Deuteronomy10chapter 10

Deuteronomy 10:1-3

God writes and Moses quarries. The first tables at Exodus 32:16 were the work of God and the writing of God, and here the man supplies the stone while the writing stays God's, which is the one part of the pair the breaking did not change. Moses also makes an ark of shittim wood before Bezaleel builds the ark of Exodus 37:1, and readers have long divided over whether this is a plain chest made to hold the tables until the tabernacle stood or the same ark told out of its order.

Deuteronomy 10:4-5

The ten commandments renders a Hebrew phrase that reads ten words, and Exodus 34:28 and Deuteronomy 4:13 use it of the same set. Moses says of the tables that there they be, a present tense spoken by a man standing in Moab forty years on. 1 Kings 8:9 says that when the ark came into Solomon's temple there was nothing in it save the two tables of stone, and Hebrews 9:4 names the golden pot of manna and Aaron's rod that budded along with the tables, and both stand in the canon with the difference left visible.

Deuteronomy 10:6-7

These two verses break the speech and give a stretch of the wilderness record in the third person. Aaron dies at Mosera here, where Numbers 20:28 and 33:38 put his death on mount Hor, and Numbers 33:31-33 lists the same camps in the reverse order to the one given here. Keil reads Mosera as the district at the foot of Hor, Benjamin Kennicott held the passage to be out of its place, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown say plainly that they cannot account for the insertion at this point. The accounts stand together and the difference is named rather than settled.

Deuteronomy 10:8-9

Levi is given three offices in one verse, to bear the ark, to stand before the Lord and minister, and to bless in his name, and the blessing is the one put into their mouths at Numbers 6:23-27. The tribe that drew the sword at Exodus 32:26-28 is the tribe handed the ark to carry. Verse 9 pays them by taking their land away, since the Lord is his inheritance, which Numbers 18:20 records as God's own word to Aaron.

Deuteronomy 10:10-11

This picks up the second forty days of 9:18 and gives the answer to the prayer of 9:25-29. What Moses asked there was that God would not destroy the people, and the reply comes back in his own words, that the Lord would not destroy thee. The march resumes on a command, and the ground given for the land is an oath sworn to the fathers rather than anything the generation at Sinai had done.

Deuteronomy 10:12-13

And now turns the chapter from what God has done to what Israel owes, and the question is answered in a single sentence with five verbs: fear, walk, love, serve and keep. Micah 6:8 asks the same question in nearly the same words and answers it with three things, to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God, and the two answers repay being read side by side. Love sits in the middle of the list as a thing commanded, as at 6:5, and the last clause says the commandments are for thy good, so the demand and the benefit are named in one breath.

Deuteronomy 10:14-15

The verse hands God everything, the heaven, the heaven of heavens, the earth and all that is in it, and Solomon uses the same phrase at 1 Kings 8:27 to say that the heaven of heavens cannot contain him. Verse 15 then narrows all of that to one family, and the only reason offered is that the Lord had a delight in thy fathers to love them. Deuteronomy 7:7 puts it from the other side, that the choice fell on the fewest of all people, so the text keeps merit out of the account twice over.

Deuteronomy 10:16

The act is commanded of the people here, and the same act is promised as God's own work at 30:6, where the Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart. Twenty chapters separate them, and the second is the shape of the whole book, since what the stipulations demand the closing chapters undertake to supply. Jeremiah 4:4 repeats the command and Romans 2:29 makes circumcision of the heart the thing that counts, while Stephen puts both halves of this verse together at Acts 7:51 when he calls his hearers stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears.

Deuteronomy 10:17-19

the Lord your God is God of gods: God of gods, and Lord of lords is taken up at Psalm 136:2-3 and rests on Christ at Revelation 17:14 and 19:16. The clause that follows turns the titles toward a courtroom, since a God who regardeth not persons nor taketh reward is a judge no one can buy, and Acts 10:34 and Romans 2:11 carry that phrase into the New Testament. The same God who owns the heaven of heavens is then said to feed and clothe the fatherless, the widow and the stranger, and verse 19 makes his conduct the pattern for theirs on the ground of their own years in Egypt, which is how Leviticus 19:34 grounds it as well.

Deuteronomy 10:20-21

Four things are asked, to fear, to serve, to cleave and to swear, and three of them were already given in these words at 6:13. Cleave is the addition, the verb used of a man and his wife at Genesis 2:24, so the tie asked of Israel is put in the language of a bond that holds. He is thy praise sets the praise on God rather than on the people who give it, and the evidence offered is what thine eyes have seen rather than what the fathers reported.

Deuteronomy 10:22

Seventy went down and a nation came out, which is Genesis 46:27 and Exodus 1:5 answered by the promise of Genesis 15:5 that the seed would be as the stars of heaven. Stephen gives the number as seventy-five at Acts 7:14, following the Septuagint reading of Genesis 46:27, and a Dead Sea scroll of Exodus carries seventy-five too, so the difference turns on which text a speaker had in front of him. A chapter that opened on broken stone closes on a head count, and the count is the evidence Moses offers that the oath sworn to the fathers has held this far.