacralize.” The law behind that linguistic usage is as follows: during the first three years after planting a vineyard, its use was forbidden, presumably because the vines were immature; in the fourth year, the product of the vineyard was considered “holy to the LORD”; in the fifth year, its sacral status was voided and its fruits could be enjoyed without hindrance.
7. and another man wed her. In all these identically couched statements, the idea that someone else would enjoy what the man had anticipated enjoying suggests that the rationale for all these military exemptions was humanitarian consideration of the soldiers.
8. and the overseers shall speak further. This final exemption is set off from the preceding three because the rationale is not humanitarian but pragmatic: the presence of a coward in the ranks could undermine the morale of those around him.
shake the heart. In keeping with the Hebrew idiom of a “soft” heart, the verb here literally means “melt,” but, again, the clear connotation is fear, not compassion.
10. peace. As the next verse makes clear, “peace” (shalom) here amounts to surrender.
13. all its males. As many commentators note, this would have to be adult males, for we are told in the next verse that the little ones are to be spared together with the women.
16. you shall let no breathing creature live. It is hard to find any mitigation for the ferocity of this injunction to total destruction. The rabbis reinterpreted it, seeking to show that it was almost never strictly applicable. Since the archaeological evidence suggests that the “ban” was never actually implemented, it seems to be the projection in legal imperative of a militant fantasy—but surely a dangerous fantasy.
19. its trees. The Hebrew uses a collective noun, in the singular.
20. Only a tree that you know is not a tree for eating. There may be an echo here of “the tree was good for eating” (Genesis 3:6), evoking the Garden world in which God provided all good things for human enjoyment, and prohibited the fruit of two of the trees. Destroying fruit trees is a despoliation of God’s natural gifts, and since the inhabitants of the besieged town would be economically dependent on the trees, it is a devastating blow against them for the foreseeable future. In fact, it was quite common in the ancient world to cut down the enemy’s fruit trees, either for the practical purpose of erecting siege-works or—as in some instances in which the Greeks destroyed olive groves—out of sheer spite.
1Should a slain person be found on the soil that the LORD your God is about to give you to take hold of it, lying in the field, it not being known who struck him down, 2your elders and your judges shall go out and measure to the towns that are around the slain person. 3And it shall be, the town closest to the slain person, the elders of that town shall take a heifer of the herd that has not been worked, that has not pulled in a yoke, 4and the elders of that town shall bring down the heifer to a swift-running wadi that is not worked and is not sown, and there they shall break the neck of the heifer in the wadi. 5And the priests, sons of Levi, shall come forward, for them did the LORD choose to minister to Him and to bless in the name of the LORD, and by their word shall be every dispute and every injury. 6And all the elders of that town, the ones close to the corpse, shall wash their hands over the broken-necked heifer in the wadi. 7And they shall bear witness and say, “Our hands did not shed this blood, and our eyes did not see. 8Atone for Your people Israel whom You ransomed and do not put innocent blood in the midst of Your people Israel, and let the blood be atoned for them.” 9As for you, you shall root out the innocent blood from your midst, for you shall do what is right in the LORD’s eyes.
10Should you go out to battle against your enemies and the LORD your God give him in your hand and you take captives from him, 11and you see among the captives a woman of comely features and you desire her and take her for yourself as wife, 12you shall bring her into your house, and she shall shave her head and do her nails, 13and she shall take off her captive’s cloak and stay in your house and keen for her father and her mother a month of days. And afterward you shall come to bed with her, and you shall master her and she shall become your wife. 14And it will be, if you like her not, you shall send her away on her own, but you shall certainly not sell her for silver, you shall not garner profit from her inasmuch as you have abused her.
15Should a man have two wives, the one beloved and the other hated, and the beloved one and the hated one bear him sons, and the firstborn son be the hated one’s, 16it shall be, on the day he grants estate to his sons of what he has, he shall not be able to make the beloved one’s son the firstborn over the firstborn son of the hated one. 17For the firstborn, the son of the hated one, he shall recognize to give him double of all that belongs to him, for he is his first yield of manhood, his is the birthright’s due.
18Should a man have a wayward and rebellious son, who does not heed his father’s voice and his mother’s voice, and they punish him and he does not heed them, 19his father and his mother shall seize him and bring him out to the elders of his town and to the gate of his place, 20and they shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is wayward and rebellious, he does not heed our voice, is a glutton and a drunk.” 21All the people of his town shall stone him to death, and you shall root out the evil from your midst, that all Israel may hear and be afraid.
22And should there be against a man a death-sentence offense and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, 23you shall not let his corpse stay the night on the tree but you shall surely bury it on that day, for a hanged man is God’s curse, and you shall not pollute your soil that the LORD your God is about to give you in estate.
CHAPTER 21 NOTES
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1. on the soil. Although ʾadamah has the extended meaning of “land” (and in some cases even “the earth”), its primary sense of “soil” is especially relevant to this and many passages in Deuteronomy. Violently shed blood soaks into the soil, pollutes it, cries out for justice (as in the murder of Abel), and when the murderer remains unknown, a special ritual is required to cleanse the polluted soil and atone for the blood shed. Abraham ibn Ezra notes that this law on bloodshed within the community of Israel immediately follows the laws pertaining to conduct in violent conflict with external enemies.
3. the elders of that town. The whole community is plagued with the miasma of bloodguilt—like Thebes at the beginning of Oedipus the King—and so must act as a community through its elders to purge the guilt.
4. a swift-running wadi. In all likelihood, this refers to a wadi that is filled with a powerful torrent during the rainy season and would not provide suitable terrain along its banks for cultivation. The wadi thus is a wilderness water source, outside the pale of regular civilized undertakings, and therefore a suitable setting for this rite of expiation for an unsolved crime against humanity.
7. Our hands … our eyes. In this formula of exculpation, the elders declare both that they—presumably this includes everyone in the community they represent—have not committed the murder and that they have not witnessed it, and so have no knowledge of the killer’s identity.
11. a woman of comely features. The same epithet is attached to Joseph in Genesis 39 when the captive Hebrew becomes the object of his Egyptian mistress’s lustful gaze. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, captive women of vanquished peoples were assumed to be the due sexual prerogative of the victors (compare Briseus at the beginning of the Iliad). This law exceptionally seeks to provide for the human rights of the woman who falls into this predicament.
and take her for yourself as wife. This expression is proleptic: the victor, desiring the woman, intends to make her his wife (or rather concubine), but that intention, as the next two verses clearly indicate, cannot be realized until the end of a thirty-day period after he returns home with her.
12. she shall shave her head and do her nails. Several of the medieval Hebrew commentators construe this as intended to make her unattractive. That is, her captor, having been smitten with desire when he first saw the beautiful woman, may now have second thoughts about her desirability and change his mind. But especially since trimming the nails would scarcely impair her attractiveness, it is more likely that this cutting of excrescences growing from the body, together with the removal of the garment of captivity, is a rite of transition that marks the woman’s transformation from the daughter of an alien people to a fit mate for an Israelite man. The period of thirty days—the set duration of all mourning—for her keening for the parents she has left behind is another indication that the law encodes a ritual of transition.
13. come to bed with her. Literally, “come into her.” For the implication of this particular idiom for sexual intercourse, see the comment on Genesis 6:4.
master her. The verb baʿal means “to cohabit,” “to master,” “to exert the capacity of a husband.”
14. if you like her not. The implication is that this disinclination toward the woman occurs at some point after she has become the man’s sexual partner.
garner profit. The Hebrew verb hitʿamer occurs only here and in 24:7 and its precise meaning is uncertain. Many understand it to mean “enslave” (Abraham ibn Ezra cites a supposed Persian cognate meaning “slavery”). This translation is based on the conjecture that the verb may be related to ʿomer, “sheaf of grain,” and hence have something to do with extracting material benefit, as in a harvest.
abused her. The verb ʿinah, “abuse,” “debase,” “afflict,” is also sometimes used for rape, and its employment here astringently suggests that the sexual exploitation of a captive woman, even in a legally sanctioned arrangement of concubinage, is equivalent to rape.
15. beloved … hated. There is some evidence that these ordinary Hebrew verbs, when applied to co-wives, have the technical sense of favored and unfavored wife. But it is worth preserving the literal meaning in translation because the language thus includes the possibility of an extreme case: even when you adore one wife and despise the other, you must grant the son of the woman you despise the rights of the firstborn if they are his due.
17. double. Some interpreters argue that the Hebrew pi shnayim (literally, “the mouth of two”) means two-thirds, as it does in Zechariah 13:8. The extant evidence is that there were varying proportional arrangements for favoring the firstborn in inheritance.
his first yield of manhood. This is the same phrase Jacob uses for his firstborn, Reuben, in Genesis 49:3 (see the comment there on that phrase). The idiom may well have been proverbial, a kind of kenning for the firstborn, and it appears to reflect a belief that the first production of the virile vigor (Hebrew ʾon) of a man is endowed with special power.
20. a glutton and a drunk. This designation is a clear indication that the carousing rebellious son is an adult.
21. the people of his town shall stone him to death. The sternness of this law surpasses that of ancient Near Eastern analogues, which variously punish the refractory son with public shaming, imprisonment, or disinheritance. The rabbis were sufficiently uncomfortable with this law to virtually disallow it. Thus the Babylonian Talmud: “The wayward and rebellious son never existed and never will exist. Then why is it written? To say, inquire and receive the reward [i.e., for strictly didactic purposes]” (Sanhedrin 71A). It should be noted that the whole community (presumably after judicial proceedings) takes part in the execution, and in this instance the hand of the witnesses (the parents) is not first against the condemned, so justice is transferred from parental authority to the community.
22. hang him on a tree. One modern view, with an eye to Assyrian practice, understands this as impalement on a pole or gibbet, though the Mishnah has in view hanging the corpse to a kind of cross after the execution. “Tree,” one might recall, in older English usage, can refer to either a gallows or to the cross.
23. a hanged man is God’s curse. The meaning of these words is in dispute, especially because of the polyvalence of ʾelohim—God, gods, divine beings, spirits. Some modern commentators prefer the last of these alternatives, yielding the sense: a corpse left hanging is a curse or blight to the departed spirit that once inhabited it. This suggestion, however, does not jibe well with “You shall not pollute your soil,” a clause suggesting that a corpse left unburied is a violation of the sacredness of the human body, a violation that pollutes the land. (In this connection, compare Antigone.) To leave a body hanging, then, may simply be a disgrace or curse in the eyes of God. Alternately, ʾelohim might even be simply a suffix of intensification: a hanged man is a supreme curse.
1You shall not see your brother’s ox or his sheep slipping away and ignore them. You shall surely return them to your brother. 2And if your brother is not close to you and you do not know who he may be, you shall gather it into your house and it shall be with you until your brother inquires for it and you return it to him. 3And thus shall you do for his donkey and thus shall you do for his cloak and thus shall you do for any lost thing of your brother’s that may be lost by him and that you find. You shall not be able to ignore it. 4You shall not see your brother’s donkey or his ox falling on the way and ignore them. You shall surely raise them up with him.
5There shall not be a man’s gear on a woman, and a man shall not wear a woman’s garment, for whoever does all these is an abhorrence of the LORD your God. 6Should a bird’s nest chance to be before you on the way or in any tree or on the ground with fledglings or eggs and the mother is crouched over the fledglings or over the eggs, you shall not take the mother together with the young. 7You shall surely send off the mother, and the young you may take for yourself, so that it may go well with you and you will enjoy length of days. 8When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, that you not put bloodguilt in your house should someone fall from it. 9You shall not plant your vineyard with mixed seeds, lest the ripe crop be proscribed—the seed that you plant and the yield of the vineyard. 10You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together. 11You shall not wear shaʿatnez, wool and linen together. 12You shall make yourself tassels on the four corners of your garment with which you cover yourself. 13Should a man take a woman, and come to bed with her and hate her, 14and he impute to her misconduct and put out a bad name for her and say, “This woman did I take and I came close to her and I found no signs of virginity for her,” 15the young woman’s father and her mother shall take and bring out to the elders of the town at the gate the signs of the young woman’s virginity. 16And the young woman’s father shall say to the elders, “My daughter I gave to this man as wife, and he hated her. 17And look, he has imputed misconduct, saying, ‘I found no signs of virginity for your daughter,’ but these are the signs of my daughter’s virginity.” And they shall spread out the garment before the elders of the town. 18And the elders of that town shall take the man out and punish him, 19and they shall fine him a hundred weights of silver and give it to the young woman’s father, for he put out a bad name for a virgin in Israel. And she shall be his wife, he shall not be able to send her away ever. 20But if this thing be true, no signs of virginity were found for the young woman, 21they shall take the young woman out to the entrance of her father’s house and the men of her town shall stone her to death, for she has done a scurrilous thing in Israel to play the whore in her own father’s house, and you shall root out the evil from your midst. 22Should a man be found lying with a woman who has a husband, both of them shall die, the man lying with the woman and the woman as well, and you shall root out the evil from Israel. 23Should there be a virgin young woman betrothed to a man, and a man find her in the town and lie with her, 24you shall bring them both out to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman, for her not crying out in the town, and the man, for his abusing his fellow man’s wife, and you shall root out the evil from your midst. 25But should the man find the betrothed young woman in the field and the man seize her and lie with her, only the man lying with her shall die. 26And to the young woman you shall do nothing, the young woman bears no capital offense, for as a man rises against his neighbor and murders him, so is this thing. 27For he found her in the field: the young woman could have cried out and there would have been none to rescue her. 28Should a man find a virgin young woman who is not betrothed and take hold of her and lie with her, and they be found, 29the man lying with her shall give to the young woman’s father fifty weights of silver, and she shall be his wife inasmuch as he abused her. He shall not be able to send her away all his days.
CHAPTER 22 NOTES
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1. your brother’s ox or his sheep. This brief group of laws about the obligation to return lost property and help one’s fellow man corresponds to Exodus 23:4–5 with an important terminological difference: Exodus posits the extreme case of finding the beast of your “enemy,” whereas Deuteronomy, with its commitment to imagining a united community of the Israelite people, repeatedly uses the term “your brother.”
ignore. The literal meaning is “hide yourself,” i.e., pretend you don’t see.
2. gather it into your house. Although this might simply mean “take into the jurisdiction of your household,” in fact Canaanite domestic structures often had an enclosure used as a stable on the ground floor. The word thus emphasizes that the finder of the beast is to keep it safe and sheltered until the owner appears.
5. There shall not be a man’s gear on a woman, and a man shall not wear a woman’s garment. The word keli (“gear”) might mean clothing, as it does in rabbinic Hebrew, but it is an all-purpose term that could also refer to weapons, as some scholars have contended. (The fact that a verb for wearing is not used for the woman might lend support to this contention.) What is “abhorrent” about the practice of cross-dressing could be an association with pagan orgiastic activities or even with pagan magic (a Hittite text prescribes cross-dressing as the first stage in a ritual for curing impotence). In any case, the common denominator shared by this law and those that follow is, as anthropological critics have noted, a general recoil of ancient Hebrew culture from the commingling of distinct, often binary categories—male and female, nurture and killing, seeds of different plants, wool (from animals) and linen (from plants), conjugality and promiscuity.
6. you shall not take the mother together with the young. The often asserted humanitarian motivation of this law is a little ambiguous because, after all, the mother is separated from her fledglings or eggs, which are fated to end up on someone’s dinner table. This law has sometimes been compared with the prohibition against eating a kid boiled in its mother’s milk: there appears to be a sense that the order of nature is violated when the destruction of life includes the biological producer and nurturer of life. Others have detected here a pragmatic, or ecological, consideration: if one makes a practice of killing both fledglings and mother, the race of birds will not be able to reproduce itself.
8. build a new house. This particular law does not seem to be connected with the surrounding laws that involve the separation of distinct categories. Perhaps the editor linked it associatively with the discovery of the bird’s nest because of the idea of potential death on the heights.
should someone fall from it. The Hebrew literally says, “should he who falls fall from it,” the subject of the clause being, as Abraham ibn Ezra observes, a proleptic usage.
9. lest the ripe crop be proscribed. This phrase, and any rationale for the law other than the separation of distinct categories, are equally obscure. The meaning of meleiʾah, “ripe crop” (from the word that means “full”) is in dispute. “Proscribed” is literally “sanctified,” but to be sanctified, or set aside, can also mean to be taboo, as Rashi notes, with several biblical instances. In any case, no one has offered an entirely satisfactory explanation of why the crop of mixed seeds should be sanctified or proscribed.
10. You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together. In this case, the separation of the two kinds of beasts has a clear humanitarian motive, for the smaller animal would suffer in this yoking.
11. shaʿatnez. This term seems to be a foreign loanword, perhaps from the Egyptian, and so, lest its sense be obscure, the rest of the verse is a gloss on its meaning. Minglings of wool and linen were worn by the priests and used in the sanctuary trappings, so the separation of categories here may be intended to draw a line between the profane and the holy.
12. tassels. The Hebrew word gedilim differs from “fringe,” tsitsit, used in Numbers 15:38–41, and here no mention is made that the tassel is a mnemonic device for the believing Israelites. Fringes at the hems of garments were fairly common in ancient Near Eastern apparel.
13. come to bed with her and hate her. The extreme concision of the sequence of verbs in the Hebrew does not allow us to conclude whether the man was immediately disaffected with the woman out of sexual dissatisfaction or whether he simply came to be displeased with her with the passage of conjugal time.
14. I came close to her. In his denunciation of the woman, the husband uses a euphemism, an idiom not restricted to sex, instead of the narrator’s plain “came to bed with” (literally, “came into”).
no signs of virginity. The Hebrew betulim means both the condition of virginity and the concrete evidence of virginity. In this case, the husband is claiming that he found neither an intact hymen nor signs of blood after the consummation of the act.
15. bring out to the elders of the town at the gate the signs of … virginity. One infers that the bride would have entrusted to the safekeeping of her parents—probably, her mother—as legal insurance the bloodied sheet or garment (sleeping in one’s garment being common in this culture) after the nuptial night.
16. and he hated her. The parents of the bride, though recycling words already used, understandably delete the verb for sexual intercourse.
18. punish him. The rabbinic understanding of this term, which is historically plausible, is that it means public flogging.
19. fine him. A fine is appropriate because the man’s calculation may have been chiefly financial: he would have been able to divorce the woman without the defamation but in that case would have been obliged to restore her dowry to her, which served as a kind of divorce insurance for the wife.
give it to the young woman’s father. One must keep in mind that in this society marriage was chiefly a transaction between the father of the bride and the groom (or the groom together with his father). The defamatory husband has essentially suggested that the young woman’s father passed off damaged goods on him, and so now he owes the father an indemnity.
he shall not be able to send her away ever. “Send her away” here has the technical sense of “divorce.” It might seem a dubious recompense for a woman to continue as wife of a man who hates her and has tried to destroy her reputation. (Even more extremely, the unbetrothed victim of a rapist, verse 29, is to become his wife, without possibility of divorce.) But in this society, the condition of a woman who is not a virgin and has no husband is quite desperate (witness Tamar’s sense that her life is virtually ended after she has been raped, 2 Samuel 13). The law is no prescription for her happiness, but at least it guarantees her social and economic security.
21. stone her to death. This is still another instance of a draconian law in Deuteronomy—the capital punishment for premarital sex far exceeds even the sternness of other ancient Near Eastern codes—which the rabbis sought to mitigate through exegesis. Since death sentences are not supposed to be issued without the firm testimony of at least two eyewitnesses, “if this thing be true,” the rabbis plausibly argued, means that the sentence could be pronounced only if two witnesses actually observed the illicit act of intercourse, merely circumstantial evidence being excluded by principle. If that is the case, implementation of the death sentence would have been extremely rare.
for she has done a scurrilous thing in Israel. This particular Hebrew phrase, nevalah beyisraʾel, is regularly used to indicate a shameful sexual act.
in her own father’s house. The phrase might mean simply, while she was under her father’s jurisdiction, but the concreteness of the idiom leaves open the more scandalous possibility that her assignations actually took place under her father’s roof.
24. to the gate of that town. Repeatedly, the gate is the place of public judgment.
25. in the field. The obvious point is that out in the open, beyond the town, there is no one else present to hear the woman’s cry for help. But “the field,” beyond the perimeters of safe communal existence, often figures in biblical language as a dangerous zone where marauders, wild animals, even demons prey on people.
and the man seize her. This verb, indicating that the man is forcing himself on her, is absent from the law about the woman in the town. There the presumption is that she is a willing partner since, had he forcibly “seized” her, she would have called out for help and presumably gotten it. One should keep in mind that Canaanite or Israelite towns were small and crowded, lacking the desolate neighborhoods with empty streets one can find in a large modern city. Precisely for that reason, this translation regularly renders the Hebrew term ʿir as “town,” not “city.”
29. the man … shall give to the young woman’s father fifty weights of silver. Deflowering the unbetrothed young woman would make her unmarriageable (see the third comment on verse 19) and entail financial loss for her father, who would be deprived of the bride-price. The double remedy of the law, however odd it may seem to modern eyes in permanently binding the rape victim and the rapist, is to decree that the man marry the woman without possibility of divorce, and that he pay a bride-price to her father. It is not clear whether there was a standard bride-price in Israelite society, but fifty weights of silver sounds generous.
1A man shall not wed his father’s wife, and he shall not uncover his father’s skirt. 2No one with crushed testes or lopped member shall come into the LORD’s assembly. 3No misbegotten shall come into the LORD’s assembly. Even his tenth generation shall not come into the LORD’s assembly. 4No Ammonite nor Moabite shall come into the LORD’s assembly. Even his tenth generation shall not come into the LORD’s assembly ever. 5Because they did not greet you with bread and water on the way when you came out of Egypt, and for their hiring against you Balaam son of Beor from Aram Naharaim to curse you. 6But the LORD your God did not want to listen to Balaam, and the LORD your God turned the curse into blessing for you, for the LORD your God loves you. 7You shall not seek their well-being and their good all your days, forever. 8You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were a sojourner in his land. 9The sons that are born to them, their third generation may come into the LORD’s assembly.
10When you sally forth in a camp against your enemy, you shall keep yourself from every evil thing. 11Should there be among you a man who is not clean through nocturnal emission, he shall go outside the camp and not come into the camp. 12And it shall be, toward evening, he shall bathe in water and as the sun sets he may come inside the camp. 13And you shall have a marker outside the camp and shall go there outside. 14And you shall have a spike together with your battle gear, and it shall be, when you sit outside, you shall dig with it and go back and cover your excrement. 15For the LORD your God walks about in the midst of your camp to rescue you and to give your enemies before you, and your camp shall be holy, that He should not see among you anything shamefully exposed and turn back from you.
16You shall not hand over to his master a slave who escapes to you from his master. 17With you he shall stay, in your midst, in the place that he chooses within one of your gates wherever is good for him. You shall not mistreat him. 18There shall be no cult-harlot from the daughters of Israel, and there shall be no cult-catamite from the sons of Israel. 19You shall not bring a whore’s pay nor a dog’s price to the house of the LORD your God for any votive offering, for both of them are the abhorrence of the LORD your God. 20You shall not exact interest from your brother, interest of silver, interest of food, or interest of anything that will bear interest. 21From the stranger you may exact interest but from your brother you shall not exact interest, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all that your hand reaches on the land to which you are coming to take hold of it. 22Should you make a vow to the LORD your God, you shall not delay fulfilling it, for the LORD your God will surely require it of you and there would be an offense in you. 23And should you refrain from making a vow, there will be no offense in you. 24The utterance of your lips you shall keep, and you shall do as you have vowed to the LORD your God, the freewill gift that you spoke with your mouth. 25Should you come into your fellow man’s vineyard, you may eat grapes as much as you crave—to your fill—but you shall not put them in your pouch. 26Should you come into your fellow man’s standing grain, you may pluck tender ears with your hand but you shall not wield a sickle on your fellow man’s standing grain.
CHAPTER 23 NOTES
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1. his father’s wife. Since the term “wed” could not be used for a man’s mother or for a woman currently married to the man’s father, the phrase would have to mean his father’s widow (who might be fairly young, in light of the early age at which girls were married off) or a woman divorced from his father.
he shall not uncover his father’s skirt. What is involved is taboo by metonymic contamination: a man should not come in contact with the female nakedness that was once in conjugal contact with his own father’s nakedness. David Cohen-Zemach interestingly detects here an allusion to Ham’s seeing his father Noah’s nakedness (Genesis 9:22), Ham being the father of Canaan, the eponymous progenitor of the Canaanite peoples. What closely follows (verse 4) is a prohibition against ever accepting the Moabites and the Ammonites, two peoples purportedly engendered out of incestuous union with a father, into the Israelite community.
2. crushed testes or lopped member. This prohibition may simply express a vehement rejection of both forms of castration, in fact fairly commonly practiced in the ancient Near East. But the law as it is formulated also excludes from the assembly a man who is sexually mutilated through some accident. In this patriarchal culture, the integrity of the body is strongly connected with the integrity of the capacity for fatherhood. The prohibition, then, is thematically related to the immediately preceding prohibition against uncovering one’s father’s skirt, both expressing a horror of violation of the body of the father.
3. misbegotten. The Hebrew mamzer (etymology uncertain) later comes to mean “bastard,” but the convincing consensus of both traditional and modern commentators is that it refers to the offspring of a taboo, or incestuous, union.
4. Ammonite nor Moabite. It is not entirely clear why these two peoples should be permanently excluded for their hostility toward the Israelites approaching Canaan, whereas the Edomites, who were scarcely more friendly, and the Egyptians, who wanted to murder the entire population of Hebrew male infants, are to be accepted in the community. The issue is further complicated by the fact that Boaz married a Moabite woman, Ruth, who then became progenitrix of David’s royal line. (Abraham ibn Ezra’s contention that the ban is against Moabite men, not women, seems strained.) One must conclude that as historical circumstances shifted, attitudes in ancient Israel toward the sundry neighboring peoples also changed, and these changes are reflected in the inconsistencies of the texts.
shall not come into the LORD’s assembly. Jeffrey H. Tigay argues persuasively that the assembly is primarily a civic concept, roughly analogous to the polis among the Greeks. To come into the assembly, then, means to become a naturalized citizen. That status, of course, would also have entailed worship of the God of Israel.
11. not clean through nocturnal emission. This cluster of regulations about remaining in a state of purity in the military camp is predicated on the notion that “the LORD your God walks about in the midst of your camp” (verse 15), acting as guarantor of victory. Soldiers on a campaign at least sometimes took upon themselves a vow of sexual abstinence for the duration of the fighting, as one sees in the David story (1 Samuel 21:5–6), and the ritual impurity imparted by an involuntary emission of semen is related to that practice.
13. a marker. The Hebrew yad (primary meaning, “hand”) also means “monument” or “marker.” The common claim that here the sense is “place” stands on scanty philological grounds.
14. a spike. The Hebrew yated usually means “tent peg.”
battle gear. The rare term ʾazen is probably an Aramaizing form of zayin, “weapon.”
15. shamefully exposed. The Hebrew is literally “nakedness of a thing,” but the word for “nakedness,” ʿerwah, is specifically the term for prohibited sexual nakedness, that which should never be exposed, and so carries a strong connotation of shame.
16. You shall not hand over to his master a slave. The scholarly consensus is that this injunction to offer asylum to runaway slaves (an unusual law in the ancient world) refers to foreign slaves. Israelite slaves, who were in essence indentured servants, would have been freed after six years.
18. cult-harlot … cult-catamite. The precise meaning of these two terms, qedeshah and qadesh, is disputed. There is no clear-cut evidence that ritual prostitution was practiced in the ancient Near East, although it remains an undeniable possibility. (Ritual prostitution was known in nearby Asia Minor, the original homeland of the Hittites who often pass through the biblical scene.) Exceptionally, the female qedeshah is presented here before the male qadesh, suggesting she was the more familiar type. The story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 makes it clear that qedeshah was some sort of more refined or dignified designation for a prostitute: Judah takes Tamar for a “whore” (zonah); Hirah his emissary then refers to her more decorously as a qedeshah. Since the root means “sacred,” it is a reasonable inference that the qedeshah was either a woman who prostituted herself as part of the cult (in that case, a fertility cult) or a prostitute working near the site of a sanctuary who devoted part of her professional income to the sanctuary. Since the pilgrim obligation to participate in the temple service was laid upon the males, the qadesh would in all likelihood have been a homosexual prostitute, as the translation “cult-catamite” is meant to indicate.
19. a whore’s pay nor a dog’s price. It is not clear whether the second of these phrases refers literally to what is gained by selling or bartering a dog or whether (perhaps more probably, because dogs had limited economic value in this society) “dog” is a contemptuous term for the qadesh. Dogs, we should recall, were despised in ancient Hebrew culture, thought of chiefly as unpleasant scavengers. They were not kept as pets and may not have been used for hunting or shepherding.
21. From the stranger you may exact interest but from your brother you shall not exact interest. The prohibition against interest (the term, at least etymologically, means “bite”) is predicated on an agrarian society of “brothers” in which loans are extended as a form of temporary charity. The ban may not have included properly mercantile loans, and it was not generally applied as Israelite society became more fully urbanized. Foreigners can be required to pay interest because the paradigmatic case would be foreign merchants traveling among the Israelites for business purposes.
23. should you refrain from making a vow. The vow is a “freewill gift,” and no one is under any obligation to make such a vow. But should a person in fact undertake a vow, he is strictly responsible to fulfill it promptly.
25. Should you come into your fellow man’s vineyard. This is by no means a country crisscrossed with highways, and thus it would often have been necessary to pass through someone’s vineyard or field on a narrow path in order to reach one’s destination.
26. you may pluck tender ears. The Hebrew melilot is derived from a verbal stem that means to rub between the fingers and is distinct from shibolim, “mature ears of grain.” The melilot (like the grapes) are thus a kind of available snack for the hungry pedestrian, but neither ears nor grapes are to be the object of actual harvesting, by wielding a sickle or filling a pouch.
1When a man takes a wife and beds her, it shall be, if she does not find favor in his eyes because he finds in her some shamefully exposed thing, and he writes her a document of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her away from his house, 2and she goes out from his house and goes and becomes another man’s, 3and the second man hates her and writes her a document of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her away from his house, or the second man, who took her to him as wife, dies, 4her first husband, who sent her away, shall not be able to come back and take her to be his wife after she has been defiled, for it is an abhorrence before the LORD, and you shall not lead the land to offend that the LORD your God is about to give you in estate. 5When a man takes a new wife, he shall not go out in the army and shall not cross over on its account for any matter. He shall be exempt in his house for a year and gladden his wife whom he has taken. 6One may not take in pawn a hand mill or an upper millstone, for one would be taking in pawn a life. 7Should a man be found stealing a living person of his brothers, of the Israelites, and garner profit from him and sell him, that thief shall die, and you shall root out the evil from your midst. 8Watch yourself in regard to the plague of skin blanch to watch carefully and to do. According to all that the levitical priests will teach you as I have charged them you shall watch to do. 9Remember what the LORD your God did to Miriam on the way when you came out of Egypt. 10Should you make a loan of anything to your fellow man, you shall not come into his house to take his pledge. 11You shall stand outside, and the man to whom you have made the loan shall bring out the pledge to you outside. 12And if he is a poor man, you shall not lie down in his pledge. 13You shall surely give the pledge back to him as the sun sets, that he may lie down in his cloak and bless you and it be a merit for you before the LORD your God. 14You shall not oppress a poor and needy hired worker from your brothers or from your sojourners who are in your land within your gates. 15In his day you shall give his wages, and the sun shall not set on him—for he is poor and his heart counts on it—that he call not against you to the LORD and there be an offense in you. 16Fathers shall not be put to death over sons, and sons shall not be put to death over fathers. Each man shall be put to death for his own offense. 17You shall not skew the case of a sojourner or an orphan, and you shall not take as pawn a widow’s garment. 18And you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and the LORD your God ransomed you from there. Therefore do I charge you to do this thing. 19When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to take it. For the sojourner and for the orphan and for the widow it shall be, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. 20When you beat your olive trees, you shall not strip the branches of what is left behind you. For the sojourner, for the orphan, and for the widow it shall be. 21When you glean your vineyard, you shall not pluck the young grapes left behind you. For the sojourner, for the orphan, and for the widow it shall be. 22And you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt. Therefore do I charge you to do this thing.
CHAPTER 24 NOTES
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1–4. These verses are all one long run-on sentence, describing in quasinarrative terms a special case of divorce, remarriage, and divorce rather than addressing the general predicament of divorce.
1. he finds in her some shamefully exposed thing. This is the same idiom for something disgraceful that appears in 23:15 (see the comment there). The vagueness of the expression leaves open the possibility that the husband has discovered something morally reprehensible in his wife or that what has repelled him is a physical defect, perhaps something about her that displeases him sexually
a document of divorce. The use of a written document for divorce (the actual divorce procedure is not spelled out in biblical law) is registered only in Deuteronomy and later texts. The reasonable inference is that in earlier periods divorce was effected by the act of banishing the woman from the house and/or by an oral declaration on the part of the husband. The literal meaning of the phrase used here, sefer keritut, is “document [or scroll] of cutting-off.” Since keritut is not one of the usual biblical terms for divorce, scholars have conjectured that it refers to a ceremony in which the husband cut off a corner of the wife’s garment as a sign that he was severing relations with her. In 1 Samuel 15, when Saul inadvertently tears the hem of Samuel’s garment, the prophet immediately seizes on the act as a symbol that God is about to tear away the kingship from Saul.
5. When a man takes a new wife. The thematic connection with the previous law is the issue of sexual consummation in marriage.
shall not cross over on its account for any matter. The “it” may refer to the army—i.e., the man shall stay put and not go off anywhere for military purposes—but the Hebrew is rather cryptic, as this literal translation indicates, and no one has provided an entirely satisfactory interpretation.
gladden his wife. The verb here could refer specifically to giving her sexual pleasure, though it does not exclude the more general pleasure of conjugal sociability. This law differs from the parallel law of exemption from military service for the newlywed in chapter 20 in introducing a humane concern for the bride.
6. a hand mill or an upper millstone. Although the Hebrew reiḥayim is the general term for mill, the large agricultural mill, several feet in diameter, would be too massive to move, so the reference must be to a hand mill. Even in that case, the heavy netherstone (shekhev) would have been hard to carry off, but it would have sufficed to seize the much lighter upper millstone (rekhev) in order to disable the mill.
for one would be taking in pawn a life. A household typically ground its own grain for bread, and hand mills were thus a necessary tool in even the poor home, as the great number of them uncovered by archaeologists confirms.
7. a living person. The term used here, nefesh, is the same one used for “life” in the previous verse concerning the poor man and his hand mill and thus provides a link between the two laws. A human life is not to be disregarded for the purpose of profit.
9. Remember what the LORD your God did to Miriam. The story in Numbers 12:10–15, in which Miriam is stricken with this disfiguring skin disease for maligning Moses, is invoked because it provides an especially horrific representation of the disease, as Aaron’s words to Moses make clear: “Let her not be, pray, like one dead who when he comes out of his mother’s womb, half his flesh is eaten away.”
11. outside. The seemingly redundant term of location at the very end of the sentence—already clearly indicated in the verb “bring out”—serves to emphasize that the creditor must remain beyond the perimeters of the debtor’s home and not violate his private space.
12. you shall not lie down in his pledge. This is a kind of pun: you shall not go to sleep, retaining his pledge, and you shall not sleep in it, as the poor man himself would sleep in his cloak, his sole bedding.
14. sojourners. The Hebrew uses a singular form.
15. his heart counts on it. More literally: “his life [or his very self] lifts toward it.”
16. Fathers … sons. Collective punishment, or measure-for-measure punishment (you killed my son, your son shall be killed), was common in ancient Near Eastern legal codes, and this law is a protest against it.
17. you shall not take as pawn a widow’s garment. This appears to be a greater restriction than the one for the poor man, in whose case the garment may be held by the creditor during the day but must be returned to the owner at sunset. Perhaps the law regarded it as a form of shameful exposure (ʿerwat davar) to deprive the widow of her (outer?) garment at any time, thus leaving her to go about insufficiently covered.
20. beat your olive trees. This was the general practice for harvesting ripe olives.
you shall not strip the branches of what is left behind you. The relatively rare verb peʾer is derived from poʾrah, “branch.” It might have involved plucking the less ripe olives not shaken loose by beating. “What is left” is added in the translation to clarify the compact Hebrew.
21. you shall not pluck the young grapes left behind you. Another unusual verb, ʿolel, is derived from ʿolelot, “small grapes.”
1When there is a dispute between men, they shall approach the court of justice, and they shall judge them and find for the one in the right and against the one in the wrong. 2And it shall be, if the one in the wrong deserves blows, the judge shall make him lie down and have him struck before him, according to his wrongdoing in number. 3Forty blows he may strike him, he shall not go farther, lest he go on to strike him beyond these a great many blows, and your brother seem of no account in your eyes. 4You shall not muzzle an ox when it threshes. 5Should brothers dwell together and one of them die and have no son, the wife of the dead man shall not become wife outside to a stranger. Her brother-in-law shall come to bed with her and take her to him as wife, and carry out a brother-in-law’s duty toward her. 6And it shall be, the firstborn whom she bears shall be established in the name of his dead brother, that his name be not wiped out from Israel. 7And if the man does not want to wed his sister-in-law, his sister-in-law shall go up to the gate to the elders and say, “My brother-in-law has refused to establish a name for his brother, a name in Israel. He did not want to carry out a brother-in-law’s duty toward me.” 8And the elders of his town shall call to him and speak to him, and if he stands and says, “I do not want to wed her,” 9his sister-in-law shall approach him before the eyes of the elders and slip his sandal from his foot and spit in his face and speak out and say, “So shall be done to the man who will not build his brother’s house.” 10And his name shall be called in Israel: the House of the Slipped-off Sandal. 11Should men brawl together, a man and his brother, and the wife of one of them come forward to rescue her man from the hand of the one striking him, and she reach out her hand and seize his pudenda, 12you shall cut off her hand, your eye shall not spare her. 13You shall not have in your pouch different weight-stones, a big one and a small one. 14You shall not have in your house different ephah measures, a big one and a small one. 15A whole and honest weight-stone you shall have; a whole and honest ephah measure you shall have, so that you may enjoy length of days on the soil that the LORD your God is about to give you. 16For the abhorrence of the LORD your God is anyone who does all these things, who commits any fraud. 17Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you came out of Egypt, 18how he fell upon you on the way and cut down all the stragglers, with you famished and exhausted, and he did not fear God. 19And it shall be, when the LORD your God grants you respite from all your enemies around in the land that the LORD your God is about to give you in estate to take hold of it, you shall wipe out the remembrance of Amalek from under the heavens, you shall not forget.
CHAPTER 25 NOTES
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1. court of justice. The single Hebrew word mishpat can mean “law,” “judgment,” “justice,” “the institution or court of justice,” besides several non-judicial senses.
2. deserves blows. The corporal punishment would be either lashes or blows delivered with a rod or cane. Biblical law is reticent about what infractions merited this punishment, mentioning only the instance of a man who defames his wife (22:18).
3. Forty blows. Rabbinic law stipulates thirty-nine lashes in order to avert the possibility that the executor of the punishment might inadvertently exceed the limit of forty. It also stipulates that if the guilty person is in any way infirm or shows signs of losing physical control during the lashing, the number of blows shall be reduced accordingly.
a great many blows. Literally, “a multitudinous blow.”
4. You shall not muzzle an ox when it threshes. The humanitarian motive of this law is obvious. Threshing was done by oxen either with their hooves or pulling a threshing sledge. In either case, the ox is not to be prevented from nibbling during the work.
5. Should brothers dwell together. Although this might mean in the same extended household, the probable reference is to contiguous properties or properties in close proximity.
carry out a brother-in-law’s duty toward her. This is a single verb in the Hebrew weyibmah, derived from yabam, “brother-in-law.” The institution assumed here is the socalled levirate marriage (from the Latin levir, “brother-in-law”). The continuity provided by male offspring in this patrilineal society was the sole form of “immortality” a man could expect, which would also have the economic ramification of bequeathing one’s property to a son. A man who dies without having begotten a son is thus cut off, his “name wiped out from Israel.” His brother serves as a kind of proxy for the dead man, and the son he begets with the widow is to bear the name—that is, the patronymic—of the dead brother. The practice of the levirate marriage seems to have shifted at different points in the biblical period. In the Book of Ruth, “brother” is clearly extended to cover the nearest available kinsman, even a distant cousin.
6. established. The literal meaning of the verb is “to arise.”
8. if he stands. Some interpreters understand this ordinary verb of physical position to mean “persist” here.
9. slip his sandal from his foot. There are differing opinions about the symbolism of this gesture. Some understand it as a gesture of severance: as the widow removes the sandal, she removes herself from obligatory connection with the brother-in-law and is free to marry someone else. But calling his house the House of the Slipped-off Sandal clearly is a shaming act. Perhaps because only the indigent would go about barefoot, slipping off the man’s sandal in public is a ritual of disgrace (especially since the law seems to assume that he and his deceased brother are men who have property).
spit in his face. Abraham ibn Ezra, Rashi, and many modern commentators interpret this as “before him,” i.e., on the ground in front of him, which the Hebrew preposition could definitely mean. But a more shocking gesture of humiliation may be more in keeping with the harsh tenor of her declaration “So shall be done to the man …”
11. Should men brawl together. Ibn Ezra shrewdly identifies this as an antithetical echo of “Should brothers dwell together” (verse 5).
pudenda. The Hebrew term mevushim, like the Latinate English term, is derived from the root that means “shame.”
12. you shall cut off her hand. Once again, the draconian severity of this law led the rabbis to reinterpret it to mean monetary compensation. The law may register a vehement response to a breach of modesty on the part of the woman, but a Middle Assyrian parallel suggests that the case in mind is one where the woman inflicts serious injury on the man by seizing his testicles. If an impairment of reproductive function is involved, this would be grave, and would link this law to the concern for the continuation of man’s name in the levirate marriage.
13. weight-stones. The Hebrew says simply “stones,” but the meaning is unambiguous, and weight-stones were abundantly used for commercial transactions.
14. ephah measures. The Hebrew says simply “ephah,” a unit of dry measure equal to about 19 liters, though some think it might have been bigger.
17. Remember what Amalek did to you. It is not entirely clear why Amalek (compare Exodus 17:8–16) is singled out as the archenemy of Israel. In historical terms, the Amalekites, a seminomadic people of the Negeb and southern trans-Jordan region, carried out frequent and brutal marauding raids against Israelite settlements (see the story about the Amalekite raid against David’s town of Ziklag in 1 Samuel 30). Deuteronomy here offers an explanation for the opprobrium of Amalek not mentioned in Exodus—that the Amalekites attacked the Israelite stragglers, who would have been the old, the infirm, and women and children, and slaughtered them.
18. he fell upon you … and he did not fear God. This language suggests an ambush of the stragglers. S. D. Luzatto, the nineteenth-century Italian Hebrew exegete, proposes that this injunction is connected to the previous one about false weights and measures through the idea of deception.
19. when the LORD your God grants you respite from all your enemies. Historically, a campaign to wipe out the Amalekites was undertaken in the time of Hezekiah, in the late eighth century B.C.E.
you shall wipe out the remembrance of Amalek. The noun zekher, which is also used in the parallel verse in Exodus 17:14, means “name” but derives from the root meaning “remembrance.” Etymologically, a name is the remembrance a man leaves after him, and zekher, “remembrance,” is strongly linked with zakhar, “male.” (Compare the necessity of male offspring to prevent a name from being wiped out in the levirate marriage.) But it is important to retain the idea of remembering in translation because the writer is pointedly playing with “remembrance … do not forget.”
1And it shall be, when you come into the land that the LORD your God is about to give you in estate, and you take hold of it and dwell in it, 2you shall take from the first yield of all the fruit of the soil that you will bring from your land which the LORD your God is about to give you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God chooses to make His name dwell there. 3And you shall come to the priest who will be in those days, and you shall say to him, “I have told today to the LORD your God that I have come into the land which the LORD swore to our fathers to give to us.” 4And the priest shall take the basket from your hand and lay it down before the altar of the LORD your God. 5And you shall speak out and say before the LORD your God: “My father was an Aramean about to perish, and he went down to Egypt, and he sojourned there with a few people, and he became there a great and mighty and multitudinous nation. 6And the Egyptians did evil to us and abused us and set upon us hard labor. 7And we cried out to the LORD God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our abuse and our trouble and our oppression. 8And the LORD brought us out from Egypt with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm and with great terror and with signs and with portents. 9And He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10And now, look, I have brought the first yield of the fruit of the soil that You gave me, LORD.” And you shall lay it down before the LORD your God, and you shall bow before the LORD your God. 11And you shall rejoice in all the bounty that the LORD your God has given you and your household, you and the Levite and the sojourner who is in your midst.
12When you finish tithing all the tithe of your produce in the third year, the year of tithing, you shall give it to the Levite, to the sojourner, to the orphan, and to the widow, and they shall eat within your gates and be sated. 13And you shall say before the LORD your God, “I have rooted out what is to be sanctified from the house and, what’s more, I have given it to the Levite and to the sojourner, to the orphan, and to the widow, according to all Your command that You charged me. I have not transgressed Your command and I have not forgotten. 14I have not eaten of it in mourning, and I have not rooted it out while unclean, and I have not given of it for the dead. I have heeded the voice of the LORD my God according to all that you charged me. 15Look down from Your holy dwelling place, from the heavens, and bless your people Israel and the soil that You have given us as You swore to our fathers, a land flowing with milk and honey.”
16This day the LORD your God charges you to do these statutes and these laws, and you shall keep and do them with all your heart and with all your being. 17The LORD you have proclaimed today to be your God, and to go in His ways and to keep His statutes and His commands and His laws and to heed His voice. 18And the LORD has proclaimed you today to be to Him a treasured people, as He has spoken to you, and to keep all His commands, 19and to set you high above all the nations that He made, for praise and for acclaim and for glory, and for you to be a holy people to the LORD your God, as He has spoken.
CHAPTER 26 NOTES
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2. from the first yield of all the fruit of the soil. Neither the amount to be taken nor the kinds of produce are specified. The early rabbis understood this to refer to the seven kinds of agricultural produce (shivʿat haminim) for which the land of Israel was famous.
3. I have told today. “Told” (higid) here has the obvious sense of making a formal declaration. In keeping with the textualization of biblical culture that is one of the central innovations of Deuteronomy, these verses and the next group of verses in this chapter offer an actual liturgy, the first full-fledged liturgy in the Torah, to be recited by each Israelite farmer.
5. an Aramean about to perish. The two most likely candidates for the Aramean are Abraham, who came from Mesopotamia, and Jacob, who spent twenty years there after fleeing from Esau. The surprising use of “Aramean” as an epithet for a patriarch may reflect the antiquity of this recited formula, since the Arameans later chiefly figured as enemies. The precise meaning of the verb ʾoved has long been in dispute. Some understand it to mean “wandering,” though when it is used elsewhere in that sense, the meaning appears to be closer to “lost,” which would not fit here. Because the end of the sentence registers going down into Egypt, implicitly in a time of famine, which both Abraham and Jacob did, it is likely that the intended reference is to the patriarch’s being on the point of perishing. Thus the prosperous farmer, even as he brings to the sanctuary specimens of the first yield of his crop, recalls how his forefathers were close to dying from famine and were obliged to go down to Egypt, where in due course they were enslaved. As Jeffrey H. Tigay notes, this liturgy shifts the grounds of the ritual of first fruits from the agricultural cycle to a rehearsal of history. Some scholars have gone a step further in conjecturing that this emphasis on the God of history in the presentation of the first fruits is an implied polemic against pagan agricultural rites, in which the deities were invoked strictly in regard to their function in guaranteeing the fertility of the crops.
10. And you shall lay it down before the LORD your God. This appears to contradict verse 4, in which, with the same verb used, the priest is the one who lays down the basket. The explanation of the Mishnah, that both priest and layman laid down the basket at different points in the ceremony, may well reflect the actual biblical procedure: “With the basket still on his shoulder, he recites from ‘I have told today to the LORD your God’ as far as ‘My father was an Aramean about to perish.’ Then he puts down the basket from his shoulder and grasps it by its edges, and the priest sets his hand beneath it and elevates it, and then he recites from ‘My father was an Aramean about to perish’ until he finishes the entire passage, and then lays it down alongside the altar and bows and goes out” (Bikurim 3:6).
13. I have rooted out what is to be sanctified. The same verb, biʿer, that is repeatedly used for the uprooting of evil from the midst of Israel is employed here to suggest how rigorous one must be in setting aside and not appropriating the tithe dedicated to the poor (“what is to be sanctified”).
14. I have not eaten of it in mourning. The mourner, having been in recent contact with the dead, might impart ritual impurity to the foodstuffs that must be qodesh, “sanctified,” for the consumption of the needy.
I have not given of it for the dead. Food offerings intended to nourish the spirits of the dead were a common practice in both Canaanite religion and Israelite popular religion. It would be a violation of the tithe law to take any part of what is supposed to be consecrated to the needy and use it for an offering to the dead. Such an offering would also be proscribed because the person would become ritually impure (“unclean”) by entering into a burial site.
15. from Your holy dwelling place, from the heavens. This identification of the divine abode is important in the theology of Deuteronomy. The West Semitic peoples often thought of the gods dwelling on a high mountain (like Olympus among the Greeks). In Deuteronomy, God is to choose one place where He will make His name dwell (and the audience would have recognized that as a mountaintop, Mount Zion), but that place is not to be thought of as God’s actual abode.
17. you have proclaimed. The verb haʾamir occurs only here. The most convincing construction of its meaning is to see it as a hiphʿil form of ʾamar, “to say.” Since the hiphʿil conjugation often has a causative sense, “cause to say” would mean something like “to declare concerning,” “to make a solemn proclamation about.” The idea of solemn declarations on the part of both Israel and God fits nicely with the move toward liturgical confessions of principle and commitment that we encounter in this section of Deuteronomy.
1And Moses, and the elders of Israel with him, charged the people, saying, “Keep all the command that I charge you today. 2And it shall be, on the day that you cross the Jordan into the land that the LORD your God is about to give you, you shall set up for yourself great stones and coat them with plaster. 3And you shall write on them the words of this teaching when you cross over, so that you may come into the land that the LORD your God is about to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey, as the LORD God of your fathers has spoken to you. 4And it shall be when you cross the Jordan, you shall set up these stones that I charge you today on Mount Ebal, and you shall coat them with plaster. 5And you shall build there an altar to the LORD your God, an altar of stones. You shall not wield iron over them. 6Whole stones you shall build the altar of the LORD your God and offer up upon it burnt offerings to the LORD your God. 7And you shall sacrifice communion sacrifices, and you shall eat there and rejoice before the LORD your God. 8And you shall write on the stones all the words of this teaching very clearly.” 9And Moses, and the levitical priests with him, spoke to all Israel, saying, “Be still and listen, Israel. This day you have become a people to the LORD your God. 10And you shall heed the voice of the LORD your God and do His commands and His statutes which I charge you today.” 11And Moses charged the people on that day, saying, 12“These shall stand to bless the people on Mount Gerizim as you cross the Jordan: Simeon and Levi and Judah and Issachar and Joseph and Benjamin. 13And these shall stand over the curse on Mount Ebal: Reuben, Gad and Asher and Zebulun, Dan and Naphtali. 14And the Levites shall call out and say to every man of Israel in a loud voice: 15‘Cursed be the man who makes a statue or molten image, the LORD’s abhorrence, stonemason’s handiwork, and sets it up in secret.’ And all the people shall call out and say, ‘Amen.’ 16‘Cursed be he who treats his father or his mother with contempt.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ 17‘Cursed be he who moves his fellow man’s landmark.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ 18‘Cursed be he who leads a blind man astray on the road.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ 19‘Cursed be he who skews the case of a sojourner, orphan, or widow.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ 20‘Cursed be he who lies with his father’s wife, for he has uncovered his father’s skirt.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ 21‘Cursed be he who lies with any beast.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ 22‘Cursed be he who lies with his sister, his father’s daughter or his mother’s daughter.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ 23‘Cursed be he who lies with his mother-in-law.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ 24‘Cursed be he who strikes down his fellow man in secret.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ 25‘Cursed be he who takes payment to strike down a life—innocent blood.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’ 26‘Cursed be he who does not fulfill the words of this teaching to do them.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’”
CHAPTER 27 NOTES
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2. you shall set up for yourself great stones. These would be steles, upright monumental stone slabs.
coat them with plaster. Writing on plaster, in order to make the letters stand out more distinctly (compare “very clearly” in verse 8), was a known procedure in the ancient Near East. The Balaam inscription found at Deir ʿAlla in Jordan is written on plaster (see the comment on Numbers 22:9). Inscriptions on plaster-coated steles of course would not have lasted too long under the assault of the elements, but since the Deuteronomist presumably did not have the actual inscriptions to display to his audience, that very fact of material transience would have served his purpose, allowing him to evoke the idea of monumental writing without the actual monuments.
3. write on them the words of this teaching. The most plausible reference of this phrase is to the code of laws (chapters 12–26) that has just been enunciated, although it could refer to the whole Book of Deuteronomy. Jeffrey H. Tigay notes that two steles of the size on which the Code of Hammurabi are inscribed could contain more than the entire text of Deuteronomy. In any case, inscribing “the words of this teaching [torah]” on stone is a powerfully concrete image of the idea of the text as the enduring source of authority, which is a central ideological innovation of Deuteronomy.
5. You shall not wield iron over them. This injunction to make the altar of whole stones is in keeping with Exodus 20:25. See the comment on that verse.
8. very clearly. The infinitive baʾer is the same verb used in Deuteronomy 1:5 in the perfect tense, where it refers to clear expounding. Here the reference is instead to clear writing.
9. This day you have become a people to the LORD. In Exodus, it is the Sinai epiphany that transforms the Israelites into the people of the LORD. Deuteronomy must insist on “this day”—repeated several times in close sequence here and frequently occurring elsewhere—as the transforming moment because it is here, as the people stand ready to cross the Jordan, that Deuteronomy’s authoritative rehearsal/revision of the Law is given to them.
12. These shall stand to bless. In this solemn ceremony, the twelve tribes are divided six and six on the two mountains, to pronounce respectively the blessing and the curse. Attempts to explain the division in terms of the genealogy of the tribes or the moral behavior of their eponymous founders in Genesis seem strained. Geography may be the best, if imperfect, explanation: all six tribes stationed on the northern mountain, Ebal, had territories in the north or east of the Jordan and became part of the northern kingdom of Israel; four of the six tribes stationed on the southern mountain, Gerizim, ended up in territory south of the Jezreel Valley.
13. stand over the curse. This phrase avoids the direct object (as in “to bless the people”), introducing a slight obliquity into the dire act of cursing. Moshe Weinfeld has shown that ceremonies of this sort, in which curses of just this nature were invoked against those who strayed from the dictates of the gods, were widely practiced by the Greeks when they established new colonies.
15. and sets it up in secret. Several commentators, medieval and modern, have taken this indication of clandestine idolatry as a clue that all the transgressions in this list that follows are acts performed in secret. (Compare the secret murderer in verse 24.) But one wonders whether secrecy is generally feasible in denying legal justice to the helpless (verse 19).
20. lies with his father’s wife. This would be either his father’s ex-wife or widow or, given the institution of polygamy, a wife of his father who was not the man’s mother.
22. Cursed be he who lies with his sister. The second half of the verse makes clear that even a half sister is taboo. Tamar’s attempt to ward off sexual assault from her half brother Amnon (2 Samuel 13) by saying that perhaps their father David might arrange a marriage between them either is an act of desperate stalling or reflects an earlier moment in biblical law when such unions were acceptable.
25. who takes payment to strike down a life. The word translated as “payment,” shoḥad, usually means “bribe,” and this has led most interpreters to understand this verse to refer to a judge’s taking a bribe in a case involving capital punishment. The problem with this view is that the idiom “strike down a life”—i.e., mortally strike—means to kill, by a violent act, and only by questionable conjecture could it be extended to judicial murder. Shoḥad, however, does not invariably mean “bribe.” See, for example, 1 Kings 15:19, where Asa, king of Judah, sends a message to the king of Aram, “I have sent you a payment [shoḥad] of silver and gold. Go, revoke your pact with Baasha king of Israel.” The most likely reference of our verse is to someone who takes payment in order to carry out a murder (a “contract”) on behalf of someone else. It may well be that the phrase “innocent blood,” which seems syntactically disjunct, was added as a kind of gloss by an editor who understood shoḥad in its judicial sense.
26. Cursed be he who does not fulfill the words of this teaching. The acts upon which curses are pronounced come to twelve, one for each tribe. They encompass idolatry and moral and sexual turpitude. This twelfth curse is clearly a summarizing one, which refers not to any specific transgression but to a general failure to uphold the words of the Law that Deuteronomy has conveyed.
1“And it shall be, if you truly heed the voice of the LORD your God to keep to do all His commands that I charge you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. 2And all these blessings will come upon you and overtake you when you heed the voice of the LORD your God. 3Blessed you will be in the town and blessed you will be in the field. 4Blessed the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your soil and the fruit of your beasts, the get of your herds and the offspring of your flock. 5Blessed your basket and your kneading pan. 6Blessed you will be when you come in and blessed you will be when you go out. 7The LORD will render your enemies who rise against you routed before you. On one way they will sally forth toward you and on seven ways they will flee before you. 8The LORD will ordain the blessing with you in your granaries and in all that your hand reaches, and He will bless you in the land that the LORD your God is about to give you. 9The LORD will set you up for Him as a holy people as He has sworn to you when you keep the command of the LORD your God and walk in His ways. 10And all the peoples of the earth will see that the name of the LORD is called over you and they will fear you. 11And the LORD will give you an extra measure for the good in the fruit of your womb and in the fruit of your beasts and in the fruit of your soil on the soil that the LORD swore to your fathers to give to you. 12The LORD will open for you His goodly treasure, the heavens, to give your land’s rain in its season and to bless all your handiwork, and you will put many nations in your debt and you will not be a debtor. 13And the LORD will set you as head and not as tail, and you will be only above and you will not be below when you heed the command of the LORD your God which I charge you today to keep and to do. 14And you shall not swerve from all the words that I charge you today to the right or to the left to go after other gods to worship them.
15“And it shall be, if you do not heed the voice of the LORD your God to keep to do all His commands and His statutes that I charge you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you. 16Cursed you will be in the town and cursed you will be in the field. 17Cursed your basket and your kneading pan. 18Cursed the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your soil, the get of your herds and the offspring of your flock. 19Cursed you will be when you come in and cursed you will be when you go out. 20The LORD will send against you blight and panic and disaster in all that your hand reaches, that you do, until you are destroyed and until you perish swiftly because of the evil of your acts, as you will have forsaken Me. 21The LORD will make the plague cling to you until He wipes you out from the face of the soil to which you are coming to take hold of it. 22The LORD will strike you with consumption and with fever and with inflammation and with burning and with desiccation and with emaciation and with jaundice, and they will pursue you till you perish. 23And your heavens that are over your head will be bronze and the earth that is under you iron. 24The LORD will turn your land’s rain into dust, and dirt from the heavens will come down upon you until you are destroyed. 25The LORD will render you routed before your enemies. On one way you will sally forth toward him, and on seven ways you will flee before him. And you will be a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. 26And your carcass will become food for the birds of the heavens and for the beasts of the earth, with none to make them afraid. 27The LORD will strike you with the burning rash of Egypt and with hemorrhoids and with boils and with scabs from which you will not be able to be healed. 28The LORD will strike you with madness and with blindness and with confounding of the heart. 29And you will grope at noon as the blind man gropes in darkness, and you will not make your ways prosper, and you will be only exploited and robbed always with no rescuer. 30A woman you will betroth and another man will bed her. A house you will build and you will not dwell in it. A vineyard you will plant and you will not enjoy its fruits. 31Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes and you will not eat of it. Your donkey will be robbed from you and will not come back to you. Your sheep will be given to your enemies and you will have no rescuer. 32Your sons and your daughters will be given to another people with your own eyes seeing and wasting away for them all day long, and your hand will be powerless. 33The fruit of your soil and all your enterprise a people that you knew not will eat up, and you will be only exploited and crushed always. 34And you will be crazed by the sight of your eyes that you will see. 35The LORD will strike you with evil burning rash on the knees and on the thighs, you will not be able to be cured, from the sole of your foot to your pate. 36The LORD will lead you and your king whom you set up over you to a nation that you knew not, neither you nor your fathers, and you will worship there other gods, wood and stone. 37And you will become a derision, a byword, and an adage among all the peoples where the LORD will drive you. 38Much seed the field will bring forth and little will you gather, for the locust will consume it. 39Vineyards you will plant and work, but wine you will not drink and will not store up, for the worm will eat them. 40Olive trees you will have throughout your territory but no oil will you rub on, for your olives will drop away. 41Sons and daughters you will beget, but you will not have them, for they will go off in captivity. 42All your trees and the fruit of your soil the grasshopper will despoil. 43The sojourner who is in your midst will rise up high above you and you will go down far below. 44He will put you in debt and you will not put him in debt. He will become the head and you will become the tail. 45And all these curses will come upon you and pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed. For you will not have heeded the voice of the LORD your God to keep His commands and His statutes which He charged you. 46And they will be a sign and a portent in you and in your seed for all time. 47Inasmuch as you will not have served the LORD your God in joy and with a good heart out of an abundance of all things, 48you will serve your enemies whom the LORD will send against you in hunger and in thirst and in nakedness and in the lack of all things, and he will put an iron yoke on your neck until you are destroyed. 49The LORD will carry against you a nation from afar, from the end of the earth, as the eagle swoops, a nation whose tongue you will not understand, 50a fierce-faced nation that will show no favorable face to an old man and will not pity a lad. 51And he will eat the fruit of your beasts and the fruit of your soil until you are destroyed, as he will not leave you grain, wine, and oil, the get of your herds and the offspring of your flock, until he makes you perish. 52And he will besiege you in all your gates until your high and fortified walls in which you trust come down throughout your land, and he will besiege you in all your gates throughout your land which the LORD your God gave you. 53And you will eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your sons and your daughters whom the LORD your God gave you, in the siege and in the straits in which your enemy will press you. 54The tender and delicate man among you, his eye will be cast meanly on his brother and on the wife of his bosom and on the remnant of his children that he will have left, 55not to give to a single one of them from his children’s flesh that he will eat because he will have nothing left in the siege and in the straits in which your enemy will press you in your gates. 56The tender and delicate woman among you, who has not ventured to set the sole of her foot on the ground from delicacy and from tenderness, her eye will be cast meanly on the husband of her bosom and on her son and on her daughter 57and on her afterbirth coming out from between her legs and on her children whom she will bear, for she will eat them in the lack of all things and in secret, in the siege and in the straits in which your enemy will press you in your gates. 58If you do not keep to do all the words of this teaching written in this book to fear this solemn and fearsome name, the LORD your God, 59the LORD will make your plagues and the plagues of your seed astounding, great and relentless plagues, evil and relentless illnesses. 60And He will bring back to you all the ailments of Egypt which you dreaded, and they will cling to you. 61What’s more, every illness and every plague that is not written in this book of teaching the LORD will bring down upon you until you are destroyed. 62And you will remain a scant few instead of your being like the stars of the heavens in multitude, for you will not have heeded the voice of the LORD your God. 63And it shall be, as the LORD exulted over you to do well with you and to multiply you, so will the LORD exult over you to make you perish, to destroy you, and you will be torn from the soil to which you are coming to take hold of it. 64And the LORD will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other, and you will worship there other gods that you did not know, neither you nor your fathers, wood and stone. 65And among those nations you will have no quiet and the sole of your foot will have no resting place, and the LORD will give you there a quaking heart and a wasting away of the eyes and an anguished spirit. 66And your life will dangle before you, and you will be afraid night and day and will have no faith in your life. 67In the morning you will say, ‘Would that it were evening,’ and in the evening you will say, ‘Would that it were morning,’ from your heart’s fright with which you will be afraid and from the sight of your eyes that you will see. 68And the LORD will bring you back to Egypt in ships, on the way that I said to you, ‘You shall not see it again,’ and you will put yourselves up for sale there to your enemies as male slaves and slavegirls, and there will be no buyer.”
69These are the words of the Covenant that the LORD charged Moses to seal with the Israelites in the land of Moab, besides the Covenant that He sealed with them at Horeb.
CHAPTER 28 NOTES
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1. set you high above all the nations of the earth. The parallel statements of divine favor to the Israelite people in Exodus stress the act of election itself and the grant of the promised land but not this idea of supremacy—verses 7 and 12 make clear that this means military and economic supremacy—over all other nations. The immediate political background for this conditional pronouncement is a period in which powerful nations to the east periodically threatened Israel’s national existence.
2. overtake you. The verb is a little surprising because it is the word used for catching up with someone who is fleeing. The idea is that an unimaginable profusion of bounties will come down on the Israelite in ways he could scarcely expect, but the usage is also obviously dictated by the need to create a precise verbal parallelism with verse 15, “all these curses will come upon you and overtake you.”
7. On one way … on seven ways. This formulaic numerical increase, sometimes found between the two versets in lines of poetry, offers, as Rashi notes, a vivid image of the unity of the attack, the disarray of the retreat.
10. the name of the LORD is called over you. According to the biblical conception of naming, this means that the LORD has a special proprietary relationship with the people, and will protect them.
12. His goodly treasure, the heavens, to give your land’s rain in its season. Moses’s speech has already called attention to the strict dependence of agriculture in the land of Israel upon rainfall (11:11).
15. these curses. Famously, four times more space is devoted to the curses than to the blessings. Historically, the implementation of the curses seemed much more imminent in the seventh century B.C.E. than the fulfillment of the blessings. In any case, the chief function of the entire verbal enactment of this stupendous ceremony of blessings and curses is admonition, so it is not surprising that a long catalogue of bloodcurdling catastrophes far outweighs the list of happier events.
20. The LORD will send against you blight. After verses 15–19, which mirror verbatim the formulation of the blessings in verses 2–6, the pronouncement of curses begins its own vivid elaborations of possibilities of disaster. The order of the terms in verses 4–5 is reversed in verses 17–18, forming a kind of chiasm.
until you perish. This phrase, or a close equivalent, becomes a kind of refrain in the recitation of curses. The point is that not only will catastrophes visit the people but they will end by destroying its very national existence.
22. desiccation. Although the term ḥerev looks like the ordinary word for “sword,” a long tradition of interpreters, going back to Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, plausibly understands it in the present context of physical pathologies as a variant of ḥorev, the condition of being parched.
23. your heavens … bronze … the earth … iron. This tremendous image of devastating sterility is borrowed from the treaty of the Assyrian emperor Assarhadon with his vassals (672 B.C.E.). Other phrases in the list of curses, as Moshe Weinfeld has observed, also seem to have been inspired by the language of that treaty, such as the acts of cannibalism against one’s own near kin in time of siege, the sightless stumbling, and the ravishing of the women by the enemy.
24. turn your land’s rain into dust. Without rain, as Abraham ibn Ezra notes, the winds would whip up vast clouds of dust that would cover the land. The similarity of this particular disaster with one of the Ten Plagues is pointed, and in verse 27 “the burning rash of Egypt” will be explicitly mentioned.
26. your carcass will become food for the birds. To be denied burial and consumed as carrion is an ultimate curse throughout the Mediterranean, including Greece. Equivalents of this phrase abound in the Prophets.
with none to make them afraid. That is, there will be no one to drive off the vultures.
28. madness … blindness … confounding of the heart. All the physical afflictions are followed, causally, by the psychological devastation of the afflicted.
30. A woman … A house … A vineyard. As several commentators have noted, this list of unfulfillments echoes the one in chapter 20 for which exemption from military service is granted.
35. evil burning rash on the knees and on the thighs. Before the culminating political disaster of exile, and after a reiteration of the curse of madness, the list reverts to an intolerable inflammation of the skin, here located on specific parts of the body, as though the physical immediacy of the skin, as in the Job story, were the best way to make suffering palpable.
36. you will worship there other gods, wood and stone. From the viewpoint of Deuteronomy’s militant monotheism, the ultimate curse is not exile itself but being driven into a place where the exiles will be forced to turn into pagans or, indeed, fetishists.
43. The sojourner who is in your midst will rise up high. At first blush, this may seem odd because the sojourner has not elsewhere been regarded as a hostile element in the population. The sojourner, however, is repeatedly mentioned as legally and economically vulnerable, dependent on the benevolence of the native Israelites. Now he will have the upper hand, and perhaps there is a hint of the idea that an occupying force, having abrogated Israelite national sovereignty, will grant special privilege and power to the aliens residing in the land.
45. come upon you and pursue you and overtake you. In a pattern of intensifying incremental repetition, “pursue” is now added to the previous iterations of this formula.
48. he will put an iron yoke on your neck. In a characteristic move of biblical Hebrew from plural to singular, “he” refers to “your enemy,” which in the previous clause was a plural.
50. a fierce-faced nation that will show no favorable face to an old man. Showing no favorable face (literally, “lifting face”), i.e., showing no special consideration, is played off against the “fierce-faced” appearance of the invaders, whose very language is unintelligible to their helpless victims.
52. your high and fortified walls in which you trust. The implication—standard doctrine in the Bible—is that it is futile to trust in fortifications or weapons; God alone can guarantee the nation’s security.
53. the flesh of your sons and your daughters. Such ghastly acts of cannibalism did in fact occur in the desperation of starvation in time of siege, as they would occur in other times and places (e.g., during the religious wars in France in the sixteenth century).
55. not to give to a single one of them. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “from giving to a single one of them.”
56. who has not ventured. In the Hebrew, the subject of the verb is “sole of the foot.”
61. What’s more, every illness and every plague that is not written. Lest the long catalogue of terrifying plagues and disasters be incomplete, this clause is added at the end to make it clear that all other conceivable plagues and disasters are included by implication.
65. a quaking heart and a wasting away of the eyes and an anguished spirit. Physical suffering, bereavement, and finally exile are capped by the most unbearable inner torment. The closest analogue in the Bible to what is said here and in the next two verses (especially, “In the morning you will say, ‘Would that it were evening’ …”) occurs in Job 7.
68. bring you back to Egypt in ships. The reference to ships is not entirely clear. Perhaps, since all this constitutes a reversal of the narrative of national liberation in Exodus, the idea of an arduous trek on foot up out of Egypt is contrasted by the notion here of a rapid voyage by sea along the Mediterranean coast back to Egypt.
you will put yourselves up for sale there. This clause is obviously an ironic recollection of Joseph, the first Hebrew to be sold down to Egypt as a slave, and also invokes the enslavement of the whole people recounted at the beginning of Exodus. Jeffrey H. Tigay proposes as a rationale for the attempted sale that the Israelites, presumably after having taken flight by sea to Egypt, will find themselves in a condition of such utter destitution that they will try to sell themselves as slaves. The sardonic conclusion of this curse is that no one will want to buy them—perhaps because they have become known throughout the earth as “a derision, a byword, and an adage,” scarcely fit even for slavery.
1And Moses called to all Israel and said to them, “You have seen all that the LORD did before your own eyes in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, 2the great trials that your own eyes have seen, those great signs and portents. 3But the LORD has not given you a heart to know and eyes to see and ears to hear until this day. And I led you forty years through the wilderness. 4Your cloaks did not wear out upon you and your sandal did not wear out upon your foot. 5Bread you did not eat, and wine and strong drink you did not drink, so that you might know that I am the LORD your God. 6And you came to this place, and Sihon king of Heshbon and Og king of the Bashan sallied forth to meet us in battle, and we struck them down. 7And we took their land, and we gave it in estate to the Reubenite and to the Gadite and to the half-tribe of the Manassite. 8And you shall keep the words of this covenant and do them in order that you may prosper in all that you do. 9You are stationed here today all of you before the LORD your God, your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your overseers, every man of Israel. 10Your little ones, your wives, and your sojourner who is in the midst of your camps, from the hewer of your wood to the drawer of your water, 11for you to pass into the Covenant of the LORD your God and into His oath that the LORD your God is to seal with you today, 12in order to raise you up for Him today as a people, and He will be for you a God, as He spoke to you and as He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. 13And not with you alone do I seal this covenant and this oath 14but with him who is here standing with us this day before the LORD our God and with him who is not here with us this day. 15For you yourselves know how we dwelled in the land of Egypt and how we passed through in the midst of the nations through which you passed. 16And you saw their abominations and their foulnesses, wood and stone, silver and gold, that were with them. 17Should there be among you a man or a woman or a clan or a tribe whose heart turns away today from the LORD our God to go worship the gods of those nations, should there be among you a root bearing fruit of hemlock and wormwood, 18it shall be, when he hears the words of this oath and deems himself blessed in his heart, saying, ‘It will be well with me, though I go in my heart’s obduracy’ in order to sweep away the moist with the parched, 19the LORD shall not want to forgive him, for then shall the LORD’s wrath and His jealousy smoulder against that man, and all the oath that is written in this book shall come down upon him, and the LORD shall wipe out his name from under the heavens. 20And the LORD shall divide him off for evil from all the tribes of Israel according to all the oaths of the Covenant written in this book of teaching. 21And a later generation will say—your children who will rise up after you and the stranger who will come from a distant land and will see the blows against this land and its ills with which the LORD afflicts it, 22brimstone and salt, all the land a burning, it cannot be sown and it cannot flourish and no grass will grow in it, like the overturning of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim which the LORD overturned in His wrath and in His anger, 23all these nations will say, ‘For what has the LORD done this to this land? What is this great smouldering wrath?’ 24And they will say, ‘For their having abandoned the Covenant of the LORD, God of their fathers, which He sealed with them when He brought them out of the land of Egypt. 25And they went and worshipped other gods and bowed to them, gods that they did not know and that He did not apportion to them. 26And the LORD’s wrath flared against that land to bring upon it all the curse written in this book. 27And the LORD tore them from upon their soil in wrath and in anger and in great fury and flung them into another land as on this day.’ 28Things hidden are for the LORD our God and things revealed for us and for our children forever to do all the words of this teaching.”
CHAPTER 29 NOTES
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1. Moses called to all Israel. As is often the case, this verb has the force of “invoke” or “summon”—here, to a national assembly in which a solemn covenant between God and Israel will be ratified—but its primary sense of “calling out” is also important because, like the rest of Deuteronomy, this is very much a piece of oratory delivered by Moses.
all that the LORD did. The rapid rehearsal here of the narrative of the Wilderness experience corresponds to passages to the same effect in Moses’s discourse at the beginning of the book and is also similar to the mention of royal triumphs in the Assyrian treaty texts with which this entire passage has a generic kinship.
3. But the LORD has not given you a heart to know. This negative declaration is hardly surprising. Abraham ibn Ezra succinctly explains, “Because they had tried God ten times and never mentioned the signs they had seen.” Moses must balance the compelling importance of the idea that the Wilderness generation were eyewitnesses to God’s great acts with their repeated recalcitrance to follow God’s ways. The underlying justification for this grand covenantal ceremony, forty years after Sinai, is that now at last, on the verge of crossing into the land, the people is granted the discernment to see God’s real power.
4. Your cloaks … your sandal. This miraculous durability of clothing through forty years of desert treks is a new detail.
5. Bread you did not eat, and wine … you did not drink. These words are another reference to God’s miraculous provision of the people’s needs. They did not eat bread but manna. They did not drink wine but water that God brought forth from the rock. In the Song of Moses (chapter 32), this second detail will be hyperbolically elevated to “He suckled him honey from the crag / and oil from the flinty stone.”
9. your heads, your tribes. Some ancient versions have a smoother phrasing, “the heads of your tribes,” and the Septuagint reads “your heads, your judges” (a difference of one Hebrew consonant).
11. for you to pass into the Covenant. The relatively rare verb for concluding a covenant is probably a linguistic fossil, reflecting an early practice in which a covenant was sealed by cutting animals in two and, evidently, having the two parties pass between the cut parts. (See Genesis 15 and the comments there.) It is a reasonable guess that the old—perhaps archaic—idiom is used here to underscore the binding solemnity of this covenant.
14. but with him who is here standing with us this day … and with him who is not here with us this day. This idea is paramount for the whole theological-historical project of the Book of Deuteronomy. The awesome covenant, evoked through Moses’s strong rhetoric, whereby Israel binds itself to God, is a timeless model, to be reenacted scrupulously by all future generations. The force of the idea is nicely caught by the rabbinic notion that all unborn generations were already standing here at Sinai.
15. we passed … you passed. The Hebrew exercises considerable freedom in slipping from first person to second person, just as it does from Moses’s discourse (the beginning of this entire speech) to God’s discourse (e.g., verse 5, “so that you might know that I am the LORD your God”).
16. their abominations and their foulnesses. Deuteronomy, with its antipagan polemic, is rich in terms of invective for idols. The second word here, gilulim, may derive from a term that means “stele,” but Rashi and others, with some plausibility, link it to gelalim, “turds,” and it is vocalized in the Masoretic Text to mirror the vowels of shiqutsim, “abominations.”
wood and stone, silver and gold. As elsewhere, the Deuteronomist reduces the idols to their sheer materiality, turning them into fetishes.
17. a root bearing fruit of hemlock and wormwood. The image may correspond to the idea in the next verse of an act of idolatry committed in the secrecy of the heart: buried roots bear poisonous fruit; the secret idolator will end by having a pernicious effect on all around him. The metaphor of poison and wormwood will come back in the Song of Moses.
18. It will be well with me. Or: I shall have peace. That is, nothing will happen to me, despite my betrayal of the cult of YHWH.
in order to sweep away the moist with the parched. This sounds very much like the citation of a proverbial saying, but lacking the original colloquial context, later readers have not been able to determine the precise reference. One often-repeated guess, citing the use of the same verb, “sweep away,” in Abraham’s bargaining with God over the survival of Sodom (Genesis 18), is that “the moist” are the innocent and “the parched” the wicked. The idea would then be that the behavior of the clandestine idolators will bring down destruction on others as well, good and bad alike. This interpretation, however, is by no means certain.
19. oath. The Hebrew term ʾalah can mean either “solemn oath” or “imprecation.” In this case, the first sense leads to the second: if Israel takes upon itself this oath and then betrays the conditions to which it has committed itself, it will be the target of a terrible imprecation.
21. And a later generation will say. The sentence that begins with these words does not conclude until the end of verse 24, when the actual words of the later generation, together with the foreigners, are quoted. The fondness for long, breathless sentences, often employed to build up vehement rhetorical momentum, and with the syntactical ligaments somewhat slackened, is distinctive of the style of Deuteronomy.
this land. Technically, the demonstrative pronoun used would mean “that land,” but to translate it that way might give the impression that the reference is to the distant land from which the foreigners have come.
22. brimstone and salt, all the land a burning, it cannot be sown and it cannot flourish. This powerful image of the promised land turned into the Cities of the Plain, blasted and desiccated forever, is all the more shocking because this land is supposed to be the thematic and agricultural antithesis of Sodom and Gomorrah—a land flowing with milk and honey.
23. smouldering wrath. Though the link between wrath and burning or hot breath is idiomatic, it is also vividly apt for the scorched Sodom-like landscape that the speaker beholds.
25. And they went and worshipped. Repeatedly, the verb “to go” precedes the indication of worshipping other gods. This usage is not just a stylistic tic but serves to make a theological point: Israel, after having been made the object of God’s special favor and having been given God’s law, must pick up its feet and go off from the way upon which it has been set in order to serve alien gods.
and that He did not apportion to them. This is another recurring idea in Deuteronomy—that God, having chosen Israel as His people, has also shared out the worship of other gods to the sundry peoples all around. Why God would want them to serve what the Deuteronomist must have regarded as pseudo-gods is not entirely clear. Perhaps he is actually alluding here to a notion that appears in the Song of Moses, a considerably older text, and one that appears not to assume absolute monotheism.
27. tore them … in great fury and flung them. Onkelos represents the first of these two verbs by the Aramaic term that means “to shake,” “violently displace.” The uprooting of exile is clearly imagined as sudden, abrupt, and painful.
into another land as on this day. The temporal indicator here of course reflects the perspective of those who behold the devastation of Israel, and it is not strictly necessary to infer, as some critical scholars have done, that both the phrase and the whole evocation of exile reflect the fact that this textual unit was composed after 586 B.C.E. The entire Book of Deuteronomy was written in a period of ominous threats to national existence, after the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.E., and it took little effort of imagination to conjure up an imminent prospect of calamitous destruction and exile, as is done at several points in the book.
28. Things hidden … things revealed. This grim promise of future disasters if Israel betrays the Covenant ends—if indeed this sentence is in its proper place—with a gnomic declaration. What the declaration actually refers to is disputed, but if the relevant context is the preceding passage on idolatry (and, especially, its clandestine practice), then the consensus of the medieval Hebrew commentators is plausible: acts of betrayal hidden from the eyes of others will be visible to God, and He alone can exact retribution for them; when such acts are committed publicly rather than in secret, it is the obligation of the community to take steps against the perpetrators. One must grant that this construction of the verse is not assured, and the difficulty is compounded by the fact that the two Hebrew words which mean “for us and for our children” have a row of dots above them in the Masoretic Text, a device often used by ancient scribes to indicate erasure.
1“And it shall be, when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse that I have set before you, that your heart shall turn back among all the nations to which the LORD your God will make you to stray. 2And you shall turn back to the LORD your God and heed His voice as all that I charge you today, you and your children, with all your heart and with all your being. 3And the LORD your God shall turn back your former state and have mercy upon you and He shall turn back and gather you in from all the peoples to which the LORD your God has scattered you. 4Should your strayed one be at the edge of the heavens, from there shall the LORD your God gather you in and from there shall He take you. 5And the LORD your God shall bring you to the land that your fathers took hold of, and you shall take hold of it, and He shall do well with you and make you more multitudinous than your fathers. 6And the LORD your God shall circumcise your heart and the heart of your seed to love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your being for your life’s sake. 7And the LORD your God shall set all these imprecations upon your enemies and your foes who pursued you. 8And you, you shall turn back and heed the LORD’s voice, and you shall do all His commands which I charge you today. 9And the LORD your God shall give you an extra measure for the good in all your handiwork, in the fruit of your womb and in the fruit of your beasts and in the fruit of your soil, for the LORD shall turn back to exult over you for good as He exulted over your fathers, 10when you heed the voice of the LORD your God to keep His commands and His statutes written in this book of teaching, when you turn back to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your being. 11For this command which I charge you today is not too wondrous for you nor is it distant. 12It is not in the heavens, to say, ‘Who will go up for us to the heavens and take it for us and let us hear it, that we may do it?’ 13And it is not beyond the sea, to say, ‘Who will cross over for us beyond the sea and take it for us and let us hear it, that we may do it?’ 14But the word is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it. 15See, I have set before you today life and good and death and evil, 16that I charge you today to love the LORD your God, to go in His ways and to keep His commands and His statutes and His laws. And you shall live and multiply, and the LORD your God shall bless you in the land into which you are coming to take hold of it. 17And if your heart turns away and you do not listen, and you go astray and bow to other gods and worship them, 18I tell you today that you shall surely perish, you shall not long endure on the soil to which you are about to cross the Jordan to come there to take hold of it. 19I call to witness for you today the heavens and the earth. Life and death I set before you, the blessing and the curse, and you shall choose life so that you may live, you and your seed. 20To love the LORD your God, to heed His voice, and to cling to Him, for He is your life and your length of days to dwell on the soil which the LORD your God swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them.”
CHAPTER 30 NOTES
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1. all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse. This opening clause pointedly refers to the great catalogue of blessings and curses laid out in chapter 28. In fact, the immediate reference is to the curses because the end of the verse assumes the condition of exile as an accomplished fact. The blessings and the curses, presented in chapter 28 as alternatives between which Israel is to choose by its future actions, here occur as a historical sequence: first the curse of exile, then the blessing of restoration.
that your heart shall turn back. Manifestly, the term “turn back” (shuv, reiterated in this chapter) is the thematic center of this passage, alternating between Israel and God in dialectic interplay.
2. And you shall turn back to the LORD your God and heed His voice as all that I charge you today. The grand exhortation of this whole speech, evoking the prospect of Israel’s return to God, exhorting Israel to choose life and good rather than death and evil, and reminding Israel that the divine word is intimately accessible, makes it a fitting peroration to the series of speeches or sermons that constitute the bulk of the Book of Deuteronomy. Appropriately, the closing of the frame here includes several verbal echoes of the frame at the beginning, especially chapter 4. After this speech, the book moves on to matters pertaining to Moses’s death and the transfer of authority and to the two poems that mark the book’s conclusion.
3. And the LORD your God shall turn back your former state. The meaning of shevut, here rendered as “former state,” has long been disputed. Many interpreters derive it from the root sh-b-h and hence understand it to mean “captivity.” The use of the same verb (shuv) with this noun shevut in Jeremiah 48:46 immediately after the term shivyah, which unambiguously means “captivity,” would seem to lend support to this understanding. But precisely this idiom is employed for the restoration of the fortunes of Job (42:10), where there is no question of Job’s having been in a prior state of captivity.
6. And the LORD your God shall circumcise your heart. A two-stage process is envisaged. First, the heart of Israel, in the depths of exile, will turn back to God. As a response to this spiritual renewal on the part of the people, God will restore them to their land and sensitize the heart that has already turned back to Him, endowing it with a heightened capacity to love Him and to cling to His teaching. This second stage seems to eliminate the prospect of another exile after the first.
7. all these imprecations. The noun invoked is ʾalah, the solemn oath mentioned at the ceremony of the blessings and the curses, which when violated becomes dire imprecation.
11. wondrous. The force of the Hebrew root p-l-ʾ is something hidden (as Abraham ibn Ezra says) or beyond human ken. The crucial theological point is that divine wisdom is in no way esoteric—it has been clearly set out in “this book of teaching” and is accessible to every man and woman in Israel.
12–13. It is not in the heavens … it is not beyond the sea. The Deuteronomist, having given God’s teaching a local place and habitation in a text available to all, proceeds to reject the older mythological notion of the secrets or wisdom of the gods. It is the daring hero of the pagan epic who, unlike ordinary men, makes bold to climb the sky or cross the great sea to bring back the hidden treasures of the divine realm—as Gilgamesh crosses the sea in an effort to bring back the secret of immortality. This mythological and heroic era, the Deuteronomist now proclaims, is at an end, for God’s word, inscribed in a book, has become the intimate property of every person.
15. life and good and death and evil. It is reductive to represent the primary terms “good” and “evil” as “prosperity” and “adversity” (New Jewish Publication Society). There is probably an echo here of “the tree of knowledge good and evil,” and the point is that good, which may lead to prosperity, is associated with life just as evil, which may lead to adversity, is associated with death. The Deuteronomic assumptions about historical causation may seem problematic or, indeed, untenable, but this powerful notion of the urgency of moral choice continues to resonate.
19. I call to witness for you today the heavens and the earth. These eternal witnesses will again be invoked at the beginning of the Song of Moses.
1And Moses finished speaking these words to all Israel. 2And he said to them, “A hundred and twenty years old I am today. I can no longer sally forth and come in, and the LORD has said to me, ‘You shall not cross this Jordan.’ 3The LORD your God, He it is who crosses over before you. He shall destroy these nations before you and you shall dispossess them. Joshua, he it is who is to cross over before you as the LORD has spoken. 4And the LORD will do to them as He did to Sihon and to Og, the kings of the Amorite, and to their land, when He destroyed them. 5And the LORD will give them before you, and you shall do to them according to all the command that I have charged you. 6Be strong and stalwart. Do not fear and do not dread them, for the LORD your God, He it is Who goes with you. He will not let go of you and He will not forsake you.”
7And Moses called to Joshua and said to him before the eyes of all Israel, “Be strong and stalwart, for you will come with this people into the land which the LORD swore to their fathers to give to them, and you will grant it to them in estate. 8And the LORD, He it is Who goes before you. He will be with you and will not forsake you. You shall not fear and you shall not be dismayed.”
9And Moses wrote this teaching and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who bear the Ark of the LORD’s Covenant, and to all the elders of Israel. 10And Moses charged them, saying, “At the end of seven years, in the set season of the sabbatical year at the Festival of Huts, 11when all Israel comes to appear before the presence of the LORD your God in the place that He chooses, you shall read this teaching before all Israel, in their hearing. 12Assemble the people, the men and the women and the little ones and your sojourner who is within your gates, so that they may hear and so that they may learn, and they will fear the LORD your God and keep to do all the words of this teaching. 13And your children who know not will hear and learn to fear the LORD your God all the days that you live on the soil to which you are about to cross the Jordan to take hold of.”
14And the LORD said to Moses, “Look, your time to die has drawn near. Call Joshua and station yourselves in the Tent of Meeting, that I may charge him.” And Moses, and Joshua, went and stationed themselves in the Tent of Meeting. 15And the LORD appeared in the Tent in a pillar of cloud, and the pillar of cloud stayed over the entrance to the Tent.
16And the LORD said to Moses, “Look, you are about to lie with your fathers, and this people will rise and go whoring after the alien gods of the land into the midst of which they are coming, and they will forsake Me and break My covenant that I have sealed with them. 17And My wrath will flare against them on that day, and I shall forsake them and hide My face from them, and they will become fodder, and many evils and troubles will find them, and they will say on that day, ‘Is it not because our God is not in our midst that these evils have found us?’ 18And as for Me, I will surely hide My face on that day for all the evil that they have done, for they turned to other gods. 19And now, write you this song and teach it to the Israelites, put it in their mouths, so that this song will be a witness against the Israelites. 20When I bring them to the soil that I swore to their fathers, flowing with milk and honey, and they eat and are sated and grow sleek and turn to other gods and worship them and despise Me and break My covenant, 21it shall be, when many evils and troubles find them, this song shall testify before them as witness, for it shall not be forgotten in the mouth of their seed, that I knew their devisings that they do today before I brought them into the land which I vowed.” 22And Moses wrote down this song on that day and taught it to the Israelites. 23And he charged Joshua son of Nun and said, “Be strong and stalwart, for you will bring the Israelites into the land which He vowed to them, and I shall be with you.” 24And it happened, when Moses finished writing the words of this teaching in a book to their very end, 25Moses charged the Levites, bearers of the Ark of the LORD’s Covenant, saying, 26“Take this book of teaching and place it alongside the Ark of the Covenant of the LORD your God, and it shall be there as witness against you. 27For I myself have known your rebelliousness and your stiff neck. Look, while I am still alive with you today you have rebelled against the LORD, and how much more after my death! 28Assemble to me all the elders of your tribes and your overseers, and let me speak in your hearing these words, that I may call to witness against you the heavens and the earth. 29For I know, after my death that you will surely act ruinously and swerve from the way which I charged you, and the evil will befall you in the latter days, for you will do evil in the eyes of the LORD, to vex Him with your handiwork.” 30And Moses spoke in the hearing of all the assembly of Israel the words of this song to their very end:
CHAPTER 31 NOTES
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1. And Moses finished speaking. The Masoretic Text reads, “And Moses went and spoke.” This translation follows the Deuteronomy text found at Qumran, which accords with the Septuagint. The third-person forms of the verb “went,” wayelekh, and the verb “finished,” wayekhal, have the same consonants, and the order of the last two consonants could easily have been reversed in a scribal transcription. The difference between the two versions is essential because the Qumran version makes this a proper introduction to the entire epilogue of Deuteronomy (chapters 31–34). Moses has completed his discourses—the monitory sermons, the Laws, the blessings and curses—and he is not “going” anywhere to speak further words. Rather, the epilogue will now concern itself with the following topics of closure: the transfer of authority to Joshua, Moses’s imminent death, the instructions for the public reading of “this teaching” (the Book of Deuteronomy or at least substantial portions of it), the recitation of the Song of Moses, which is to bear witness against Israel, and the poem blessing the twelve tribes.
2. I can no longer sally forth and come in. The idiom “go out and come in” (elsewhere, “bring out and bring in”) means to lead the forces in battle. It is an apt phrase for Moses to use because Joshua, whom he is about to designate as his successor, figures above all as the military commander of the conquest.
7. Be strong and stalwart. These words of encouragement, used in verse 6 in the plural for the Israelites, before the armed confrontation with the Canaanites are, as Abraham ibn Ezra properly notes, the same words Moses addresses now to Joshua (verses 7 and 23).
you will come with this people. Three ancient versions read here “you will bring this people” (the same verb in a different conjugation), which matches the use of the verb in verse 23.
8. the LORD, He it is Who goes before you. This is a recurring motif, picked up from Exodus: God is imagined as a celestial warrior headed out in front of the people against its enemies. The presence of that divine vanguard is the reassurance the people have when faced with adversaries superior in numbers.
9. And Moses wrote this teaching. As elsewhere in Deuteronomy, “this teaching,” torah, refers to Deuteronomy itself. In verse 24, Moses is said to have written “the words of this teaching in a book.” That last noun, sefer, refers in biblical Hebrew to anything recorded in writing, and it of course would not look physically like a book in our sense because the bound book or codex had not yet been invented. But the scroll, or series of scrolls, on which the text of Moses’s valedictory discourses was set down clearly constitutes a book. Indeed, it may well inaugurate the clear-cut concept of the book in ancient Israel.
10. in the set season of the sabbatical year at the Festival of Huts. In the sabbatical year the fields are allowed to lie fallow, and the Festival of Huts (Succoth), the fall harvest festival, would conclude all harvesting from the previous year, thus leaving the entire people, with its agriculturally based economy, free to come to the central sanctuary and listen to the public reading of the book of teaching. In later tradition, this reading of Deuteronomy once every seven years would be replaced by the practice of reading all Five Books of Moses annually, divided into weekly portions through the year. That practice has its roots in the institution of the public reading of the Torah by Ezra in the fifth century B.C.E.
11. in their hearing. Literally, “in their ears.”
12. Assemble the people. The assembly of the people to listen to the recitation of the Mosaic teaching is, as David Cohen-Zenach aptly observes, a reenactment of the hearing of the Law at Sinai, an event that Deuteronomy calls “the day of the assembly.”
13. your children who know not. That is, your children who have not known, have not witnessed, all these great signs and portents that you have seen with your own eyes.
14. Call Joshua … that I may charge him. Critical scholarship has identified a whole series of duplications, contradictions, interruptions, and shifts in terminology in this chapter and generally has attributed them to a collation of different literary sources. The transfer of authority to Joshua is probably the most salient of these contradictory repetitions. In verses 7–8, Moses confers authority on Joshua in a declaration made before the whole people and God plays no direct role. Here it is God Who charges Joshua, and the investment of leadership is enacted away from the eyes of the people, in the sacrosanct space of the Tent of Meeting. The intricacies of the interwoven sources in this chapter need not detain us. Suffice it to say that there appear to be four layers: an old source, well antedating the composition of Deuteronomy; a Deuteronomic source; some work by the presumably exilic editor of Deuteronomy; and, finally, the editorial intervention of the redactor of the Torah as a whole. An orchestration of different strands may have been deemed necessary to provide an adequate conclusion to the book. Modern readers must keep in mind that the notion that most books were composite, heterogeneous in both authorship and literary genre, the product of collage, was naturally assumed in ancient Hebrew literature.
16. and this people will rise and go whoring. Abraham ibn Ezra emphatically observes that “it could not possibly be connected with what precedes.” We might expect here a speech from God directed to Joshua, or to Joshua and Moses, in the Tent of Meeting. Instead, we have a divine prediction of Israel’s future idolatry, leading to the withdrawal of the divine presence from Israel, and cast in language reminiscent of the depiction of idolatry in Exodus and in Numbers rather than in the distinctive style of Deuteronomy.
they are coming. Throughout this passage, “people” is singular, but the repetition of “it” would be awkward in English.
17. they will become fodder. Literally, “food,” that is, easy prey for their enemies.
because our God is not in our midst. It is equally possible to understand this as “because our gods are not in our midst.” Jeffrey H. Tigay argues for this possibility, suggesting that the people persist in their idolatrous beliefs even after disaster occurs. It may be more plausible, however, to coordinate the people’s sense of God’s absence with His declaration that he will hide His face.
19. this song will be a witness. The sequence of verses from 18 to 22 are the first preface to the Song of Moses (traditionally called in Hebrew Shirat Haʾazinu, after the first word of the poem). But the text, instead of proceeding, as one might have anticipated, to the lead-in line of verse 30 and then the Song proper (chapter 32), will go on to two other topics first. Poetry is memorable and formally articulated (in the Hebrew, through semantic and syntactic parallelism between halves of the poetic line) in ways that facilitate actual memorization. Thus, Moses is enjoined to “put it in their mouths,” that is, to make them learn it by heart. (A similar idiom for memorization is attested in other ancient Semitic languages, and in postbiblical Hebrew, the idiom for “by heart” is beʿal peh, literally, “in/on the mouth.”) But there is a fail-safe second measure for permanence that Moses must take: he must not rely on memorization but must write the poem out, until the last word. The textual permanence of the poem thus makes it an eternal “witness” that will confront every generation of the people of Israel.
20. eat … grow sleek and turn to other gods … and despise Me. The language here abounds in terms that anticipate the actual language, not just the themes, of the Song.
21. I knew their devisings. This relatively unusual word, yetser, is surely a pointed allusion directing us to God’s bleak words about human nature after the Flood: “For the devisings of the human heart are evil from youth” (Genesis 8:21).
23. And he charged Joshua. This verse, which essentially repeats verse 8, appears to interrupt the narrative continuity at this point.
26. Take this book of teaching … and it shall be there as witness against you. First the Song is identified as witness; now it is the book of teaching, to be placed alongside the Ark, which is to be the witness. At least from the viewpoint of the editor, the aim is to suggest an equivalence between these two texts: the Song of Moses, culminating the Book of Deuteronomy, provides a powerful focus in the concentrated form of poetry for the book’s major themes, and so both the larger text and the text within the text serve the same function.
27. I myself have known your rebelliousness. The emphatic ʾanokhi, “I myself,” before the conjugated verb has autobiographical resonance for the speaker Moses, who through forty years has had to cope with the refractory nature of the people and to be the repeated target of their resentment.
28. that I may call to witness against you the heavens and the earth. This clause verbally anticipates the very beginning of the Song, “Give ear, O heavens, that I may speak, / and let the earth hear my mouth’s utterances.” Thus Moses segues from writing the book (verse 26) to declaiming the Song.
1“Give ear, O heavens, that I may speak,
and let the earth hear my mouth’s utterances.
2Let my teaching drop like rain,
my saying flow like dew,
like showers on the green
and like cloudbursts on the grass.
3For the name of the LORD do I call.
Hail greatness for our God.
4The Rock, His acts are perfect,
for all His ways are justice.
A steadfast God without wrong,
true and right is He.
5Did He act ruinously? No, his sons’ the fault—
A perverse and twisted brood.
6To the LORD will you requite thus,
base and unwise people?
Is He not your father, your shaper,
He made you and set you unshaken?
7Remember the days of old,
give thought to the years of times past.
Ask your father, that he may tell you,
your elders, that they may say to you.
8When Elyon gave estates to nations,
when He split up the sons of man,
He set out the boundaries of peoples,
by the number of the sundry gods.
9Yes, the LORD’s portion is His people
Jacob the parcel of His estate.
10He found him in the wilderness land,
in the waste of the howling desert.
He encircled him, gave mind to him,
watched him like the apple of His eye.
11Like an eagle who rouses his nest,
over his fledglings he hovers,
He spread His wings, He took him,
He bore him on His pinion.
12The LORD alone did lead him,
no alien god by His side.
13He set him down on the heights of the land,
and he ate the bounty of the field.
He suckled him honey from the crag
and oil from the flinty stone,
14Cattle’s curd and milk of the flocks
and rams of Bashan and he-goats
with the fat of kernels of wheat,
and the blood of the grape you drank as mead.
15And Jeshurun fattened and kicked—
you fattened, you thickened, grew gross—
and abandoned the God Who had made him
and despised the Rock of his rescue.
16He provoked Him with strangers,
with abhorrences he did vex Him.
17They sacrificed to the demons, the ungods,
gods they had not known,
new ones just come lately,
whom their fathers had not feared.
18The Rock your bearer you neglected
you forgot the God Who gave you birth.
19The LORD saw and He spurned,
from the vexation of His sons and His daughters.
20And He said, ‘Let Me hide My face from them,
I shall see what their end will be.
For a wayward brood are they,
children with no trust in them.
21They provoked Me with an ungod,
they vexed Me with their empty things.
And I, I will provoke them with an unpeople
with a base nation I will vex them.
22For fire has flared in My nostrils
and blazed to Sheol down below,
eaten up earth and its yield
and kindled the mountains’ foundations.
23I will sweep down evils upon them,
my arrows spending against them
24wasted with famine, withered by blight and bitter scourge,
and the fang of beasts will I send against them,
with the venom of creepers in the dust.
25Outside will the sword bereave
and within chambers—terror.
Both youth and virgin,
suckling and gray-haired man.
26I would have said, “Let Me wipe them out,
let Me make their name cease among men.”
27Had I not feared the foe’s provocation,
lest their enemies dissemble,
lest they say, “Our hand was high,
and not the LORD has wrought all this.”’
28For a nation lost in counsel are they,
there is no understanding among them.
29Were they wise they would give mind to this,
understand their latter days:
30O how could one chase a thousand,
or two put ten thousand to flight,
had not their Rock handed them over,
had the LORD not given them up?
31For not like our Rock is their rock,
32Yes, Sodom’s vine is their vine,
from the vineyards of Gomorrah.
Their grapes are grapes of poison,
death-bitter clusters they have.
33Venom of vipers their wine,
and pitiless poison of asps.
34Look, it is concealed with Me,
sealed up in My stores.
35Mine is vengeance, requital,
at the moment their foot will slip.
For their day of disaster is close,
what is readied then swiftly comes.
36Yes, the LORD champions His people,
for His servants He shows change of heart
when He sees that power is gone,
37He will say, ‘Where are their gods,
the rock in whom they sheltered,
38who ate the fat of their offerings,
drank their libation wine?
Let them arise and help you,
be over you as a shield!’
39See now that I, I am He,
and no god is by My side.
I put to death and give life,
I smash and I also heal
and none rescues from My hand.
40When I raise to the heavens My hand
and say, ‘As I live forever.’
41When I hone the flash of My sword
and My hand takes hold of justice,
I will bring back vengeance to My foes
and My enemies I will requite.
42I will make My shafts drunk with blood,
and My sword will eat up flesh,
from the blood of the fallen and captive,
from the flesh of the long-haired foe.
43Nations, O gladden His people,
for His servants’ blood will He avenge,
and vengeance turn back on His foes,
and purge His soil, His people.”
44And Moses came and spoke all the words of this song in the hearing of the people—he and Hosea son of Nun. 45And Moses finished speaking all these words to all Israel. 46And he said to them, “Set your hearts upon all these words with which I bear witness against you today, that you charge your sons with them to keep to do all the words of this teaching. 47For it is not an empty thing for you, but it is your life, and through this thing you will long endure on the soil to which you are about to cross the Jordan to take hold of there.”
48And the LORD spoke to Moses on that very day, saying, 49“Go up to this Mount Abarim, Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab by Jericho, and see the land of Canaan that I am about to give to the Israelites as a holding. 50And die on the mountain where you are going up and be gathered to your kin, as Aaron your brother died in Hor the Mountain and was gathered to his kin, 51because you two betrayed Me in the midst of the Israelites through the waters of Meribath-Kadesh in the Wilderness of Zin, because you did not sanctify Me in the midst of the Israelites. For from the far side you will see the land, 52but you will not come there, to the land that I give to the Israelites.”
CHAPTER 32 NOTES
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1. Give ear, O heavens. The high stylistic solemnity of the poem is signaled by a formal beginning (verses 1–2) that calls attention to the poet’s own act of uttering sublime speech. This convention constitutes an approximate analogy to the invocation of the muse and the proclamation of the subject of the poem at the beginning of the Homeric epics. The address here to heaven and earth as witnesses is replicated, as many commentators have noted, by the opening lines of Isaiah 1. The Song of Moses (traditionally referred to in Hebrew, as we have noted, as Shirat [the song of] Haʾazinu) is certainly older than the body of Deuteronomy, though how much older is a matter of scholarly debate. Many (though not all) of the grammatical and morphological features of the language as well as certain aspects of the syntax are archaic, and numerous formulaic word pairs in the parallel members of the lines are ones that also occur in the prebiblical poetry of Ugarit. On stylistic grounds, then, the poem—or at least much of it—could be as early as the period of the Judges, that is, the eleventh century B.C.E. As with any archaic poem, one encounters rare terms of uncertain meaning and a number of points where the text appears to have been scrambled in scribal transmission, whether out of sheer confusion or through theological censorship of the ancient materials. The more salient instances of these lexical and textual difficulties will be noted below.
2. cloudbursts. The only thing certain about the unique Hebrew noun seʿirim is that it has to be some form of precipitation. If it is cognate with seʿarah, “storm,” then “cloudburst” would be a likely meaning.
4. The Rock. This epithet for God, with the obvious sense of bastion or stronghold, is common in Psalms. It is used seven times in the poem, which exhibits a predilection for repeating key terms a formulaic number of times.
5. Did He act ruinously? No, his sons’ the fault. The Hebrew syntax here is impacted and hence the meaning obscure. This translation—like all others, only a guess at the sense of the original—follows the sequence of Hebrew words fairly literally.
8. When Elyon gave estates to nations. Elyon (the High One) is the sky god of the Canaanite pantheon, who appears to have been assimilated into biblical monotheism as an epithet for the God of Israel (see the comment on Genesis 14:19–20). The use of this designation here probably reflects the antiquity of the poem.
by the number of the sundry gods. The Masoretic Text here reads lemispar beney yisraʾel, “by the number of the sons of Israel.” It is hard to make much sense of that reading, though traditional exegetes try to do that by noting that Israel/Jacob had seventy male descendants when he went down to Egypt and that there are, at least proverbially, seventy nations. This translation adopts the reading of the text found at Qumran (which seems close to the Hebrew text used by the Septuagint translators): lemispar beney ʾelohim. This phrase, which appears to reflect a very early stage in the evolution of biblical monotheism, caused later transmitters of the text theological discomfort and was probably deliberately changed in the interests of piety. In the older world-picture, registered in a variety of biblical texts, God is surrounded by a celestial entourage of divine beings or lesser deities, beney ʾelim or beney ’elohim, who are nevertheless subordinate to the supreme God. The Song of Moses assumes that God, in allotting portions of the earth to the various peoples, also allowed each people its own lesser deity. Compare Moses’s remark about the astral deities in Deuteronomy 4:19.
9. Yes, the LORD’s portion is His people. This affirmation stands in contrast to the preceding statement that God has allotted different deities to the sundry peoples. The LORD has made Israel His special possession through His acts of historical providence toward them, and thus Israel must worship the LORD alone.
11. who rouses his nest. “Rouses” is the usual sense of this Hebrew verb. But some scholars have pointed to a possible Ugaritic cognate that would yield the sense “guard over.”
13. He suckled him honey from the crag / and oil from the flinty stone. This line is a lovely illustration of the dynamic of intensification that characterizes much of the semantic parallelism in biblical poetry. Because the verb “suckled” does double duty for both clauses, the poet has extra rhythmic room in the second verset—a unit of one word, one accented syllable—that he can exploit by elaborating or heightening the parallel object of the verb, moving from the general term “crag” to a particularly hard kind of rock, “the flinty stone.” There is also a move from an image that can readily be understood in naturalistic terms, finding honeycombs in crevices, to one that seems more flatly miraculous, being suckled oil from flintstone. The effort of many commentators to “explain” the latter image as a reference to olive trees growing on crags may not be altogether beside the point but diminishes the striking immediacy of the image.
14. the fat of lambs … the fat of kernels of wheat. In both cases, “fat” may mean what it says or may be idiomatic for “the best of” (as in “the fat of the land”).
15. Jeshurun. An epithet for Israel. Since the etymology suggests “straight,” its use here is ironic, as the poem pointedly associates crookedness with Israel.
17. the ungods. The Hebrew is loʾ ʾeloha. One of the distinctive stylistic traits of this poem is the fondness it exhibits for such negative prefixes. Compare verse 21.
had not feared. The verb seʿarum is unique to this text and its meaning is disputed. One interesting suggestion is that it plays on the noun seʿirim, “demons” or perhaps “goat-gods,” an approximate synonym for shedim, “demons,” in this verse.
21. their empty things. Literally, “their mere vapors.” The Hebrew hevel is the same word that will be repeatedly used in Qohelet for insubstantiality, “mere breath” (“vanity of vanities,” King James Version), and here it glosses “ungod.”
unpeople. The Hebrew is loʾ-ʿam. Jeffrey H. Tigay thinks the reference may be to nomads, and hence would reflect the premonarchic period of nomadic marauders, but the term might simply be a self-evident pejorative for an alien people.
22. For fire has flared in My nostrils. This pyrotechnic representation of an angry warrior-god, drawing on polytheistic antecedents, occurs frequently in biblical poetry (compare, for example, 2 Samuel 22:8–16). Thus, God’s hiding His face from Israel (verse 20) is not merely a withdrawal of the divine presence but the opposite of showing favor (in biblical idiom, “lifting the face to”)—a wrathful God actively assaults Israel. The weapons of the warrior deity are lightning (God’s “arrows”), earthquake, a whole panoply of plagues and noxious beasts, and hostile nations.
26. I would have said. In this moment of fury, provoked by Israel’s betrayal of its obligation of loyalty to YHWH, God expresses no compassion for His people; it is only concern for the divine reputation (“lest they say, ‘Our hand was high, / and not the LORD has wrought all this’” [verse 27]) that prevents Him from utterly destroying Israel.
28. For a nation lost in counsel are they. As the following lines make clear, the reference is not to Israel but to its triumphant enemy. Had they real understanding, they would realize that such a spectacular defeat as they inflicted on Israel could only have been God’s doing.
30. one chase a thousand, / or two put ten thousand to flight. This paradigmatic line neatly illustrates the pattern of intensification that informs biblical poetic parallelism. Were the system based on actual synonymity, one would expect numerical equivalents in the two parallel versets, but the prevailing rule, precisely as with nonnumerical elements in poetic parallelism, is that something must be increased or heightened: from one to two, from a thousand to ten thousand.
31. our enemies’ would-be gods. The second of the two Hebrew words here, weʾoyveinu pelilim, is a notorious crux, evidently already a source of puzzlement to the ancient Greek translators. The ostensible verbal root of pelilim is related to the idea of judgment or assessment, but every attempt to construe the two words in light of that meaning seems strained. Tigay proposes an Akkadian cognate that means “leader” or “guardian” and serves as an epithet for deities. If one notes that pelilim rhymes richly with ʾelilim, “idols,” and if one recalls this poet’s verbal inventiveness in coining designations for the nonentity of the pagan gods, “would-be gods” is a distinct possibility.
32. death-bitter. The Hebrew merorot by itself suggests only bitterness, but in context the line is clearly referring to poison.
34. Look, it is concealed with Me, / sealed up in My stores. The poet picks up an idea current in ancient Near Eastern mythology, also reflected in Job 38:22–23, that the deity stores up weapons in a cosmic armory or storehouse (Hebrew ʾotsar) for a day of apocalyptic battle.
36. no ruler or helper. The Hebrew phrase ʿatsur weʿazuv has invited highly divergent interpretations, but its use elsewhere (compare 1 Kings 14:10 and 2 Kings 9:8) suggests a link with political leadership.
42. I will make My shafts drunk with blood. Now the warrior-god turns His ferocity from Israel to its enemies. It is a commonplace of biblical figurative language that arrows drink blood, the sword consumes flesh.
from the flesh of the long-haired foe. The Masoretic Text says, very literally, “from the head of the long hair [or unbound hair] of the foe.” This reading raises two problems: if the long hair is the object of the sword, not much blood would be involved; and “head” makes an odd parallel to “blood” in the preceding verset. This translation adopts a proposed emendation that simply reverses the order of consonants of “head,” roʾsh, yielding sheʾer, “flesh.”
43. Nations, O gladden His people. Although the formulation of the Hebrew is a little obscure, the sense seems to be something like “Nations, congratulate God’s people as He exacts vengeance from their enemies and restores them to their place in their land.” The Qumran text, again approximately confirming the Septuagint, has a partly divergent reading: “Gladden, O heavens, His people, / and let all divine beings bow before Him. / For His sons’ blood He will avenge / and vengeance turn back on His foes. / And His enemies He will requite / and purge His people’s soil.” There are grounds for thinking this reading might be more authentic than the Masoretic Text. The invocation of the heavens at the end of the poem would correspond neatly to the apostrophe to the heavens at the beginning, whereas turning to the nations at the end is a little odd. As in the probable substitution of “sons of Israel” for “sundry gods” in verse 8, later editors for reasons of monotheistic rigor might have been impelled to delete the reference that follows to all divine beings (kol ʾelohim) bowing before the triumphant LORD. Finally, “His people’s soil” (ʾadmat ʿamo, in the construct state) makes better idiomatic sense than “His soil, His people” (ʾadmato ʿamo in seeming apposition).
44. Hosea son of Nun. Hosea is a variant form of Joshua.
46. bear witness against you. The poem, as chapter 31 makes clear, is the eternal witness. The phrase could also mean “warn you” or even “impose upon you.”
50. And die on the mountain. This a rare, and shocking, use of the verb “to die” in the imperative.
51. because you two betrayed Me. The word “two” is added in the translation to make clear in English what is transparent in the Hebrew through the plural form of the verb—that both Moses and Aaron betrayed God at the waters of Meribah and thus each was doomed to die on his own mountain.
1And this is the blessing that Moses the man of God, blessed the Israelites before his death. 2And he said:
and from Seir He dawned upon them,
and appeared from Ribeboth-Kodesh,
from His right hand, fire-bolts for them.
3Yes, lover of peoples is He,
all His holy ones in your hand,
and they are flung down at Your feet,
he bears Your utterances.
4‘A teaching did Moses charge us,
a heritage for Jacob’s assembly!’
5And He became a king in Jeshurun
when the chiefs of the people gathered,
all together the tribes of Israel.
6Let Reuben live and not die,
though his menfolk be but few.
7And this is for Judah, and he said:
Hear, LORD, Judah’s voice
and to his people You shall bring him.
With his hands he strives for himself—
a help against his foes You shall be.
8And for Levi he said:
for your devoted man,
you disputed with him at the waters of Meribah,
9who says of his father and mother,
I have not seen them,
and his brothers he recognized not,
and his sons he did not know.
For they kept Your pronouncement
and Your covenant they preserved.
10They shall teach Your laws to Jacob
and Your teaching to Israel.
They shall put incense in Your nostrils
and whole offerings on Your altar.
11Bless, O LORD his abundance,
and his handiwork look on with favor.
that his enemies rise no more.
12For Benjamin he said:
The LORD’s friend, may he dwell securely,
He shelters him constantly,
and between His shoulders he dwells.
13And for Joseph he said:
Blessed of the LORD is his land,
from the bounty of heavens, from dew,
and from the deep that couches below,
14and from the bounty of yield of the sun
and from the bounty of crop of the moon,
15and from the top of the age-old mountains,
from the bounty of hills everlasting,
16and from the bounty of earth and its fullness
and the favor of the bush-dwelling One.
May these come on the head of Joseph,
on the brow of him set apart from his brothers.
17His firstborn bull is his glory,
wild ox’s antlers his horns.
With them he gores peoples,
all together, the ends of the earth,
and they are the myriads of Ephraim
and they are Manasseh’s thousands.
18And for Zebulun he said:
Rejoice, Zebulun, when you go out
and Issachar, in your tents.
19Peoples they call to the mountain,
there they sacrifice offerings of triumph.
For the plenty of seas do they suckle
and the hidden treasures of sand.
20And for Gad he said:
Blessed he who enlarges Gad.
Like a lion he dwells
and tears apart arm, even pate.
21And he saw the prime for himself,
for there is the lot of the hidden chieftain.
And the heads of the people came,
he performed the LORD’s benefaction,
and His judgments for Israel.
22And for Dan he said:
Dan is a lion’s whelp,
he springs forth from the Bashan.
23And for Naphtali he said:
Naphtali is sated with favor
and filled with the blessing of the LORD.
To the west and the south his possession.
24And for Asher he said:
Blessed among sons is Asher,
May he be favored of his brothers
25Iron and bronze your gate-bolts,
and as your days be your might.
26There is none like the God of Jeshurun
riding through heavens as your help—
and in His triumph through the skies.
27A refuge, the God of old,
from beneath, the arms everlasting.
He drove from before you the enemy
and He said, ‘Destroy!’
28And Israel dwelled securely,
in a land of grain and wine,
its heavens, too, drop dew.
29Happy are you, Israel. Who is like you?
Your shield of help and the sword of your triumph.
Your enemies cower before you,
and you on their backs will tread.”
CHAPTER 33 NOTES
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1. And this is the blessing that Moses … blessed the Israelites before his death. This second, concluding poem is placed exactly in the same position, just before the end of the book, as Jacob’s blessings before his death to the twelve future tribes. There are some precise echoes of Jacob’s blessing here (compare verses 13, 15, and 16 with Genesis 49:25 and 26.) There are also some parallels to the Song of Deborah. These correspondences suggest that in the premonarchic period there may have been an oral reservoir of poetic sayings about the tribes from which poets could draw to celebrate them. The archaic nature of the language and the political situation envisaged by the poem argue for its origins in the era before the monarchy was established. Judah here (in contrast to Genesis 49) is not represented as the tribe of kings. The poem appears to assume some form of national federation of all twelve tribes. The centralization of the cult at a single national site, one of the great themes of Deuteronomy, is nowhere implied: on the contrary, Zebulun and Issachar are said to offer sacrifices in their tribal territory (verse 19). Finally, because of the antiquity of the poem, the text shows signs of having been mangled at several points—the most egregious of these will be noted below—and at these junctures all efforts to rescue intelligible meaning from the reading that has come down to us are liable to be unavailing.
2. from Sinai. This poem, like the Song of Deborah and a few psalms, registers what looks like an early tribal memory that the grand inception of YHWH’s relationship with Israel was to the south, in the Sinai peninsula and in a series of associated sites, though there are some indications in the poetic texts that Mount Sinai might have been placed in northern Arabia.
He shone. This choice of verb, like the preceding “dawned,” reflects an early biblical poetic notion of the LORD’s powerful appearance in awesome refulgence.
appeared from Ribeboth-Kodesh. It is safest to construe the last term here as an otherwise unattested place-name, although some scholars understand it as “the myriads of Kadesh” or “the myriads of holy ones.” The verb for “apppeared” (or “came”) is the Hebrew cognate of the Aramaic ʾatah, which in early biblical Hebrew is restricted to poetic diction.
fire-bolts for them. The Hebrew ʾeshdat, anachronistically construed by later Hebrew exegetes to mean “fire of the law,” is not intelligible. Since God in biblical poetry, following Canaanite conventions, is often represented coming down to earth hurling lightning bolts as His weapons, this translation embraces the proposal that the text originally read ʾesh d[oleq]et (burning, or racing, fire) or something similar.
3. Yes, lover of peoples is He. This entire verse is one of the most problematic in the poem. Its principal difficulties: the epithet “lover of peoples” for God is peculiar, and one is constrained by the nationalist character of the poem to understand “peoples” as “the tribes.” The lines lurch from third-person to second-person references to God, leaving some doubt as to where the poet is talking about God and where about Israel. The verb rendered as “flung down” is uncertain of meaning. It is not entirely clear who the “holy ones” are and what is meant by “he bears Your utterances.” The inevitable conclusion is that this verse suffered serious damage in transmission.
4. A teaching. Since Moses here is referred to in the third person, the simplest way to understand this without emending the line is as an exclamation of the people—hence the quotation marks in the translation.
5. when the chiefs of the people gathered, / all together the tribes of Israel. The poet clearly envisages a grand assembly of all the tribes—an obviously premonarchic event—to confirm God’s kingship over Israel. (Jeshurun is of course an epithet for Israel.) This flourish concludes the introductory section of the poem and sets us up for the blessings of the tribes one by one.
6. Let Reuben … not die, / though his menfolk be but few. These urgent words, more prayer than blessing, obviously reflect a moment in early Israelite history when the tribe of Reuben, inhabiting territory east of the Jordan, habitually threatened by marauders, perhaps also in the process of being swallowed up by neighboring Gad, appeared to run the risk of extinction.
7. to his people You shall bring him. Jeffrey H. Tigay plausibly suggests that the reference is to bringing him back safe from battle. The next line in fact invokes combat.
8. Your Thummim and Your Urim. These oracular devices (see the comment on Exodus 28:30) appear in all other occurrences with Urim in first position. Perhaps the reversal was encouraged by the poetic form.
whom You tested at Massah. The story of the waters of Massah and Meribah (Exodus 17:2–7) makes no mention of a crucial role for the Levites. One may infer that this early poem drew on a narrative tradition not reflected in the story told in the Torah.
9. who says of his father and mother. The reference is obscure, but this sounds rather like the Levites’ ruthless denial of kinfolk in playing the role of the LORD’s avengers in the episode of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:26–29). Perhaps this same motif was attached to the Levites in an early story about Massah and Meribah that did not survive elsewhere.
11. Smash the loins. This violent image of martial triumph does not accord with the later sacerdotal role of the Levites, which exempted them from military duty. What it may pick up is the preceding allusion to the Levites as YHWH’s special militia, wielding their swords against all who betrayed him, even against their own kin.
12. between His shoulders he dwells. This appears to be an image of Benjamin carried on God’s shoulders. Rashi and others link the image with the proximity of Benjamin’s tribal territory to the Temple in Jerusalem, but that seems doubtful—especially because this poem does not envisage a central sanctuary.
13. Blessed of the LORD is his land. The tribal territory of Joseph was obviously proverbial for its fertility, and the language of the blessing to Joseph here strongly echoes the wording of Jacob’s blessing for Joseph in Genesis 49, which similarly invokes the heavens above the watery deep (tehom) below, and the bounty of hills everlasting.
from dew. Some manuscripts read meʿal, “above,” instead of the Masoretic mital, “from dew.” The attraction of that reading is that it makes a perfect parallelism with “below” at the end of the next verset.
16. the bush-dwelling One. This unique kenning for God is justified by the fact that it is Moses who is speaking. Moses first encountered God in the burning bush, and this poem begins by announcing that the LORD has come from Sinai—the mountain on which the bush (seneh) grew.
17. His firstborn bull is his glory. The idea of the firstborn bull as an embodiment of fierce power is clear enough, but the antecedent of “his” is ambiguous. Some attach it to Jacob, Joseph’s father, but Joseph was not Jacob’s firstborn, though he was Rachel’s firstborn. The most likely candidate is Joseph himself, the image of the goring bull representing his son Ephraim, who displaces the firstborn (see Genesis 48) and thus has “myriads” while his brother Manasseh has only “thousands.”
the ends of the earth. There is an ellipsis here. The sense is: “he gores peoples, / all together [the inhabitants of] the ends of the earth.”
and they are. This explains the reference of the bull metaphor. The myriads and the thousands are of course the subject, not the object, of the goring.
18. Rejoice, Zebulun, when you go out / and Issachar, in your tents. The bracketing of these two tribes under one blessing, and in one poetic parallelism, is unique in this poem. It seems plausible that these two neighboring tribes, both offspring of Leah, were so intertwined at an early point in Israelite national history that it was deemed appropriate to join them in a single blessing.
19. Peoples they call to the mountain. Most commentators understand “peoples,” ʿamim, as a poetic designation of the tribes, but one cannot exclude the possibility that Zebulun and Issachar actually invited (the sense of “call” here) neighboring peoples to participate in their sacrifices. It is unclear what mountain the poet has in mind, though it would have to be in the northern Galilee.
the plenty of seas … the hidden treasures of sand. In light of what is known about the tribal territory of Zebulun and Issachar, the sea in question would be the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret). But “the hidden treasures of sand” must refer to the murex, from which the precious purple dye was extracted, and perhaps also to glass (Phoenicia was famous for both). These natural resources would bring us to the shore of the Mediterranean, not of Lake Kinneret. Some scholars have speculated that after Barak’s victory over the Canaanites (Judges 4), these two tribes may have expanded westward to the seacoast.
21. the prime. The Hebrew reʿshit usually means “beginning,” but it also has the sense of the choice part or best, which the next verset seems to require.
for there is the lot of the hidden chieftain. This entire clause, and the rest of the verse as well, is one of the most obscure moments in the poem. Many traditional interpreters take this as a reference to the burial site of Moses, but difficulties abound: it is implausible that Moses would speak of his own future burial place; the term “chieftain,” meḥoqeq (perhaps literally, “one who gives the statute”), is nowhere else linked with Moses, and some even think it actually refers here to a digging tool, as it appears to do in Numbers 21:18. These lines probably invoke a once well-known story, now irretrievably lost, about a hidden (or, in the term’s rabbinic sense, important) leader, or even about some legendary spade, which explains the eminence of Gad. We remain equally in the dark about what event is alluded to when Gad is praised for performing “the LORD’s benefaction, / and His judgments for Israel.”
24. bathe in oil his foot. Though this phrase might refer to an abundance of olive trees in Asher’s territory, rubbing oneself with oil was a way of taking pleasurable care of the body, a kind of ancient Near Eastern antecedent to modern body lotions.
25. Iron and bronze your gate-bolts. The noun minʿalim means “shoes” in rabbinic Hebrew. Rashi preserves this sense by understanding the whole clause metaphorically: your land is shod in iron and bronze by virtue of the mountains in it that yield those metals. It is more likely that the image is one of military security, and the verbal stem n-ʿ-l does mean “to lock.”
your might. The Hebrew noun dovʾe appears only here in the biblical corpus, and so one is compelled to infer its meaning from context. The inference of “might” is as old as Onkelos’s Aramaic translation, which renders the word as toqpakh.
26. There is none like the God of Jeshurun. The Masoretic vocalization, kaʾel yeshurun turns this into a vocative, “There’s none like God, O Jeshurun.” It seems more likely that this is an epithet for the God of Israel, keʾel yeshurun, the two nouns linked in the construct state. In any case, this clause signals the summarizing movement of the poem, the blessings of the individual tribes having been completed.
riding through heavens. The image of God as a celestial warrior, riding a cherub through the skies, is drawn from Canaanite poetry and appears a number of times in Psalms and elsewhere. It is worth noting that the word for “help,” ʿezer, often has the sense of “rescue” from military threat.
27. from beneath, the arms everlasting. That is, God embraces or physically supports Israel.
28. untroubled Jacob’s abode. The normal meaning of ʿeyn yaʿqov would be “Jacob’s well,” which makes little sense here. Most scholars construe the noun as a derivative of the root ʿ-w-n, “to abide,” which thus yields a neat parallelism with “Israel dwelled securely.” This same root is reflected in maʿon, “refuge,” at the beginning of verse 27.
29. rescued. This verb is frequently associated with military victory, and the rest of this verse emphatically confirms that sense. The poem concludes with a triumphalist flourish that is dictated by the geostrategic reality of the Land of Israel. The tribes may be blessed with an abundance of natural resources—grain and wine and oil and the treasures of the sea and its shore—but they are surrounded and interpenetrated by alien peoples with hostile intentions, so that in order to enjoy their land, they must above all be militarily powerful. This idea that the LORD is Israel’s shield and sword betrays none of the concern expressed in the Song of Moses that Israel will swerve from God’s covenant and be doomed to catastrophic defeat and exile as a punishment.
on their backs will tread. Although most biblical occurrences of the noun bamot use it in the sense of “high places,” it appears that the topographical meaning of the term was an extension of its original anatomical sense (i.e., the “backs” of hills). Job 9:8 describes God “trampl[ing] on the crest [or backs] of the sea,” probably a reference to His triumph over the primordial sea monster Yamm. The linking of exactly the same verb and noun here is a virtually iconographic representation of utterly subjugating a defeated enemy.
1And Moses went up from the steppes of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which faces Jericho. And the LORD let him see all the land, from the Gilead as far as Dan, 2and all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah as far as the Hinder Sea, 3and the Negeb, and the plain of the Valley of Jericho, town of the palm trees, as far as Zoar. 4And the LORD said to him, “This is the land that I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘To your seed I will give it.’ I have let you see with your own eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” 5And Moses, the LORD’s servant, died there in the land of Moab by the word of the LORD. 6And he was buried in the glen in the land of Moab opposite Beth Peor, and no man has known his burial place to this day. 7And Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died. His eye had not grown bleary and his sap had not fled. 8And the Israelites keened for Moses in the steppes of Moab thirty days, and the days of keening in mourning for Moses came to an end. 9And Joshua son of Nun was filled with a spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands upon him, and the Israelites heeded him and did as the LORD had charged Moses. 10But no prophet again arose in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face-to-face, 11with all the signs and the portents which the LORD sent him to do in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, 12and with all the strong hand and with all the great fear that Moses did before the eyes of all Israel.
CHAPTER 34 NOTES
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1. And Moses went up. He of course has to go up to reach the mountaintop from where he will see the grand panorama of the land which he will not enter. The action of ascent, however, also signals the trajectory of Moses’s life: he is born in the Nile Valley, first encounters God in the burning bush on a mountain, returns from his mission in Egypt to that same mountain to receive the law there, and now dies on a mountaintop.
the LORD let him see. Elsewhere, this verb (the hiphʿil or causative conjugation of the verb r-ʾ-h, “to see”) has been translated as “show,” but here it is important to preserve the literal sense of allowing or causing to see because that is the pointed meaning of this verb when it occurs again in verse 4.
from the Gilead as far as Dan. Moses’s gaze is directed first to the north, to the trans-Jordanian region of the Gilead, and then westward to the tribal territory of Dan in the northernmost part of the Land of Israel. Dan’s original settlement was near the coastal plain in the south, and only later did the tribe migrate to the north; so the indication of tribal geography reflects the time of writing, not that of Moses.
2. and all Naphtali. The gaze now begins to sweep to the south, ending with the Negeb and the plain along the Dead Sea.
4. the land that I swore to Abraham. This final mention of the promise to the forefathers links the end of Deuteronomy with the beginning of the Patriarchal narrative in Genesis.
5. by the word of the LORD. The literal sense of this idiom, repeatedly used elsewhere in the Torah, is “by the mouth of the LORD,” i.e., by divine decree. But the use of “mouth” encouraged the Midrash to imagine here a “death by a kiss” (mitat neshiqah), the ultimate favor granted to the righteous leader.
6. And he was buried. The Hebrew says literally, “and he buried him,” but the third-person singular verb without specified grammatical subject is not infrequently used in biblical Hebrew in place of a passive verb. Many interpreters have understood this ostensibly active verb to mean that God buried Moses. That possibility cannot be dismissed, but God’s acting as a gravedigger for Moses seems incongruous with the representation of the deity in these narratives, and thus construing the verb as a passive is more likely.
in the glen. This note of location is of a piece with the mystifying reticence in the whole report of Moses’s death. It is unclear how or by whom he was brought down from the mountaintop to be buried in a glen, though the evident purpose of this removal from the heights is to underline Moses’s irreducible humanity: we are not to imagine any act of “assumption” into the celestial sphere; Moses is buried down below, like all his fellow men.
no man has known his burial place to this day. As many commentators have observed, the occultation of the grave of Moses serves to prevent any possibility of a cult of Moses, with pilgrimages to his gravesite. The phrase “to this day” is a giveaway of the temporal perspective from which this concluding chapter of the Torah was written. Both the rabbis of the Talmud and the medieval Hebrew commentators were perplexed about the authorship of the story of the death of Moses. One opinion was that Joshua wrote this chapter; another, more poignant one, was that God dictated it and Moses wrote it down, weeping (Baba Batra 14B). But the phrase “to this day” is regularly used in biblical narrative to signal a present moment shared by the writer and his audience that is many generations removed from the time of the reported events.
7. one hundred and twenty years old. This is, of course, the typological number for the extreme limit of a human life (see Genesis 6:3, which first sets this limit), based on the Mesopotamian sexagesimal numerical system. Several eminent rabbinic sages are given biographies that divide their lives into three large periods of forty (another formulaic number), and some commentators have suggested that such a division may also be implied in the life of Moses: forty years in Egypt, forty years in Midian until his return to Egypt, forty years as leader of Israel in the wilderness.
10. no prophet again arose in Israel like Moses. This clause again reflects the temporal distance of the writer from the event reported. There will be other prophets in Israel, but none will enjoy the unique stature of Moses, whom God knew (or embraced—the same verb that is used in different contexts for sexual intimacy) face-to-face. Deuteronomy in this way concludes with an implicit claim for its own irrevocable authority, for no subsequent revelation of God’s will to a prophet can equal the words conveyed to Israel by the one prophet whom God knew face-to-face. Some interpreters detect here a clue to the composition of this passage in the time of Ezra, when the period of prophecy was deemed to have come to an end, but it is safer simply to infer that the Book of Deuteronomy is confirming its own status, and that of the entire Torah which it now concludes, as the product of an unparalleled prophecy that suffers no amendment or replacement.
11–12. with all the signs … to all his servants and to all his land, and with all the strong hand … before the eyes of all Israel. It is fitting that the Book of Deuteronomy concludes with one last instance of the grand sweeping sentences that are characteristic of its style, here running from the beginning of verse 10 to the end of verse 12. This final flourish flaunts the anaphora of “all” to convey the comprehensiveness of Moses’s epic undertaking: he executed all the signs that God had directed him to do, made all their spectacular effects manifest to all Pharaoh’s servants in all the land of Egypt, before the eyes of all Israel. It is beautifully apt that the last words of the book should be leʿeyney kol-yisraʾel, “before the eyes of all Israel,” for these words pick up the strong rhetoric of witnessing that has informed the book. The claims of the book on the sense of history and the religious loyalty of its audience are founded on Israel’s having witnessed God’s great portents in the formative experience of national liberation. The envisaged result of that experience is a unified nation sharing the legacy of its supreme prophet—“all Israel,” the concluding words of the book.
