Last week I covered the preamble, the recap of the story of how the Jews were coming to the Promised Land, and the differences in the narratives. In Deuteronomy, the author created a different Moses, one who was proactive, strong, and reactive rather than the passive leader that few people wanted who "fell on his face" when he was faced with any form of crises.
This week, that recap ends, there's an introductory segment, and then the rules begin, with a new version of the "10 commandments" (as it is typically called) that the Deuteronomist updated for his later audience.
But let's look at a few of the quirks of the text.
3:25 - Moses' plea
Rather than a passive Moses in Numbers who accepts his fate quietly, the Deuteronomy version has him requesting to be let across to the new land, to have Yahweh change His mind. The Hebrew word na has been translated as "Now!" and "Please!", so depending on which commentator you read, this could either be a demand (Onkelos), or begging (Rashi).
And, of course, this new Moses, is denied. Yahweh responded with, "Enough!" while the old Moses never bothered asking.
3:28 - Joshua
In Numbers 27:18, just before Yahweh tells Moses to attack the Midianites after the Hebrew men dared to have intercourse with the Moabite women and participated in idolatry with Baal-Peor, God tells Moses to put Joshua into the leadership position.
Here, in Deut. 3:28, the same demand for a Joshua leadership occurred, but there's no mention of any genocide, and Midian isn't even worth mentioning. One possibility for this omission is a change in political alliances during the time that this late text was produced. Another could be that the story of wiping out the wrong nation was not a good idea, and just punishing the Jews for their actions was good enough. I wrote about "the wrong genocide" at this blog post.
3:29 - Peor
At the end of the recap of the story, Beth-Peor is mentioned. It's the first time that this location is referred in this manner. In the Balaam scroll (Num. 23:28) Balaam brings Balak to the top of Peor, which seems to be a mountain. And the only other reference in Numbers is of Baal-Peor, which we can assume is the Lord/God of Peor, whomever that God would happen to be.
This description is close to that of Yahweh, who dwelled atop "Mt. Elohim" when Moses first met Him, a God to whom He would be eventually referred to as "Lord".
Gods will often have temples, and places that are referred to by their name. Think of it as a modern equivalent of having a "St. Mary's Church" or calling your town "Corpus Christi". So the Israelites camping by the base of this mountain, at Beth-Peor, could have been by that God's temple, or a place that the worshipers named after Him to honor Him.
As to who this "Peor" was, we don't know. Keep in mind that Scripture often has names whose meanings were lost, obscure, and in some instances, polemical, especially when it came to other Gods.
4:3 - Imperfect Eyes
In Biblical Hebrew, perfect verb forms which speak in the past tense, is the norm. To write such a verb form in the future, a grammatical technique called vav conversive is often used to switch the tense, or else the tense is directly changed. Writing in the present, or imperfect tense, wasn't the writing style of the Book of Genesis, for example.
Deuteronomy, being from a much later period uses imperfect tenses occasionally, which admits to its later period. In this case, what is normally, and incorrectly translated as though it were in the perfect form, as "Your eyes have seen" is actually written imperfectly as "Your seeing eyes" or "Your eyes that are seeing".
It's a grammatical indication of a very late authorship of this text and it's interesting that most translations refuse to use it.
4:7 - Them God
This verse literally reads where foreign nations will say of Israel, "[saying] 'For what nation is so great, that has Elohim They-who-are-close to them' like our God, Yahweh...". You can see how clumsy that would look in a literal translation. When I am getting at is that, in this case, Elohim is followed by a plural form of "close", making it plural.
Given that the Deuteronomist is on-point about there being only one God, albeit an anthropomorphic one, and those who see themselves as monotheistic fans of the Torah always point to Deuteronomy and avoid the other four books of the Torah as proof-texts of there being one God, the most likely explanation here is that the other nations who believe in many Gods are seeing the Israelite God as one of many and referring to Him in this way.
But it is an interesting grammatical point that most people miss.
4:10 - The Threat of the Mountain
The Deuteronomist has been presenting a Deity who is consistent in his actions. And while the earlier books has Yahweh telling Moses to bring the people upon His mountain to meet with Him, another author has Yahweh threatening to kill any living thing that even touches the mountain, Moses excluded, of course.
The Biblical form of "die a death" I render as "fucking die!" since it is more in line with how that expression, a verb-noun combination with the same root, was used in Biblical Hebrew.
The Deuteronomist doesn't have such a disorderly God, and so omits the threat altogether, and instead, the people elect to stand at the bottom and let their strong prophet go and meet with Yahweh in their stead.
4:12 - The One Man Show
The Deuteronomist paints some great imagery, of fire and a booming voice echoing down through the darkness and the clouds for all the people to hear...
But that's not the Exodus version of the story. Yahweh tells Moses "Tell the people this", He never shouts "Hey people, do this!" Instead he talks to Moses about a lot of things, most of which were sacrificial minutiae that would have bored the two million people below, who were not only not the people who were being told these things, but who hadn't heard a peep for weeks and decided that Moses was dead. And Yahweh complains, not to the people who couldn't hear anything, but only to Moses, threatening to kill them all.
The Deuteronomist decided that he needed a more powerful and awe inspiring God, and rewrote that part of the story.
4:20 - Blast it!
The Deuteronomist has a great metaphor for a people who, no matter how strong they may be, will eventually succumb to the outside pressures and become part of the melting pot of society. In this verse, the Deuteronomist refers to Egypt as an "iron blast-furnace" (מכור הברזל). Some translators call it an iron smelting furnace and other such references.
Keep in mind, that iron was considered to be the hardest metal of the time, and melting it was a great simile for assimilation.
Except, of course, that if Moses was saying this, you have a problem since the iron age was many centuries later. Yes, they may have found and used iron meteorites for basic tools, but they weren't into forming them into bed frames (Deut. 3:11) or melting them (Deut. 4:20).
This is another anachronism left by the Deuteronomist which points to his later period of authorship.
The next section deals with a supposed prophecy, which is actually a reminiscence, one that I will cover in the next post.
Thanks for reading!
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