Reading: Deuteronomy 1-3, Psalm 53

We’ve made it to Deuteronomy, the last book of Moses! Often quoted by the later prophets and eventually by Jesus, this book stands as a kind of summation of the story so far and a final effort by Moses to impart to the people a message about the nature of their God and how to correctly relate to him. It may surprise some of you to learn that the word love appears more in Deuteronomy than in any other book of the Bible. More than anything else, Moses wants the people to understand that the God of Israel is a God of love. Of commitment. Of follow through. Dedication. Completion.

As we proceed, we’ll see that this speech is in the form of an ancient covenant agreement. Moses is going to recount the action of God for the people, outline the nature of their relationship going forward, and eventually wind up with the consequences for both obedience and disobedience. More than any previous rendering of the law, this one will be what the prophets quote from when they bring charges against Israel for disobedience. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

The book takes the form of a long speech. Moses says he is making the speech to explain the law of the God of Israel before they enter the promised land. The first section, which we read today, is a recounting of the story of Israel so far. Again, this seems repetitive, and possibly boring considering we’ve just read about all of these events over the last couple of months. But remember once more the time period this dates to- there were no such thing as cross references, links, or even indexes. When reading the book of Deuteronomy, one did not have an easy time referencing the middle of the book of Numbers or the 18th chapter of Leviticus. There weren’t divisions like chapter and verse, and this stuff was written on scrolls. We are highly privileged in the structure of our Bible in ways humans have not been for most of history.

So, why the recounting of the journey? Couldn’t Moses just have jumped in with how the people were supposed to behave and be done with it? Well, I suppose he could, but one of the important pieces of covenant agreements in the ancient world was the origin story of the sovereign. In ancient kingdoms, the king would often have a history written about how he came to the throne, especially if he was not the natural heir of the previous monarch. We will see something like this in the book of Samuel, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves again. Of course, these histories were often extremely exaggerated as to the heroic actions of the new king to prove his right to rule. Moses, though, is not extolling his own actions, but the actions of God as ruler of Israel. In fact, he includes his own failure at the rock at Meribah. Moses is giving the people of Israel an argument by story as to why God should be allowed to rule not just because of his great acts of rescue, but also because of their rather weak efforts to rule themselves, including himself in this. Note his emphasis of his own inability to carry Israel, though we also see his frustration with the people’s constant grumbling and it’s effect on him.

This tactic of argument by story is in many ways what the story of the Bible is doing. God is presented as the only legitimate and capable ruler of the people of Israel here, and if we go back to Genesis, the only legitimate and capable ruler of all humans. Deuteronomy is going to outline a specific method of serving this legitimate ruler, and ask the people of Israel to commit to it in absolute terms.

Our reading today wraps up with a charge to the people to follow Joshua, but to charge him with following the rule of God. The leadership of Israel will fall on a human being, but that human being holds leadership by virtue of following the rule of God, not by his own heroic actions and abilities. In a time and culture in which the king was almost always at least partially thought of as a god, the rulers of Israel were to acknowledge their subservience and fallibility. This is a key part of the story going forward: the leaders of Israel are as much under authority as the people they lead. God alone is capable of ruling with justice and righteousness.