Deuteronomy26chapter 26

Deuteronomy 26:1-2

The last chapter of the stipulations opens with a law that cannot be obeyed until the land is held, given to men who own nothing yet. The place which the Lord shall choose falls here for the fifteenth and last time in this book, and the statutes close without the place ever being named. 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Kings 8:16 are where the naming happens, and the Samaritan Pentateuch reads the phrase as a place already chosen and puts it at Gerizim, which is the dispute the woman raises at John 4:20.

Deuteronomy 26:3-4

Barnes reads verses 1 to 15 as two liturgical acts set at the end of the whole legislation, a basket brought with a spoken formula and a tithe declared with another. The worshipper says the words himself instead of having the priest say them for him, and what he professes is that an oath sworn to the fathers has been kept inside his own lifetime. Gill records the rabbinic tradition, citing Rashi, that the priest put his hand under the owner's hand and waved the basket before setting it down.

Deuteronomy 26:5

A man holding a basket of fruit says the whole history of his nation in one sentence, and it begins with an ancestor who nearly died. Barnes takes the father to be Jacob, born of Syrian parents and twenty years resident in Padan-aram, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown render the Hebrew a wandering Syrian rather than one ready to perish, since the phrase will carry either. The Passover Haggadah takes this verse as the text it expounds clause by clause, so a farmer's confession became the shape of the seder's telling.

Deuteronomy 26:6-8

The confession moves into the first person plural here and stays there, so a farmer born in the land says that the Egyptians afflicted us. What God did is given as a chain, we cried and he heard and looked and brought us forth, which is the order of Exodus 2:23-25. The pairing of a mighty hand with a stretched out arm is this book's standing phrase for the exodus, at 4:34, 5:15, 7:19 and 11:2, and it is put in the mouth of a man carrying produce.

Deuteronomy 26:9-11

The last clause of the confession is the point of it, that the fruit in the basket came out of a land the speaker was given rather than one he won. Worship follows the setting down of the basket and rejoicing follows the worship, with the Levite and the stranger named as sharers because neither of them holds ground, which is how 16:11 and 16:14 order the feasts. Clarke sets verse 11 against a grudging piety and says God intends his followers to be happy in what he has given.

Deuteronomy 26:12-13

The third year tithe goes to the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless and the widow, and is eaten inside a man's own gates rather than at the chosen place, which is the law of 14:28-29. How many tithes Israel actually paid is an old dispute: Clarke reads one tithe diverted to the poor every third year, Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read a second tithe distinct from the Levites' portion of Numbers 18:21, and Josephus in the Antiquities counts three. Gill gives the rabbinic reckoning from Maimonides, that the tithing of the third year was finished at the passover. The declaration attached to it ends on forgetting, which is the failure this book names more than any other.

Deuteronomy 26:14-15

Three denials, and the third is the hardest to place. Clarke reads given ought thereof for the dead as food devoted to an idol, which was often a dead man raised to a god, while Gill and Wesley keep the clause inside Israelite mourning practice, where holy things were not handled by a man with a corpse in his house. The declaration then turns into a prayer, and what the speaker asks for is a blessing on the people and on the land rather than on his own field, which Henry takes as the pattern for public-minded praying.

Deuteronomy 26:16-17

Barnes marks verse 16 as the close of the second and longest discourse of the book, so the stipulations end where they began, on this day, a phrase Deuteronomy uses seventy times. Keeping the statutes with all thine heart and with all thy soul takes back the words of 6:5 and leaves off the third term, might. Verse 17 then states the covenant from the human side, and Barnes notes that avouched renders a Hebrew form meaning caused to say, so Israel has given God occasion to say that he is their God.

Deuteronomy 26:18-19

The same declaration is now made from the other side, and the two verses together are the covenant formula whole: the people have said the Lord is their God, and the Lord has said this people is his. Peculiar people renders the Hebrew segullah, the treasured property of a king, used of Israel first at Exodus 19:5, carried on at Malachi 3:17, and taken up of the church at Titus 2:14 and 1 Peter 2:9. Being set high above all nations in praise and name and honour is the promise 28:1 repeats at the head of the blessings, and holiness is stated here as the purpose the whole arrangement serves.