Deuteronomy23chapter 23

Deuteronomy 23:1-2

The chapter opens on who is shut out, and what being shut out means is disputed, since Barnes reads the bar as one on naturalization and public office rather than on living in the land, and Henry says plainly that interpreters are not agreed. The word rendered bastard is mamzer, which Clarke takes of the child of an incestuous or forbidden union rather than of any child born outside marriage. Isaiah 56:3-5 answers verse 1 by name, promising the eunuch who takes hold of the covenant a place and a name in God's house better than of sons and of daughters. Acts 8:27 has an Ethiopian eunuch on the road home from Jerusalem with the scroll of Isaiah open in front of him.

Deuteronomy 23:3-6

The charge against Moab and Ammon is two things done on the road out of Egypt, no bread and water offered and Balaam hired to curse, which Numbers 22 to 24 tells at length. Verse 5 says the Lord turned the curse into a blessing because he loved thee, and Nehemiah 13:1-2 quotes that whole charge back, the turned curse included, on the day the book of Moses is read aloud in Jerusalem. Deuteronomy 2:29 says the Moabites who dwelt in Ar sold Israel food on that same road, both verses stand in the book, and Keil reads the charge here as the conduct of the nation rather than of every man in it. Ruth the Moabitess is the case a reader sets against verse 3, since Ruth 4:17 makes her the great-grandmother of David and Matthew 1:5 names her in the line of Christ, and the readings offered are that the law bars naturalization rather than marriage, which is where Barnes lands, or that the Hebrew is masculine and reaches the men of Moab only, or that Ruth came in as a proselyte.

Deuteronomy 23:7-8

Edom is spared on the ground of kinship, for he is thy brother, and the reckoning holds after Genesis 27 and after Numbers 20:18-21, where Edom came out with the sword to refuse Israel passage. Egypt is spared on the ground that thou wast a stranger in his land, so the house of bondage is kept off the list that holds Moab, and Barnes reads the oppression as the act of the Pharaohs rather than the will of the people who once fed Joseph's brothers. The grandchildren of both may enter in the third generation, against the ten generations of verse 3.

Deuteronomy 23:9-14

Verse 9 puts the army in the field under the law it lives under at home, keep thee from every wicked thing, and what follows is bodily rather than moral. A man unclean by night goes outside until he has washed and the sun is down, which Leviticus 15:16 had already required, and every man carries a paddle on his weapon to cover his own waste beyond the lines. Verse 14 gives the reason, that the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp, which is the language of Leviticus 26:12 where God says he will walk among his people. Clarke observes that the same rules keep an army from disease, and he takes the health of the camp as a mercy carried inside the command rather than as the ground the text gives for it.

Deuteronomy 23:15-18

The runaway is not returned, which reverses the codes around Israel, since the laws of Hammurabi put to death the man who hid a fugitive slave and paid a reward to whoever brought one in. He settles where it liketh him best, in the place which he shall choose, and chapters 12 to 26 use that phrase fifteen times of the place which the Lord shall choose. Barnes and Keil both read the case as a slave escaping a foreign master into Israel rather than one Hebrew fleeing another. Verses 17 and 18 bar prostitution kept at a shrine and bar its wages from the house of the Lord for any vow, and Gill notes that the word rendered whore is the ordinary word for a consecrated woman turned to its opposite.

Deuteronomy 23:19-23

Interest may be taken of a stranger and not of a brother, which is the line Exodus 22:25 and Leviticus 25:35-37 draw, and Psalm 15:5 and Ezekiel 18:8 make lending without it a mark of the righteous man. Henry reads the permission toward the stranger as evidence that interest is not oppressive in itself, while Ambrose and the canonists after him took the passage as a bar on lending at interest at all. Vows are voluntary, and verse 22 says outright that it is no sin to make none, though what has gone out of the lips binds once it is spoken, which Ecclesiastes 5:4-5 repeats almost line for line. Numbers 30 sets out the law of vows at length, and Judges 11:30-39 is where one spoken in haste is carried through to its end.

Deuteronomy 23:24-25

A man passing through another man's vineyard may eat his fill and may carry nothing away, and the same line is drawn in the standing corn, where the hand is allowed and the sickle is not. Clarke points out that this is the law the disciples were keeping when they plucked the ears of corn at Matthew 12:1, so the complaint brought against them was about the day and not about the grain. Henry passes on the Jewish reading that the rule was framed for the hired labourer in the harvest, whose mouth is not to be muzzled any more than the ox that treads out the corn.