Good morning! We continue to breeze through the laws of Deuteronomy with today’s reading, Deuteronomy 19-22. A wide variety of rules here address the community’s experiences in the land. Some of these laws are in keeping with those given in Exodus and Numbers, but others are adaptions to the realities of later life in Israel.
Month: March 2016
Deuteronomy 15-18
Good morning! We are cruising right along through Deuteronomy. Today’s passage (15-18) reinforces instructions about the Sabbath and festival celebrations, introduces the later categories of authority of kings and prophets, and gives guidance for the proper limits and use of this authority.
Deuteronomy 11-14
Good morning! Today’s passage (Deuteronomy 11-14) uses both the carrot of promised blessings and the stick of violent retribution to emphasize the importance of obedience to the prescribed ways of God. We also get a sense of later Israel’s concerns in these chapters which purport to address a pre-Israel people.
Deuteronomy 7-10
Good morning! As Moses’ second sermon to the people continues today (Deuteronomy 7-10), he gives instruction for how the Hebrew people are to live in their new land in light of who God is, and what God has done already in salvation history (for the matriarchs/patriarchs, slaves in Egypt, and wanderers in the wilderness). Throughout, the writer emphasizes the God’s benevolence (at least to the “chosen people”) and the need for loyal obedience among the Hebrews.
Deuteronomy 4-6
Good morning! Today’s passage (Deuteronomy 4-6) concludes the first address of Moses to the people about to enter into Canaan and begins a second address. Remember that this is directed to the younger Israelites who have been found worthy to enter Canaan because they came of age after the Exodus. In other words, they have known what it is to rely fully on God.
Deuteronomy 1-3
Good morning! Today we begin Deuteronomy, the last of the five books of Torah which are centrally important to Jews, and so also to Jesus and his peers. This book’s English name means something like “the second law-giving” captures the way the heart of Deuteronomy (chs. 12-26 especially) is a longer version of the core legal covenant between God and the Hebrews described in Exodus 20-23. Though most of Deuteronomy takes the form of addresses by Moses to the Hebrew people on the cusp of entering Canaan, biblical historians have identified this as most likely the book discovered by the reforming King Josiah in 622 BCE (Before the Common Era). Its expansion of the legal code so closely tracks the actions of King Josiah that it was presumably the blueprint for his reforms. Further, Deuteronomy has been informed by the insights of later biblical prophets like Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah, because their themes are present in the ways that earlier Exodus covenant is here expanded. In Deuteronomy we will read far less of priestly regulations, and far more of the moral and ethical underpinnings for righteous Hebrew life.
Pastor Oby Ballinger 