Deuteronomy12chapter 12

Deuteronomy 12:1-3

This verse opens the body of the covenant, and chapters 12 to 26 work through the particulars that chapters 5 to 11 charged in general. The first command is demolition, with altars overthrown, pillars broken, groves burnt, images hewn down and the names of the gods destroyed out of the place. Upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree becomes the standing description of Canaanite worship, and the books of Kings use that formula to report Israel building the same shrines anyway, at 1 Kings 14:23 and 2 Kings 17:10.

Deuteronomy 12:4-5

Verse 4 turns the demolition into a rule about method, since Israel's God is not to be served the way the nations served theirs. Verse 5 gives the alternative, and the phrase the place which the Lord your God shall choose falls fifteen times in chapters 12 to 26, five of them in this chapter, at verses 5, 11, 14, 18 and 26. It never names the place, and the naming happens later, at 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Kings 8:16. The Samaritan Pentateuch reads the phrase as a place already chosen and identifies it with Gerizim, which is the textual root behind the question the woman puts to Jesus at John 4:20.

Deuteronomy 12:6-7

The list of what goes up to the chosen place covers nearly everything a household could give, with burnt offerings, sacrifices, tithes, heave offerings, vows, freewill offerings and firstlings all named. Verse 7 says what happens once they arrive, that they eat before the Lord and rejoice, so the central sanctuary is a place of meals as well as of slaughter. Rejoice falls three times in this chapter, at verses 7, 12 and 18, and every time the household is named alongside the man.

Deuteronomy 12:8-9

Every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes describes the wilderness years as Moses looks back on them, and Judges 17:6 and 21:25 use the same sentence for the years after Joshua. Albert Barnes reads verse 8 as a plain statement that the prescribed order of worship could not be kept while the camp was moving, and he says that consideration governs the reading of the whole book. Verse 9 gives the reason the arrangement is about to change, that they are not yet come to the rest and to the inheritance, and Hebrews 3 and 4 take up that word rest and press it further.

Deuteronomy 12:10-12

Rest is defined here by what it removes, rest from all your enemies round about, so that ye dwell in safety, and only then does the place appear. Verse 12 lists who rejoices, and the list runs sons, daughters, menservants, maidservants and the Levite that is within your gates, which puts the household's servants inside the celebration. The reason attached to the Levite is that he hath no part nor inheritance with you, the arrangement set at Numbers 18:20-24, and the chapter returns to him at verses 18 and 19.

Deuteronomy 12:13-14

The command is restated as a warning to the individual, and take heed to thyself falls three times in this chapter, at verses 13, 19 and 30. Every place that thou seest is what gets ruled out, since a man could pick a hill that suited him and call it holy. Verse 14 answers with in one of thy tribes and still declines to say which, and John Gill notes that neither the tribe nor the town is named anywhere in the law.

Deuteronomy 12:15-16

Notwithstanding opens a concession, and it is a real change from what stood before. Leviticus 17:3-4 required that an ox, lamb or goat killed for the table be brought to the door of the tabernacle as a peace offering, and here a man may kill and eat in all thy gates. Distance is the reason, stated outright at verse 21, and the unclean and the clean may both eat because the meal is common rather than holy. Verse 16 holds one thing back from the concession, the blood, poured on the earth as water.

Deuteronomy 12:17-19

What the concession does not cover is then listed, since the tithe of corn, wine and oil, the firstlings, the vows, the freewill offerings and the heave offering all keep their old destination. Verse 18 repeats the guest list of verse 12 and again names the Levite within thy gates. Verse 19 makes it a standing obligation, that thou forsake not the Levite as long as thou livest upon the earth, which is the same span of time verse 1 put on the statutes themselves. Nehemiah 13:10-12 records the season when the portions were not given and the Levites went back to their fields.

Deuteronomy 12:20-22

Enlarging the border is promised at Exodus 34:24 and again at Deuteronomy 19:8, and here it is the setting for a wider permission. The text lets a man say I will eat flesh, because thy soul longeth to eat flesh, and grants it, where Numbers 11:4-33 meets the same craving with quails and a plague. The earlier passage turns on a complaint against the manna and against God, and this one attaches no fault to the appetite at all.

Deuteronomy 12:23-25

The blood rule is repeated with its reason attached, for the blood is the life, which is the sentence of Leviticus 17:11 where the life of the flesh is in the blood and the blood is given upon the altar to make atonement. Genesis 9:4 laid the same restriction on Noah long before Israel existed, so it does not begin at Sinai. Acts 15:20 and 15:29 keep abstaining from blood in the short list the Jerusalem council sends to Gentile believers, and readers have differed since over whether that ruling was permanent or fitted to a particular moment.

Deuteronomy 12:26-28

Holy things and vows go up to the chosen place, and verse 27 says what happens to the blood there, poured out upon the altar rather than on the ground. The same substance is handled two ways within ten verses and the altar is the whole difference. Verse 28 closes the section with the formula that runs through the book, that it may go well with thee, and with thy children after thee for ever, which verse 25 has already used of the blood rule alone.

Deuteronomy 12:29-31

The danger named here is curiosity rather than force, a man asking how these nations served their gods and deciding to do the same. Snared is the word the text uses, and the same warning stands at Exodus 23:33 and at Deuteronomy 7:16. Verse 31 gives the practice that makes their worship abominable, their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods, and 2 Kings 16:3, 2 Kings 21:6 and Jeremiah 7:31 record Israelite kings and Israelite parents doing that very thing in the valley of the son of Hinnom.

Deuteronomy 12:32

The verse repeats 4:2 almost word for word, add not and diminish not, and in the Hebrew Bible it is numbered 13:1, opening the next chapter rather than closing this one. Proverbs 30:6 and Revelation 22:18-19 carry the same formula about the words of God. A clause forbidding alteration is a standard feature of second-millennium treaty documents, and Meredith Kline in Treaty of the Great King and Kenneth Kitchen in On the Reliability of the Old Testament both set that pattern beside the shape of Deuteronomy as a whole, which bears on the dating of the book and does not settle it.