Deuteronomy

Overview

Deuteronomy is about a hundred pages and it is cast as three farewell speeches. Moses is a hundred and twenty years old, standing on the plains of Moab with the Jordan in front of him and the land beyond it that he has been told he will not enter. The whole generation that left Egypt has died in the wilderness; he is addressing their children, who did not see any of it, and much of the book is the effort to make them remember something they did not experience.

The Greek name means second law, from a mistranslation of a phrase meaning a copy of this law. The Hebrew name, Devarim, is simply the opening word: words.

Two things about how it is written. It is in the first person almost throughout, which no other book of the Torah is, and the effect is personal and often urgent. And it is preached rather than narrated: the characteristic sentence is an imperative followed by a reason, usually a memory. Do this, because you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord brought you out.

Scholars generally connect it with the law-book discovered in the temple during Josiah’s reforms in 622 BCE, described in 2 Kings 22, which prompted a purge of local shrines and a centralisation of worship in Jerusalem, exactly the programme this book demands. That does not settle when it was composed, and the question is not necessary for reading it.

What happens

Chapters 1 to 11: the first speech, and the argument for obedience. Moses reviews the journey from Horeb: the appointment of judges, the spies sent into the land and the panic that followed, the forty years, the defeat of Sihon and Og, and the allocation of territory east of the Jordan. The retelling is selective and pointed, and the point is that the generation being addressed inherited a promise its parents forfeited.

Chapter 5 restates the Ten Commandments, with differences from the Exodus version, most notably that the sabbath is grounded in the rescue from Egypt rather than in creation.

Then chapter 6, which contains the Shema. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might. The commandment to love is followed immediately by instructions for transmission: keep these words in your heart, teach them diligently to your children, speak them at home and on the road, at bedtime and on rising, bind them on your hand and between your eyes, write them on your doorposts and your gates. Observant Jews still recite this twice a day, still wear it in tefillin and still fix it to doorframes.

Chapters 7 to 11 alternate warning and encouragement, and include the command to remember the wilderness and the manna, which taught that man does not live by bread alone. They also include the herem passages, the instruction to destroy the peoples of the land utterly and show them no mercy, which are among the most difficult texts in the Bible and cannot be read around.

Chapters 12 to 26: the law code. Worship first, and the demand that sacrifice happen only at the place the Lord will choose, which is the centralising measure. Then a long, mixed body of legislation.

The social provisions are the remarkable part. Every seventh year debts are released, and the text anticipates the obvious evasion and forbids it: do not look meanly at your poor brother as the seventh year approaches and refuse him a loan. A Hebrew slave goes free in the seventh year and is not to be sent away empty-handed. Wages are paid the same day because the labourer is poor and counts on them. What is forgotten in the field at harvest belongs to the stranger, the orphan and the widow. Interest is not charged to a fellow Israelite. An escaped slave is not to be returned.

The constitutional chapters, 16 to 18, appoint judges in every town and forbid them to take bribes or show partiality, with the doubled command to pursue justice. They limit a king, should the people want one, from accumulating horses, wives or silver and gold, and require him to keep his own copy of the law and read it all his life. They provide for the priests and levites, and they give a test for prophets that is practical to the point of bleakness: if what he says does not happen, the Lord did not speak it.

Chapters 27 to 34: the covenant, and the ending. Blessings for keeping the covenant and curses for breaking it, the curses running far longer and describing siege, exile, madness and cannibalism in detail that is hard to read. Then the great choice: life and death, blessing and cursing, set before them, with the instruction to choose life.

Moses commissions Joshua, writes the law down, and delivers a song and a blessing on the tribes. The last chapter takes him up Mount Nebo, shows him the whole land from Gilead to the Mediterranean, and has him die there. No one knows his burial place. The book ends by saying there has not arisen a prophet since like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.

How to read it

Read chapters 5 to 11 and 30, which contain the Shema, the argument, and the choice. That is the theological heart and it is about thirty pages.

Then read the law code in chapters 15, 16 and 24 for the social legislation. The provisions on debt release, wages and gleaning, each attached to a memory of slavery, are the clearest example anywhere of a law giving its own reasons.

Read the treaty form once you know it is there. Ancient Near Eastern vassal treaties have a preamble, a historical prologue, stipulations, provision for deposit and public reading, witnesses, and blessings and curses. Deuteronomy has all of them in order. Once you see the structure the command to love makes sense as a demand for exclusive loyalty.

Do not skip the herem passages. The instruction to exterminate the inhabitants of the land is in this book, it is unambiguous, and it has been cited in colonial contexts for centuries. Historians generally doubt the conquest happened as described, which affects what the passages were for but not what they say.

Read it alongside Exodus and notice the differences in the same material: the commandments, the reason for the sabbath, the account of how judges were appointed. Deuteronomy is a retelling, and the changes are deliberate.

Questions it raises

• Can love be commanded? The treaty background suggests loyalty is meant. Does that make the command coherent or diminish it?
• The covenant makes the nation’s fortunes conditional on its conduct. What does that framework do to people trying to understand a disaster?
• The debt release and the provision for the poor are attached to the memory of slavery. Is that a stronger foundation for social obligation than an abstract principle?
• The test of a prophet is whether his words come true. What use is that test at the moment you need it?
• The herem commands are in the same book as the most humane legislation in the Torah. How should a reader hold both?
• Moses is shown the land and refused it. Why does the Torah end that way?