Deuteronomy8chapter 8

Deuteronomy 8:1-2

Remember falls fourteen times in this book and forget nine, and chapter 8 carries both, remember at verses 2 and 18 and forget at verses 11, 14 and 19. What verse 2 asks Israel to hold is an event rather than a doctrine, all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years. The purpose comes in three clauses, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, so the forty years are described as a test God ran and then read.

Deuteronomy 8:3

Jesus answers the first temptation with this verse at Matthew 4:4. The Hebrew carries no noun where the King James supplies word, reading every outgoing of the mouth of the LORD, and Albert Barnes points out on this verse that Matthew follows the Septuagint, which does supply it. Manna is named as a thing they had never seen, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know, and Exodus 16:15 preserves the question the name came from, what is it.

Deuteronomy 8:4-5

Deuteronomy 29:5 says this again and Nehemiah 9:21 repeats it centuries later, so the claim stayed in Israel's memory rather than being made once. Readers divide over what it describes. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take it as a work done on the clothes themselves, and Adam Clarke reads provision so ample that nobody went ragged among a people who carried weavers and embroiderers with them. Verse 5 then names the whole forty years as a father's discipline of a son, the figure Hebrews 12:7 takes up for the church.

Deuteronomy 8:6-7

Verse 6 turns the forty years into a reason for obedience and verse 7 gives the second reason, the land itself. It is described first by its water, brooks, fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills. Deuteronomy 11:10-11 sets that against Egypt, where a man watered his field with his foot from the river, and says this land drinketh water of the rain of heaven. A harvest fed by rain depends on the sky every year, and that dependence is the ground the blessings and curses of chapter 28 stand on.

Deuteronomy 8:8-9

Wheat, barley, vines, figs, pomegranates, olive oil and honey are counted in later Jewish practice as the seven species of the land, and the Mishnah tractate Bikkurim, compiled about AD 200, limits the firstfruits of Deuteronomy 26 to them. Verse 9 turns from food to metal, and the Hebrew word rendered brass is copper, brass being an alloy. Adam Clarke makes that correction on this verse, and the copper workings at Timna and Feinan in the Arabah are what the region is known for.

Deuteronomy 8:10-11

The same clause opens verse 10 and verse 12, when thou hast eaten and art full, and it runs to blessing in the first and to forgetting in the second, so fullness is where the road forks. Jewish practice takes verse 10 as the warrant for the blessing said after a meal rather than before it, and the Babylonian Talmud derives the obligation from this verse at Berakhot 48b. Verse 11 then defines forgetting as not keeping his commandments, so memory in this book is something done rather than something felt.

Deuteronomy 8:12-14

Verse 1 promised that they may live, and multiply, and verse 13 uses that word three times over herds, flocks, silver, gold and all that thou hast, so the thing promised is the thing that endangers. Chapter 6:10-12 warned about houses full of good things which thou filledst not, where the danger is inheriting what another man built; here they build the goodly houses themselves, which is the harder case. The heart lifted up comes first and forgetting follows it, and what gets forgotten is named as the house of bondage.

Deuteronomy 8:15-16

The wilderness gets its own sentence, fiery serpents and scorpions and drought, and the fiery serpents are Numbers 21:6. Water out of the rock is told twice in the Torah, at Horeb in Exodus 17:6 and at Kadesh in Numbers 20:11, and Paul takes up that rock at 1 Corinthians 10:4. Verse 16 repeats the purpose clause of verse 2, humble thee and prove thee, and adds a term the earlier verse did not carry, to do thee good at thy latter end, which sets the forty years inside a longer intention.

Deuteronomy 8:17-18

The danger is put as a sentence a man says in his heart, my power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. Verse 18 answers it by giving the wealth a purpose outside the man who holds it, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, so the money is covenant business before it is anyone's reward. Chapter 9:4-6 presses the same point about the land three times in three verses, not for thy righteousness, and the two chapters run one argument.

Deuteronomy 8:19-20

The chapter closes by putting Israel under the same sentence as the nations it is about to displace, so shall ye perish. Leviticus 18:28 had already warned that the land would spue them out as it spued out those before them, and the ground given here is the same one, disobedience rather than descent. I testify against you this day is the witness formula the book uses again at 30:19, where heaven and earth are called to record.