Deuteronomy32chapter 32

Deuteronomy 32:1-3

Heaven and earth are summoned as witnesses, which is what Moses did the day before at 31:28 and twice earlier at 4:26 and 30:19. Isaiah 1:2 opens his own prophecy with the same summons, so the form outlived the man using it here. Verse 2 asks for the words to fall as rain on grass rather than as a sentence read out, and verse 3 names the subject before the song starts.

Deuteronomy 32:4-6

He is the Rock, his work is perfect: This is where God is given the name Rock, and the song then uses it at verses 15, 18, 30 and 31, with the enemies' rock set against it at verse 37. Numbers 20:7-11 has Moses striking a rock for water inside the forty years he is retelling, and 1 Corinthians 10:4 says of that rock that it was Christ. Verse 6 asks whether this is how a father is repaid, and it lists three things done for the people, bought, made and established.

Deuteronomy 32:7

Remember the days of old, consider the years: This is the last of the fourteen places where Deuteronomy says remember, and nine occurrences of forget stand against them across the book. What is to be held on to is an event rather than a doctrine, and the method given is to ask thy father and thy elders. The men being addressed were children or unborn when Egypt happened, so the song lays on them a duty to question the generation that was there.

Deuteronomy 32:8-9

The King James follows the Masoretic text here, according to the number of the children of Israel, which older writers tie to the seventy nations of Genesis 10 and the seventy souls of Genesis 46:27. The Septuagint reads angels of God, other Greek witnesses read sons of God, and a Deuteronomy scroll from Qumran supports that second reading. Michael Heiser is the best known modern advocate of the sons of God reading and builds a divine council understanding of the Old Testament on it, while Keil and Delitzsch defend the Masoretic text and read the division through Genesis 10. Verse 9 states what the division left, that the Lord's portion is his people and Jacob the lot of his inheritance.

Deuteronomy 32:10-12

He found him in a desert land: The eagle stirring her nest is the second use of that image for the exodus, after Exodus 19:4, where God tells Israel he bare them on eagles' wings. Apple of his eye is the pupil, the part of a man that is guarded without any decision to guard it, and Psalm 17:8 and Zechariah 2:8 use the phrase the same way. Verse 12 shuts the door on any partner in the rescue, so sole authorship is settled before the song turns to the charge.

Deuteronomy 32:13-14

Honey out of the rock and oil out of the flinty rock give the chapter's name for God a second use, since the rock that is his title is also what food is drawn from. Psalm 81:16 repeats the honey out of the rock in a psalm about the same period. Verse 14 is a catalogue of settled produce, butter, milk, lambs, rams of Bashan, wheat and wine, set down as gifts immediately before verse 15 says what was done with them.

Deuteronomy 32:15-16

Jeshurun stands four times in Scripture, here and at 33:5 and 33:26 and again at Isaiah 44:2, and commentators take it from the root for upright, which makes the name affectionate and its use here bitter. What ruins Jeshurun is the danger 6:10-12 and 8:11-14 already named, which is having enough. Lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation sets the failure directly against the name given at verse 4.

Deuteronomy 32:17-18

The Hebrew word behind devils here stands twice in the Old Testament, at this verse and at Psalm 106:37, where it describes sacrificing sons and daughters. Paul writes at 1 Corinthians 10:20 that what the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to devils and not to God, which is this clause carried into a letter about meat offered to idols. Verse 18 puts the charge as forgetting, one of the two commands the whole book runs on, and what is forgotten is the Rock that begat thee.

Deuteronomy 32:19-21

Verse 21 is built as an exchange, a no-god answered by a no-people, with the same two verbs used on both sides of it. Paul quotes the second half at Romans 10:19 to account for the Gentiles hearing what Israel did not, and he takes the jealousy up again at Romans 11:11 and 11:14. Not a people is the phrase Hosea 1:9-10 turns over and 1 Peter 2:10 applies to the church. Verse 20 gives the sentence as a hiding of the face, which Isaiah 8:17 and 54:8 both take up.

Deuteronomy 32:22-23

The word rendered hell here is sheol, the place of the dead, and the fire is said to burn to its lowest part, so what is described has no floor under it. Chapter 28 gave these same judgments as the consequences of a broken covenant, and the song gives them as the act of a person who is angry. Arrows spent upon them makes God the archer, and verse 42 comes back to that image at the end.

Deuteronomy 32:24-25

The list runs through famine, fever, wild beasts and serpents, which is close to the covenant curse of Leviticus 26:22 and 26:25. Verse 25 names four ages in a single line, the young man, the virgin, the suckling and the man of gray hairs, so nobody stands outside the sentence. Lamentations 1:20 describes Jerusalem in the same two halves, the sword abroad and death at home.

Deuteronomy 32:26-27

The judgment stops short, and the reason given is what the enemy would conclude, that their own hand was high and the Lord had not done any of it. Moses had used that argument in prayer at Exodus 32:12 and Numbers 14:13-16, and Ezekiel 20:9 and 20:14 have God give it as his own reason for holding back. Israel's survival is therefore grounded in the name of God rather than in anything Israel is at that point.

Deuteronomy 32:28-30

One chasing a thousand is the promise of Leviticus 26:8 and Joshua 23:10 run backwards, since there Israel does the chasing and here it is the one chased. Sold them is the word Judges 2:14 and 3:8 use for what God does with Israel when it turns, so the defeat is put as a transaction rather than a failure of strength. Their latter end in verse 29 is the thing the song says they will not consider, and the whole chapter was given at 31:19 as a witness for the day they do.

Deuteronomy 32:31-33

Verse 31 makes the enemies the judges of the comparison between the two rocks, which is a court the song does not have to convene for itself. The vine of Sodom sends a reader back to Genesis 19, and Isaiah 5:1-7 works the vineyard image the same way against Judah. Commentators divide over whose vine verses 32 and 33 describe, since verse 31 has been speaking of the adversaries while the surrounding song is charging Israel, and Gill and Keil take opposite sides of it.

Deuteronomy 32:34-35

Romans 12:19 and Hebrews 10:30 both quote verse 35, and both read vengeance is mine, I will repay, which follows the Hebrew more closely than the Septuagint does at this point. Paul uses it to forbid private revenge and Hebrews uses it to warn a church, so one line does two different pieces of work in the New Testament. Jonathan Edwards took the clause their foot shall slide in due time as the text of his 1741 sermon at Enfield, which is how most English readers have met the verse since.

Deuteronomy 32:36-38

Hebrews 10:30 quotes this clause immediately after quoting verse 35, so the two halves of that argument come out of two consecutive verses of the song. Psalm 135:14 repeats the same line. The turn happens here, because judging his people is followed at once by repenting himself for his servants, and the trigger given is that their power is gone. Verses 37 and 38 then put the question to the gods that had been fed, let them rise up and help you.

Deuteronomy 32:39-40

Hannah says the same thing at 1 Samuel 2:6, the Lord killeth and maketh alive, and Isaiah 45:7 states it in the same shape. The lifted hand is the gesture of an oath, used by Abram at Genesis 14:22, and here God swears by his own life because there is nothing higher to swear by, which is the point Hebrews 6:13 makes of the promise to Abraham. Revelation 10:5-6 has an angel lift a hand and swear by him that liveth for ever and ever.

Deuteronomy 32:41-42

The last clause of verse 42 is hard in Hebrew, and the King James reads from the beginning of revenges upon the enemy where other translators give the long haired heads of the enemy, taking the word for the hair of a man under a vow. Isaiah 34:5-6 and 63:1-6 work the same picture of a sword and a stained garment, and Revelation 19:11-15 hands it to the rider on the white horse. The judgment in these two verses falls on the adversaries rather than on Israel, which is the hinge into verse 43.

Deuteronomy 32:43

Paul quotes this line at Romans 15:10 as one of four texts for Gentiles praising God alongside Israel. The Septuagint of this verse is longer than the Hebrew and carries the clause let all the angels of God worship him, a Deuteronomy scroll from Qumran carries a form of it too, and Hebrews 1:6 quotes that clause. Other readers take Hebrews 1:6 from Psalm 97:7 instead, where the Septuagint also has angels worshipping, and the standard commentaries name both sources without deciding between them. The song ends on mercy to his land and to his people.

Deuteronomy 32:44-45

Joshua is given his older name here, Hoshea the son of Nun, which Numbers 13:16 says Moses changed to Jehoshua when the spies were sent out. This is the one place after that change where the earlier form comes back, and the text gives no reason for it. The song is delivered aloud to the whole assembly, which is what 31:19 and 31:22 required, so words written the day before are now in the people's ears.

Deuteronomy 32:46-47

This day falls seventy times in Deuteronomy, and it falls again here in the last thing Moses says to the assembly. What the fathers are told to do with the words is what 6:6-7 told them, take them into the heart and command them to the children. It is your life repeats the terms of 30:19-20, where life and death were set before the people and they were told to choose life.

Deuteronomy 32:48-50

The order had already been given at Numbers 27:12-14, in nearly the same words and without the name Nebo, and here it comes again on the day the song was sung. Gathered unto thy people is the phrase used of Abraham at Genesis 25:8 and of Isaac at Genesis 35:29, and in each place the text keeps it distinct from burial. Aaron is held up as the pattern, and Numbers 20:28 and 33:38 record his death on mount Hor in the fortieth year.

Deuteronomy 32:51-52

Three times earlier in this book Moses gives the reason as the people, at 1:37, 3:26 and 4:21, where the Lord was angry with him for your sakes. Here and at Numbers 20:12 the reason is his own act at the waters of Meribah, that he sanctified God not in the midst of the children of Israel. Both accounts stand in the canon, and the last word spoken to Moses in this chapter sets the second beside the first without softening either. The sight of the land is granted and the entry refused, and chapter 34 carries that out.