Deuteronomy11chapter 11

Deuteronomy 11:1-3

Love is commanded three times in this chapter, at verses 1, 13 and 22, and 6:5 is where the book first asks for it. Verse 2 draws a line through the audience, because Moses says he speaks to the men who saw the chastisement of the LORD and not to their children, who did not. The word rendered chastisement carries teaching along with correction, so what those men watched God do in Egypt is counted as their schooling.

Deuteronomy 11:4-5

The Red sea is given in one clause and the weight of it falls on the last words, how the LORD hath destroyed them unto this day, which keeps an act done forty years earlier in force at the moment of speaking. Exodus 14:28 is the account it points back to. Verse 5 then covers the whole wilderness period in a single line and names nothing in it, because the men listening supply the detail themselves.

Deuteronomy 11:6-7

Numbers 16 is the account, and there the revolt is led by Korah with Dathan and Abiram beside him. This verse names the two Reubenites and their households and leaves Korah out, and Numbers 26:11 records that the children of Korah died not. Both books stand as they are written. Verse 7 closes the recital on the ground of the whole appeal, that your eyes have seen all the great acts of the LORD.

Deuteronomy 11:8-9

The recital of what they saw turns into a charge, and the first thing promised is strength for the taking of the land. Milk and honey entered Scripture at Exodus 3:8, in what God said to Moses at the bush, and it runs from there to the end of the Torah as the standing description of the place. Long days in the land is the promise attached to honouring parents at Exodus 20:12, and here it is attached to the whole law.

Deuteronomy 11:10-12

Egypt was watered by human labour out of the Nile and the land they are going to drinks water of the rain of heaven, which puts the harvest out of a farmer's hands and under the sky. Commentators differ over what wateredst it with thy foot describes: Adam Clarke takes it of a water engine worked by the feet, and others read it of a man opening and closing the ridges of his channels with his foot in the mud. Verse 12 then says the LORD careth for that ground and his eyes are upon it from the beginning of the year even unto the end, which gives a piece of earth a standing of its own.

Deuteronomy 11:13-15

Verse 13 repeats the demand of the Shema almost word for word, to love the LORD your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, and sets it as a condition with rain hanging on it. The first rain and the latter rain enter Scripture at verse 14, the early rain that softens the ground for autumn sowing and the late rain that fills the grain in spring. The pair carries forward to Jeremiah 5:24, Hosea 6:3, Joel 2:23 and Zechariah 10:1, and James 5:7 uses it of the husbandman waiting for the precious fruit of the earth.

Deuteronomy 11:16-17

The sanction is cut to fit the promise, since the God who gives the rain can shut up the heaven that there be no rain. Solomon prays this clause back at the dedication of the temple in 1 Kings 8:35, and Elijah enacts it at 1 Kings 17:1 when he swears there shall not be dew nor rain these years but according to his word. James 5:17 reads that drought as an answer to a man's prayer and measures it at three years and six months, and Revelation 11:6 gives the two witnesses power to shut heaven that it rain not.

Deuteronomy 11:18-21

This is 6:6-9 said a second time inside the same speech: laid up in the heart, bound on the hand, worn as frontlets, taught to the children sitting, walking, lying down and rising up, and written on the door posts and the gates. Verse 18 addresses the whole nation in the plural where 6:6 addressed one man, and verse 19 drops back into the singular for the house. The promise is enlarged as well, from a man's own days to the days of your children in the land, as the days of heaven upon the earth, a figure Psalm 89:29 uses of David's throne.

Deuteronomy 11:22-23

Five verbs are stacked in one verse, to keep, to do, to love, to walk and to cleave, and the last of them is the word Genesis 2:24 uses of a man joined to his wife. The nations to be driven out are called greater and mightier than Israel, which is the same assessment the spies brought back at Numbers 13:31 and used as a reason to stay out. The difference the verse makes is over who does the driving.

Deuteronomy 11:24-25

Joshua 1:3-4 hands this promise to Joshua almost word for word after Moses dies, from the wilderness and Lebanon to the great river Euphrates, and Genesis 15:18 gave the same span to Abram. The description runs wider than Israel ever held: Joshua 13:1 says there remaineth yet very much land to be possessed, and 1 Kings 4:21 has Solomon reigning from the river to the border of Egypt, which is the nearest it came. The fear and the dread of verse 25 were promised at Exodus 23:27, and Rahab reports them as fact at Joshua 2:9.

Deuteronomy 11:26-28

The close of the whole book is laid out here in three verses, a blessing and a curse set before the people to choose between. Chapters 27 and 28 stage them at length, fourteen verses of blessing against fifty-four of curse, and 30:19 puts the choice one last time as life and death, blessing and cursing. This day falls eight times in this chapter and seventy times in the book, which keeps the covenant from becoming something that happened to an earlier generation.

Deuteronomy 11:29-30

Gerizim and Ebal stand on either side of the valley at Shechem, and the plains of Moreh named in verse 30 are where Abram built his first altar in the land at Genesis 12:6-7. Chapter 27:12-13 assigns six tribes to each mountain, and Joshua 8:30-35 records the ceremony being carried out on the ground. The Samaritan Pentateuch reads the place which the LORD shall choose as a place already chosen and puts it at Gerizim, which is the old dispute behind the woman's words at John 4:20.

Deuteronomy 11:31-32

The general charge of chapters 6 to 11 ends at verse 32 and the statutes begin at 12:1, so all the statutes and judgments which I set before you this day are the ones about to be given. Ye shall pass over Jordan is said by a man standing on the wrong side of it, and Moses has already given the reason he will not cross three times, at 1:37, 3:26 and 4:21. From here the book stops rehearsing what God did and starts setting out what Israel is to do.