THE SONG AND BLESSING OF MOSES

(A) THE SONG OF MOSES
Deuteronomy 32

CRITICS have debated the date, authorship, and history of this song. For the present purpose it is sufficient, perhaps, to refer to the statement on these points in the note below.

But in discussing the meaning and contents of the song the differences referred to cause no difficulties. On any supposition the time and circumstances, whether assumed as present, or actually and really present to the prophet’s mind, can clearly be identified as not earlier than those of the Syrian wars. Accepted as dealing with that time, this poem takes its place among the Psalms of that period. Its subject is a very common one in Scripture: the goodness of Yahweh to his people, and their unfaithfulness to Him; His grief at their rebellion; His punishment of them by heathen oppressors; and His turning in love to them, along with His destruction of the nations who had prematurely triumphed over the people of God. Practically this is the burden of all the prophecies, as indeed it may be said to be the burden of the whole Book of Deuteronomy itself. Here it is stated and elaborated with great poetic skill; but in the main, the essential thought, there is little that has not already been elucidated.

As regards form the poem is among the finest specimens of Hebrew literary art which the Old Testament contains. Every verse contains at least two parallel clauses of three words or word-complexes each, and the parallelism in the great majority of instances is of the "Synonymous" kind; that is to say, "the second line enforces the thought of the first by repeating, and as it were echoing it in a varied form." But into this as a foundation there is wrought a great deal of pleasing variation. The two-clause verses are varied by single instances or couplets or triplets of four-clause verses; while in two cases, at the emphatic end of sections, in Deu 32:14 and Deu 32:39, the rare five-clause verse is found. Further, the synonymous parallelism is relieved by occasional appearances of the "synthetic" parallelism, in which "the second line contains neither a repetition nor a contrast to the thought of the first, but in different ways supplements and completes it," e.g., Deu 32:8, Deu 32:19, and Deu 32:27.

The contents of the song are in every way worthy of the origin assigned to it, and higher praise than that it is impossible to conceive. Beginning with a fine exordium calling upon heaven and earth to give ear, the inspired poet expresses the hope that his teaching may fall with refreshing and fertilising power upon the hearts of men, for he is about to proclaim the name of Yahweh, to whom all greatness is to be ascribed. In Deu 32:4 ff. the character and dealings of Yahweh are set over against those of the people:-

"The Rock! His deeds are perfect, For all His ways are judgment; A God of faithfulness and without falsity, Just and upright is He."

They, on the contrary, were perverse and crooked; and, acting corruptly, they requited all Yahweh’s benefits with rebellion. To win them from that perverseness, he calls upon his people to look back upon the whole course of God’s dealings with them. Even before Israel had appeared among the nations, Yahweh had taken thought for His people. When He assigned their lands to the various nations of the world He had always before Him the provision that must be made for the children of Israel, and had left a space for them from which none but Yahweh could ever drive them out. For He had the same need of and delight in His people as the nations had in the lands assigned to them, the lot of their inheritance. And not only had He thus prepared a place for Israel from the beginning, but He had led him through the wilderness, through the waste, the howling desert.

"He compassed him about, He cared for him, He kept him as the apple of His eye."

To depict the Divine care worthily, he ventures upon a simile of a specially tender kind, rare in the Old Testament, but to which our Lord’s comparison of His own brooding affection for Jerusalem to that of a "hen gathering her chickens under her wing" is parallel.

"As an eagle stirs up her nest, Flutters above her young; He, Yahweh, spread abroad His wings, He took him, He bore him upon His pinions."

All the hardship and the toil were of God’s appointment to drive His beloved people upwards and onwards. Whatever they might think or believe now, it was Yahweh alone, without companion or ally, who had done this for them, borne them up through it, and had bestowed upon them all the luxury of the goodly land once promised to their fathers. Even from the rocks He had given them honey, and the rocky soil had produced the olive tree. They had, too, all the luxuries of a pastoral people in abundance, and the wheat and foaming wine which were the finest products of agriculture.

In every way their God had blessed them. They had all the prosperity which a complete fulfillment of the will of God could have brought, but the result of it all was unfaithfulness and rejection of Him. Jeshurun, the upright people, as the sacred singer in bitter irony calls Israel, waxed fat and wanton. Instead of being drawn to God by His benefits, they had been puffed up with conceit concerning their own power and discernment. Full of these, they had mingled idolatrous rites with their worship of Yahweh. He had suffered them to read the results of their own unfaithfulness in defeat at the hands of their foes.

Instead of seeking the cause of their ill-success in themselves, they had found it in the weakness of their God. All the victories Yahweh had given them over foes whose strength they had feared were forgotten, and they "despised the Rock of their salvation." They had adopted new and upstart deities whom their fathers had never heard of, who as they had come up in a day might disappear in a day, and neglected the Rock who begat them.

Yahweh on His part saw all this, and scorned His people and their doings. In a vivid imaginative picture the poet represents Him as resolving to hide His face from them, to see what their end would be. Without the shining of God’s countenance there could be but one issue for a people who were so faithless and perverse. He will recompense them for their doings.

"They made Me jealous with a no-God, They vexed Me with their vain idols, And I will make them jealous with a no-people, With a foolish nation will I vex them."

For the fire of Divine wrath is kindled against them. It burns in Yahweh with an all-consuming power, and fills the universe even to the lowest depths of Sheol. Upon this sinful people it is about to burst forth; Yahweh will exhaust all His arrows upon them. By famine and drought; by disease and the rage of wild beasts, and of "the crawlers of the dust"; by giving them up to their enemies, and by overwhelming them with terror. He will destroy this people, "the young man and the virgin, the suckling and the man of grey hairs" alike. Nothing could save them, save Yahweh’s respect for His own name.

"I had said, I shall blow them away, I shall make their memory to cease from among men: Were it not that I feared vexation from the enemy, Lest their adversaries should misdeem, Lest they should say, Our hand is exalted, And Yahweh hath not done all this."

Nothing but that stood between them and utter destruction, for as a nation they had no capacity for receiving and profiting by instruction. If they had been wise they would have known that there was but a step between them and death; they would have seen that their deeds had separated them from Yahweh, and could have but one issue. Their frequent and shameful defeats should have taught them that, for

"How could one chase a thousand, And two put to flight ten thousand, Were it not that their Rock had sold them, And that Yahweh had delivered them up?"

There was no possible explanation of Israel’s defeats but this; for neither in the gods of the heathen nor in the heathen nations themselves was there anything to account for them. Their gods were not comparable to the Rock of Israel; even Israel’s enemies knew as much as that. Israel might forget and doubt Yahweh’s power, but those who had been smitten before Him in Israel’s happier days knew that He was above all their gods. Nor was the explanation to, be sought in the heathen nations themselves. For they were not vines of Yahweh’s planting, but shoots from the vine of Sodom, tainted by the soil of Gomorrah. They were, perhaps, in race, of the old Canaanite stock; in any case they were morally and spiritually related to them, and their acts were such as brought death and destruction with them. In themselves, consequently, they could not have been strong enough to discomfit the people of God as they were doing, nor could they have been helped to that by any favor of His. Only the determination of Yahweh to chastise His people could explain Israel’s unhappy fate in war.

But Yahweh’s purpose was only to chastise. He was in no way finally forgetful of His chosen, nor of the ineradicable evil of their enemies’ nature. The inner character of men and things is always present to Him, and their deeds are laid up with Him as that which must be dealt with, for it is one of the glories of Deity to sweep evil away and to restore anything that has good at its heart. Recompense is God’s great function in the world, and evil, however strong it may be, and however long it may triumph, must one day be dealt with by Him. It is laid up and sealed

"Against the day of vengeance and of recompense, Against the time when their foot shall slip; For the day of their calamity is at hand, And hastening are the things prepared for them."

Without that, justice could never be done to the people of God; and justice should be done to them when they had been brought to the verge of extinction, when, according to the antique Hebrew phrase, there "was none fettered or set free," none left under or over age. Then when all but the worst had come, Yahweh would demand, "Where are their gods, with whom they took refuge, and who have eaten the fat of their sacrifices, and drunk the wine of their drink offerings?" He will challenge them to arise and help in this last disastrous state of their votaries.

But there will be no response, and it will be made clear beyond all doubting that Yahweh alone is God. He will declare Himself, saying:-

"See now that I, I, am He, And there is no god with Me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: And there is none that delivereth out of My hand."

In that great day of Yahweh’s manifested glory He will stand forth in the fullness of avenging power. Before the universe He will pledge Himself by the most solemn oath to bring down the pride of His enemies. In a death-dealing judgment, such as is seen only when the evil elements in the world have brought about a mere carnival of wickedness, and only universal death can cleanse, He will recompense upon evil-doers the evil they have wrought, and to a renovated world bring peace. There are few finer or more impressive imaginative passages in Scripture than this:-

"For I lift up My hand to heaven, And say, (As) I live for ever, If I whet My gleaming sword, And My hand take hold on judgment, I will take vengeance upon Mine enemies, And I will recompense them that hate Me. I will make Mine arrows drunk with blood, And My sword shall devour flesh, With the blood of the slain and the captives, From the chief of the loaders of the enemy."

With this great vision of judgment the poet leaves his people. For them the first necessity evidently was that they should be assured that Yahweh reigned, that evil could not ultimately prosper. With their whole horizon dominated and illumined by this tremendous figure of the ever living and avenging God, their faith in the moral government of the world and in the ultimate deliverance of their nation would be restored.

The poem closes with a stanza in which the seer and singer calls upon the nations to rejoice because of Yahweh’s people. The deliverance worked for them will be so great and so memorable that even the heathen who see it must rejoice. They will see His justice and His faithfulness, and will gain new confidence in the stability and the moral character of the forces which rule the world.

(B) THE BLESSING OF MOSES
Deuteronomy 33

Besides the farewell speeches and the farewell song, we have in this chapter yet another closing utterance attributed to Moses. Here, as in the case of the song, we relegate critical matters to the note below.

We must notice in the first place the remarkable difference in tone and outlook between the blessing and the song of Moses. In the latter evil doing and approaching judgment are the burden; here the outward and inward condition of Israel leaves little to be desired. Satisfaction is breathed in every line, for both temporally and spiritually the state of the people is almost ideally happy. Nowhere is there a shadow; even on the horizon there is scarcely a cloud. Now even an optimist would need a background of actual prosperity to draw such a picture of idyllic happiness for any nation, and we may therefore conclude that the poem has in view one of the few halcyon periods of Israel, before social wrongs had ruined the yeomen farmers, or war and conquest had corrupted the powerful. The nation is as yet faithful to Yahweh, and possesses in peace the land which He had given them to inherit.

The central part of the poem is of course the ten blessings promised to the various tribes, but these are preceded by an introduction (Deu 33:2-5), in which the formation of the people is traced to Yahweh’s revelation of Himself and His coming forth as their King. They are followed also by a concluding section (Deu 33:26-29), in which the God of Jeshurun is declared to be incomparable, and His people are depicted as supremely happy under His protecting care. The language is in parts obscure, and though the general scope is always plain, yet there are verses the meaning of which can only be conjectured. This is especially the case in the introduction. Of the five lines of Deu 33:2, the fourth and fifth as they stand are hardly intelligible; the fifth indeed is not intelligible at all. In Deu 33:3 again, while the first and second clauses are fairly clear, the third and fourth are as they stand untranslatable. But the general signification of the introductory verses (Deu 33:2-5) is that the Divine revelation of Himself which Yahweh bestowed upon His people as He came with them from Sinai, Paran, and Seir through the wilderness, and the establishment of the covenant which made Yahweh Israel’s King, together with the bestowal of an inheritance upon them, is the foundation and beginning of that happiness which is to be described. It is all traced back to the "dawning" of God upon them, His "shining out" upon them from Sinai, and Seir, and Paran. These are named simply as the most prominent ports in that region whence the people came out into Canaan, and where the great revelation had been bestowed. God had risen like the sun and had Shed forth light upon them there, so that they walked no more in darkness. The sight of God was, on this view, the great and fundamental fact in the history of the chosen people. They, like all who have seen that great sight, were henceforth separate from others, with different duties and obligations, with hopes and desires and joys unknown to all beside. And the ground of this condescension on the part of God was His love for His people. He loved them, and the saints among them were upheld by Him. By Moses He gave them a law, which was to hold from generation to generation; and He had crowned His gifts to them by becoming their King when the heads of the people entered into covenant with Him.

Then follow the blessings, beginning with good wishes for Reuben as the firstborn. But the tribe is not highly favored. It is however less severely dealt with than in Jacob’s blessing. There instability and obscurity are foretold of it. Here it would seem as if the fortunes of the tribe were at the lowest ebb, and a wish is expressed that it may not be suffered to die out. From the earliest times the tribe of Reuben seems to have been tending to decay. At the first census taken under Moses the number of Reubenites capable of bearing arms was 46,500 men, {Num 1:21} at the second 43,730. {Num 26:7} Both passages are from P, and consequently this decadence of the tribe must have been present to that author’s mind. In David’s day they had still possession of part of their heritage, but even then their best estate was past. They had allowed many Moabites to remain in the territory they conquered. These most certainly caused trouble and gained the upper hand in places, until before the days of Mesa, king of Moab, as we learn from his inscription, a great part of the cities formerly Reubenite were Moabite or Gadite hands. In Isaiah 15 and 16 again, Heshbon and Elealeh, cities still Reubenite in Mesa’s day, appear as Moabite, so that the bulk of the territory assigned to the tribe must have been lost. This record confirms the view that the blessing was written between Rehoboam and Jehoshaphat, and throws light upon our verse:-

"May Reuben live, and not die, So that his men be few."

The blessing of Judah follows, but in contrast with the great destiny foretold for this tribe in Jacob’s blessing what is here said is strangely short and unenthusiastic:-

"Hear, O Yahweh, Judah’s voice, And bring him to his people; With his hands has he striven for it (his people); And a help against his enemies be thou."

Some whose opinions we are bound to respect, as Oettli, think this refers merely to Judah’s being appointed to lead the van of the invasion, as in Jdg 1:1; Jdg 20:8. In that case we should have to conceive that on some occasion Judah was absent leading the conquest, and got into dangerous circumstances, which are here referred to. But it would seem that any such temporary danger could hardly have a place here. In all the other blessings permanent conditions only are regarded; and the sole historical fact we really know that would explain this reference is the division of the kingdom. But, it may be said, all critics agree that the author of the blessing is a Northern Israelite: now we cannot suppose a Northern man to speak in this way of Judah, for it was the ten tribes that revolted from the house of David, not Judah from them. We must remember, however, that though that is how Scripture, which in this matter represents the Southern view, regards the matter, the Northern Israelites could look at the separation from another standpoint. To those even who were favorable to the Davidic house, and regretted the folly of Rehoboam, it might seem that Judah had first broken away from the kingdom as united under Saul; and the revolt under Jeroboam would appear to be only a resumption of the older state of things, from which Judah had again separated itself. What circumstance can be referred to in the request to hear Judah’s voice cannot now be ascertained; but it is not at all unlikely that some indication of a wish for reunion, perhaps expressed in some public prayer, may have been given in the first period of the separation. The rest of the verse would fit this hypothesis as well as it fits the other, and I think with the light we at present have we must hold the reference to be as suggested.

With the eighth verse {Deu 33:8} the blessing of Levi (one of the two most heartfelt and sympathetic) begins. In it Yahweh is addressed thus:-

"Thy Urim and thy Thummim be to the men (\i.e., tribe) of thy devoted one (ie., Moses or Aaron), Whom thou didst prove at Massah With whom thou didst strive at the waters of Meribah."

In the last lines the relative pronoun is ambiguous, as it mawr refer either to "men," for which in Hebrew we have the collective singular ‘ish, or to "thy devoted one." The last is the more probable; but in either case there is a superficial discrepancy here between the historical books and this statement. In Exo 17:1-7, as well as in Deuteronomy itself, it is the people who strove with Moses and proved or tempted Yahweh. On this account some would have us believe that a different account of the events at Massah and Meribah was in this writer’s mind. But that is the result of a mere itch for discovering discrepancies. It lies in the very nature of the case that there should be another side to it. The beginning was with the people; but just as the wandering in the wilderness is said to have been meant by God to prove Israel, so this insubordination of the people was meant to prove Moses or Aaron, and their failure to stand the proof made Yahweh strive with them. The verse, then, founds Levi’s claim to possess the chief oracle and to instruct Israel first of all upon their connection with Moses or Aaron, or both, since they had been exceptionally tried and had proved their devotion. The next verse, then, goes on to found it also on the faithfulness of the Levites, when they were called upon by Moses {Exo 32:26-29} to punish the people for their worship of the golden calf. In Deu 33:27 and Deu 33:29 of that chapter we find the same phrases,

Deu 33:9 -"Who (i.e., the tribe) said unto his father and to his mother, I have not seen him; Who recognized not his brother, and would know naught of his son; For they kept Thy commandment, And kept guard over Thy covenant."

Being such-

Deu 33:10 -"Let them teach Jacob Thy judgments, And Israel Thy Torah; Let them put incense in Thy nostrils And whole burnt-offerings upon Thine altars."

Here we have the whole priestly duties assigned to the Levites. They are to perform judicial functions; to give Torah, or instruction, by means of the Urim and Thummim and otherwise; to offer incense in the Holy Place, and sacrifices in the court of the Temple. As early as this, therefore (on any supposition we need regard, long before Deuteronomy), we find the Levites fully established as the priestly tribe. Before the earliest writing prophets this was so-a fact of the greatest importance for the history of Israelite religion. The remaining verse beseeches Yahweh to accept the work of Levi’s hands, and to smite down his enemies. Evidently when this was written special enmity was being shown to this tribe; and, as has been said already, the religious proceedings of Jeroboam I would be sufficient to call forth such a cry to Yahweh.

In Deu 33:12 the tribe of Benjamin is dealt with, and it is depicted as specially blessed by the Divine favor and the Divine presence. Yahweh covers him all the day long, and dwells between his shoulders. There can hardly be a doubt that the reference is to the situation of the Temple at Jerusalem, on the hill of Zion, towards the loftier boundary of Benjamin’s territory.

Deu 33:13-17 contain the blessing of Joseph, i.e., of the two tribes Ephraim and Manasseh.

Deu 33:13 -Blessed of Yahweh be his land By the precious things of heaven from above, By the deep which crouches beneath;

Deu 33:14 -By the precious things of the sun, And the precious things of the moons;

Deu 33:15 -And by the (precious things of the) tops of the ancient mountains And by the precious things of the everlasting hills;

Deu 33:16 -And by the precious things of the earth and its fullness. And may the good-will of Him that dwelt in the bush Come upon Joseph’s head, And upon the top of the head of the crowned among his brethren.

Deu 33:17 -May the firstborn of his ox be glorious; And the horns thereof like the horns of the wild-ox; With them may he gore the peoples, even all the earth’s ends together. These (i.e., thus blessed) are the myriads of Ephraim, And these the thousands of Manasseh.

Supreme fertility is to be his, and the favor of Yahweh is to rest upon him as the kingly tribe in Israel. The curious phrase at the beginning of the seventeenth verse has been supposed to be a reference to some individual, Joshua, Jeroboam II, or to the Ephraimite kings as a whole. But the subject of the blessing is the Josephite tribes, and there seems to be no good reason why the reference should be changed here. It cannot, therefore, refer to less than a whole tribe, and as according to Gen 48:14 Ephraim received the blessing of the firstborn, it must be Ephraim which is Joseph’s firstborn ox. This view is confirmed by the last clause of the verse, in which the myriads of Ephraim are spoken of, and only the thousands of Manasseh. Obviously this must refer to times like those of Omri, when the Israelite kingship was in its first youthful energy, and was extending conquest on every hand.

The benedictions which remain are addressed to Zebulun, Issachar, Gad, Dan, Naphtali, and Asher. They need little comment beyond close translation.

Deu 33:18 -And of Zebulun he said, Rejoice, Zebulun, in thy going out; And, Issachar, in thy tents.

Deu 33:19 -"They shall call the peoples unto the mountain; They shall offer sacrifices of righteousness: For they shall suck the abundance of the seas, And the hidden treasures of the sand."

The territory of Zebulun stretched from the Sea of Galilee to the Mediterranean, probably quite down to the sea near Akko, in any case near enough to give it an active share in the sea traffic. Issachar, whose tribal land was the plain of Esdraelon, also shares in it; but the contrast between "thy going out" and "thy tents" implies that Zebulun took the more active part in the traffic. The reference in Deu 33:19, clauses a-and b, is obscure. As the Septuagint reads "they shall destroy" instead of "unto the mountain," the text may be corrupt. It may perhaps be an allusion to the sacrificial feasts at inaugurated fairs to which surrounding peoples were called, as Stade suggests.

Deu 33:20 -And of Gad he said, Blessed be the enlarger of Gad: He dwelleth as a lioness, And teareth the arm, yea, the crown of the head.

Deu 33:21 -"And he looked out the first part for himself, Because there a (tribal) ruler’s portion lay ready; And he came with the heads of the people, He executed the justice of Yahweh, And His judgments in company with Israel."

At this time Gad was in possession of a wide territory, and was famed for courage and success in war. His foresight in choosing the first of the conquered land as a worthy tribal portion is praised, and his faithfulness in carrying out his bargain to accompany the nation in its attack on the west Jordan land.

Deu 33:22 -"And of Dan he said, Dan is a lion’s whelp, Leaping forth from Bashan."

This does not mean that Dan’s territory was Bashan, but only that his attack was as fierce and unexpected as that of a lion leaping forth from the crevices and caves of the rocks in Bashan.

Deu 33:23 -"And of Naphtali he said, O Naphtah, sated with favor, And full of the blessing of Yahweh: Possess thou the sea and the south."

The soil in the territory of Naphtali was specially fruitful, in the region of Huleh and on the shore of the Sea of Gennesaret. These are the sea and the hot south part which the tribe is called upon to take as a possession, and because of which the favor of Yahweh and His blessing specially rested upon it.

Deu 33:24 -And of Asher he said, Blessed above children be Asher; May he be the favored of his brethren, And dip his feet in oil.

Deu 33:25 -"Iron and brass (be) thy bars; And as thy days (so may) thy strength (be)."

The last line is extremely doubtful. The word translated "thy strength" is really not known, and that meaning probably implies another reading; "thy bars" in the previous line is also doubtful. The reference to oil probably implies that the olive tree was specially fruitful, in the country inhabited by Asher, but why he should be specially favored of his brethren can now hardly be conjectured.

In the concluding verses we have an exaltation of Israel’s God and of His people. Speaking out of the time when Israel had driven out its enemies and was in full and undisturbed possession of its heritage (Deu 33:28), the poet declares to Jeshurun how incomparable God is. He rides upon the heaven to bring help to them, and He comes in the clouds with majesty. The God of old time is Israel’s refuge or dwelling, covering him from above, and beneath, i.e., on the earth. His everlasting arms bear His people, up in their weariness, and shelter them there against all foes. He has proved this by thrusting out before them, and by commanding them to destroy, their enemies.

Deu 33:28 -And so Israel came to dwell in safety, The fountain of Jacob alone, In a land of corn and wine; Yea, His heavens drop down dew.

Deu 33:29 -"Happy art thou, O Israel: Who is like unto thee? A people saved by Yahweh, The shield of thy help And the sword of thy majesty! Thine enemies shall feign friendship to thee; And thou shalt tread upon their high places."