Deuteronomy30chapter 30

Deuteronomy 30:1-3

Chapter 28 ended with Israel scattered, and chapter 30 opens after the scattering has happened. What starts the return is memory, thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, which is the order Moses already gave at 4:29-31. The words rendered turn thy captivity at verse 3 fall nowhere else in the King James Bible. Adam Clarke read the gathering from all the nations as reaching past the return from Babylon, and Albert Barnes set the passage beside Solomon's prayer at 1 Kings 8:46-50.

Deuteronomy 30:4-5

Nehemiah prays this promise back to God at Nehemiah 1:8-9, quoting the clause about being cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven and asking for the gathering it names. Verse 5 sets the return above the first possession, since the land is the land thy fathers possessed and the increase is multiply thee above thy fathers. Moses is describing a second entry into the land to a people who have not made the first one yet.

Deuteronomy 30:6-7

Deuteronomy 10:16 laid the act on the people as a command, circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and twenty chapters later the same act is something God undertakes. Jeremiah 4:4 repeats the command while Jeremiah 31:33 and Ezekiel 36:26 carry the promise forward, and Paul takes up circumcision of the heart at Romans 2:29. Verse 7 then puts the curses of chapter 28 on the enemies, so the same words land somewhere else. Adam Clarke held that the promise remained unfulfilled in his own day, and John Gill read it of a future turning of the Jewish people to their Messiah.

Deuteronomy 30:8-10

Verse 9 hands back the blessing vocabulary of 28:4 and 28:11, the fruit of thy body and of thy cattle and of thy land, so the promise is measured in the terms the curse used. John Wesley counted the title the Lord thy God twelve times in these ten verses and set that against chapter 28, where the same speaker says the Lord. John Gill argued that the if of verse 10 carries the force of for, since verse 6 has already promised the obedience verse 10 speaks of, while other readers keep the condition standing as a condition.

Deuteronomy 30:11-13

Two errands are named and both are impossible, going up to heaven and going over the sea, and the point of naming them is that neither is required of anybody. Paul quotes these verses at Romans 10:6-7 and reads them of the righteousness which is of faith, and where Moses says beyond the sea Paul says who shall descend into the deep, applying it to bringing Christ up from the dead. Albert Barnes held that Paul's reading gives the true intent of the words themselves, and John Wesley read the passage of a law made practicable by gospel grace. The commandment is called near on the ground that it has already been spoken to them, in the wilderness, that day.

Deuteronomy 30:14

Romans 10:8 quotes this verse and names what is near, the word of faith, which we preach. Paul keeps the two organs Moses used and works them in the other order, the heart believing unto righteousness and the mouth making confession unto salvation at Romans 10:9-10. Moses ends on doing, that thou mayest do it, so nearness in this chapter is measured by whether a thing can be obeyed.

Deuteronomy 30:15-16

Moses puts the whole covenant into one pair of choices, life and good against death and evil, which is the form he used at 11:26-28 with a blessing and a curse. Verse 16 then defines the life by three verbs, to love the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments, so the choice is described by conduct. Love stands first and the keeping follows from it, in the order of 6:5-6.

Deuteronomy 30:17-18

What verse 17 describes is a heart turning to other gods, and Matthew Henry observed that the ruin threatened here hangs on apostasy rather than on every failure in the particulars of duty. The word denounce at verse 18 falls once in the whole King James Bible and this is the place. Moses says it of himself, I denounce unto you this day, which puts a man's own testimony behind the sentence he reads out.

Deuteronomy 30:19

Heaven and earth are summoned as witnesses, called to witness at 4:26, to record here and again at 31:28, and addressed directly when the Song opens at 32:1. Second millennium treaties between a great king and a vassal close with a witness clause of the same kind, a correspondence set out by Meredith Kline in Treaty of the Great King and by Kenneth Kitchen in On the Reliability of the Old Testament, and it bears on the dating of the book without settling it. Then comes the single imperative of the passage, therefore choose life. The reason attached is the next generation, that both thou and thy seed may live.

Deuteronomy 30:20

Three verbs close the address, love, obey and cleave, and cleave unto him is the word Moses used at 11:22 and 13:4 and Joshua repeats at Joshua 22:5. He is thy life, and the length of thy days puts the life set before them in a person rather than in a span of years. The last clause reaches back past Moses to the oath sworn to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, so a chapter that opened among the nations of the scattering closes on a promise older than the law it has been arguing for.