Grad school is wicked time consuming! This blog is currently on hold as the semester grinds on!

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Deuteronomy 11: The Last Command for Obedience

Deuteronomy 11: Rewards for Obedience

I am beginning to grow tired of this whole "keep the charge of the Lord thing," having blogged on it every day for the past week. The problem might be that the chunks I am analyzing are too small. However, the repetitiveness is intentional. The biblical author wants his reader to understand exactly what is going on, so he writes on and one about it for 11 chapters (a necessary anachronism: chapters are a much later addition). The biblical author is highly effective at conveying his message. All that writing ensures that the reader understands the dialectical tensions. We have read again and again how the Israelites disobeyed the Lord and the Lord was about to kill them and the Lord will kill them if they do not obey the Lord. That's what this is all about: getting the audience to understand that all that matters is obedience to God. Without this, the Israelites will never survive.

Rewards for Obedience: Deuteronomy 11
Moses continues his speech to the Israelites:

The Israelites are to love the Lord and keep his charge, as well as pass down their love of the Lord and obedience to his commandments to their children. The Israelites are to remember their escape from Egypt, how God delivered them and crashed the Red Sea on the Egyptian army. They are to remember their time in the wilderness, particularly how the the Lord caused the Earth to swallow up Dathan and Abiram for their disobedience, along with all their possessions.

Remembering this - in addition to all the Lord's commandments - will give the Israelites the strength to occupy the land promised to their ancestors, a land flowing with milk and honey.

Here appears some new information - some useful knowledge concerning the promised land the Israelites will soon enter:
The promised land is not like the irrigated land of Egypt. Rather it is a land of hills and valleys. The Israelites will depend on rain to grow crops. [Unlike in Egypt, where the Nile allows for the fixed watering method of irrigation.] The Lord will bring rain only if the people follow all his commands. No obedience, no fruit for the people and grass for the livestock.

The Lord continuously looks after this land, so not only is he able to control the climate, but he is also able to determine when the people loose faith in him.

To combat belief atrophy, God's commands should be kept in the heart and soul, bout to the hand and forehead, taught to children, discussed at home and away in the morning and evening. They should be written on doorposts of houses and on gates, so that the ancient covenantal promise of land and progeny may be fulfilled.

Again Moses states that observance of the Lord's commandments will cause the Lord to drive out the other nations of the land. The Israelites will be feared by all in the area. The Israelites will drive out great nations to occupy an area that extends from the wilderness to the Lebanon and form the Euphrates to the Mediterranean sea. [This just so happens to be about the dimensions of Israel during the Davidic monarchy. Not that it was necessarily written then, just that the synchronized proportions give us an understanding of when the biblical author might have written and what references he used.]

Moses then sets a blessing and a curse before the people, which concludes this section of Dueteronomy. The Israelites will be blessed if they adhere to the Lord's commandments. They will be cursed if they do not. The Israelites are to remember the blessing and the curse by writing them down. The blessing shall appear on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal.

This is the second example in this chapter of the literal writing of God's commandments. The biblical author was very concerned with establishing a written record of God's commandments. The most famous of these is the two stone tablets comprising the ten commandments. But the Israelites are also to keep the commandments and blessings in their minds and written on their entryways. The word of God, in a religious sense, is to completely engulf Israelite society. The Lord is literally never to be far from a person. God establishes many precautions to ensure that his chosen people follow him.

And yet for some reason they don't.

And that is the biblical story.

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