Deuteronomy4chapter 4

Deuteronomy 4:1-2

Verse 2 forbids adding to the word or taking from it, and Moses repeats the clause at 12:32. Proverbs 30:6 sets the same guard over the words of God, and Revelation 22:18-19 sets it over the book of the prophecy. A prohibition on altering the document is a standing feature of second millennium treaty texts, which is part of what Meredith Kline in Treaty of the Great King and Kenneth Kitchen in On the Reliability of the Old Testament build on when they read Deuteronomy on that pattern. The dating that follows from the correspondence is held one way by those two and another by readers who place the book in the seventh century.

Deuteronomy 4:3-4

Your eyes have seen what the Lord did: The event appealed to is Numbers 25, where Israel joined itself to the Baal of Peor at Shittim and twenty and four thousand died in the plague. Moses picks it because it is the most recent thing that happened to the people standing in front of him, so the evidence he asks them to weigh is their own memory rather than a report. Verse 4 divides the same crowd by one word, they that did cleave, and the mark of the survivors is that they are alive every one of you this day.

Deuteronomy 4:5-6

Moses gives the law an audience outside Israel. Keeping the statutes is called your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, so the watching heathen are expected to draw a conclusion about the people from the way the people live. The verdict is put in their mouths in advance, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people, and 1 Kings 10:6-9 has the queen of Sheba saying something close to it over Solomon's house.

Deuteronomy 4:7-8

Two questions carry the argument and both open with what nation is there so great. The first answer is nearness, God so nigh unto them in all things that we call upon him for, which makes access rather than power the thing Israel has and the nations do not. The second answer is the law itself, statutes and judgments so righteous, so the content of the code is offered as evidence about the God who gave it.

Deuteronomy 4:9-10

Verse 9 is the first of the nine times Deuteronomy says forget, and what stands at risk is the things which thine eyes have seen. The guard against losing them is teaching, and the reach is stated to two generations, thy sons and thy sons' sons, the same span chapter 6 opens with. Verse 10 fixes the day being remembered as Horeb, and the purpose God stated there was that they may learn to fear me all the days that they shall live, and that they may teach their children.

Deuteronomy 4:11-12

What they saw was fire and darkness, and the mountain burned unto the midst of heaven. What they did not see is the weight of the sentence, ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude, and the same denial returns at verse 15 as the ground of the whole argument against images. Exodus 19:16-19 gives the scene from the other side, with the thunders, the thick cloud and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud.

Deuteronomy 4:13-14

The King James renders the Hebrew ten words as ten commandments, and the phrase falls three times in the Old Testament, here and at Exodus 34:28 and Deuteronomy 10:4. Verse 13 marks off what God spoke and wrote himself on two tables of stone from what verse 14 says he commanded Moses to teach. The ten are set apart from the statutes and judgments by who delivered them, and chapter 5 repeats them in full.

Deuteronomy 4:15-18

Verse 15 turns the absence of a form into an argument. Because ye saw no manner of similitude, an image would be a likeness of something God did not show, and the list runs downward from male and female through beast, fowl, creeping thing and fish, back along the order Genesis 1 built up. Paul works the same descent at Romans 1:23, where the glory of the uncorruptible God is changed into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

Deuteronomy 4:19-20

The sun, moon and stars are handled differently from the images of verses 16 to 18, because verse 19 says the Lord thy God hath divided them unto all nations under the whole heaven. What the division means is argued. Some read it as God appointing the lights to all nations for their use, marking seasons and times as Genesis 1:14 has them do, and others read it beside 32:8 as an allotment of the nations themselves to other powers, which Michael Heiser is the best known recent advocate of. Verse 20 states what Israel was given instead, taken out of the iron furnace to be a people of inheritance, a phrase 1 Kings 8:51 and Jeremiah 11:4 both carry.

Deuteronomy 4:21-22

This is the third time in four chapters that Moses gives the reason he cannot cross, after 1:37 and 3:26, and all three say the Lord was angry with me for your sakes. Numbers 20:12 gives the reason from the other side, because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel. Both accounts stand in the canon and neither book reconciles them. Verse 22 states the outcome without softening it, I must die in this land, and the sentence turns at once to what the people will do after him.

Deuteronomy 4:23-24

Forget returns at verse 23, and the thing to be forgotten is the covenant itself. Hebrews 12:29 carries the clause of verse 24 over as it stands, for our God is a consuming fire, and places it at the end of an argument about a kingdom which cannot be moved. Jealous is the word God used of himself in the second commandment at Exodus 20:5, and the fire that spoke at Horeb in verse 12 is now said to be what he is.

Deuteronomy 4:25-26

Moses summons heaven and earth as witnesses, which is what a treaty does when there is no higher court to appeal to, and he does it again at 30:19, 31:28 and 32:1. The offence he foresees is placed after long settlement, when thou shalt beget children and children's children and ye shall have remained long in the land, so the danger named belongs to security rather than to the wilderness. This day falls seventy times in the book, and it keeps the covenant in the present tense of whoever is hearing it read.

Deuteronomy 4:27-28

The sentence is exile, and verse 28 fits the punishment to the offence exactly. A people who wanted an image are given a country full of them, gods which are the work of men's hands, wood and stone. The four things those gods cannot do, see, hear, eat and smell, are the faculties an idol would need to be what its makers want of it, and Psalm 115:4-8 and Isaiah 44:9-20 work the same list out at length.

Deuteronomy 4:29-31

The threat is not left as the last word. Seeking with all thy heart and with all thy soul is the language of 6:5, so what is held out to the scattered is the very thing the covenant asked for at the start. Jeremiah 29:13 repeats the promise to exiles in almost the same words, and Moses grounds it in verse 31 on what God is, a merciful God who will not forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them. Latter days at verse 30 is the phrase Balaam uses at Numbers 24:14, and Deuteronomy takes it up again at 31:29.

Deuteronomy 4:32-33

Moses puts the case as a question of evidence and sets no limit on the search, since the day that God created man upon the earth and from the one side of heaven unto the other. The claim being tested is narrow and checkable, that a whole people heard the voice of God out of the fire and lived. Exodus 20:19 records what they said about it while it was happening, speak thou with us and we will hear, but let not God speak with us lest we die, and 5:24-26 repeats their words back to them.

Deuteronomy 4:34-35

The second question moves from hearing to rescue, a nation taken from the midst of another nation, and the means are counted out in seven terms ending at great terrors. Verse 35 states what the whole demonstration was for, that thou mightest know that the Lord he is God, there is none else beside him. The signs are given a purpose beyond themselves, and 1 Kings 18:39 has the people on Carmel answering Elijah in the same words.

Deuteronomy 4:36-38

Verse 36 joins the two halves of Horeb, a voice out of heaven and a great fire upon earth, and says what both were for, that he might instruct thee. Verse 37 puts the reason behind the exodus further back than the exodus, because he loved thy fathers, therefore he chose their seed after them, so the choice is dated to the patriarchs rather than earned by the generation delivered. Verse 38 gives the direction of the whole action in three clauses, to drive out nations greater and mightier, to bring thee in, to give thee their land for an inheritance.

Deuteronomy 4:39-40

Verse 39 asks for more than assent, know therefore this day and consider it in thine heart, and it extends the claim over heaven above and the earth beneath. Jewish liturgy has closed the Aleinu prayer with this clause for many centuries, which is one measure of how the verse has been read. Verse 40 attaches the plain consequence, that it may go well with thee and with thy children after thee, and it ends the address where verse 1 began it, on statutes and commandments to be kept.

Deuteronomy 4:41-43

The address stops and a piece of narrative is set down. Moses acts on Numbers 35:9-15, which required six cities of refuge, by severing the three that lie east of Jordan in territory already taken, and Joshua 20:8 names the same three when the western three are added. The right protected is narrow and the text says so, the slayer which should kill his neighbour unawares and hated him not in times past. Bezer, Ramoth and Golan fall one to Reuben, one to Gad and one to Manasseh, which divides the east bank evenly among the tribes that hold it.

Deuteronomy 4:44-46

These verses are a heading rather than a speech, and they mark where the historical prologue ends and the stipulations begin. Testimonies, statutes and judgments is the threefold description the book keeps using of its own contents, and 6:20 puts the same words into a child's question. The place is given as the valley opposite Beth Peor, which is the ground of the plague named back at verse 3, so the law is delivered on the site of the last apostasy.

Deuteronomy 4:47-49

These verses record the first land Israel actually holds, the kingdoms of Sihon and Og taken in chapters 2 and 3. Og is the king 3:11 singles out as remaining of the remnant of giants, with a bedstead of iron nine cubits long by the cubit of a man. Verse 48 gives Hermon the name Sion, a different word from the Zion of Jerusalem, and 3:9 records that the Sidonians and the Amorites each had another name again for the same mountain.