1“At that time the LORD said to me, ‘Carve you two stone tablets like the first ones and come up to Me on the mountain, and you shall make you a wooden ark, 2that I may write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets which you smashed, and you shall place them in the Ark.’ 3And I made an ark of acacia wood and I carved two stone tablets like the first ones, and I went up the mountain, the two tablets in my hand. 4And He wrote on the tablets, like the first writing, the Ten Words that the LORD had spoken to you on the mountain from the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly, and the LORD gave them to me. 5And I turned and came down from the mountain and I put the tablets in the Ark that I had made, and they were there as the LORD had charged me.”
6“And the Israelites journeyed onward from Beeroth-Bene-Jaakan to Moserah. There Aaron died and he was buried there, and Eleazar his son served as priest in his stead. 7From there they journeyed on to Gudgod and from Gudgod to Jotbath, a land of brooks of water. 8At that time the LORD divided off the tribe of Levi to bear the Ark of the LORD’s Covenant, to stand before the LORD, to minister unto Him and to bless in His name, until this day. 9Therefore Levi has had no portion and estate with his brothers, the LORD is his estate, as the LORD your God had spoken to him. 10As for me, I stood on the mountain as on the first days forty days and forty nights, and the LORD heard me that time, too, He did not want to bring ruin upon you. 11And the LORD said to me, ‘Rise, go upon the journey before the people, that they may come and take hold of the land that I swore to their fathers to give to them.’
12“And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all His ways, to love Him, and to worship the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your being, 13to keep the LORD’s commands and His statutes that I charge you today for your own good? 14Look, the LORD your God’s are the heavens and the heavens beyond the heavens, the earth and all that is in it. 15Only your fathers did the LORD desire to love them, and He chose their seed after them, chose you from all the peoples as on this day. 16And you shall circumcise the foreskin of your heart, nor shall you show a stiff neck anymore. 17For the LORD your God, He is the God of gods and the Master of masters, the great and mighty and fearsome God Who shows no favor and takes no bribe, 18doing justice for orphan and widow and loving the sojourner to give him bread and cloak. 19And you shall love the sojourner, for sojourners you were in the land of Egypt. 20The LORD your God you shall fear, Him you shall worship, and to Him you shall cleave, and in His name you shall swear. 21He is your praise and He is your God Who did with you these great and fearsome things that your eyes have seen. 22With seventy persons did your fathers go down to Egypt, and now the LORD your God has set you like the stars of the heavens for multitude.”
CHAPTER 10 NOTES
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3. And I made an ark of acacia wood. In the parallel account in Exodus, it is Bezalel, the master craftsman, who fashions the Ark. The version here may elide Bezalel simply to keep an uninterrupted focus on Moses, or—since this is, after all, Moses’s first-person, abbreviated report of the earlier events—he may deem it unnecessary to mention the chief artisan who was, in effect, his agent in carrying out God’s instructions for the making of the Ark.
6. There Aaron died. Abraham ibn Ezra notes a connection with the previous report of Moses’s intercession on behalf of Aaron after the sin of the Golden Calf. He was not killed then, but after forty years he paid the price for his complicity when he died before the people crossed into the promised land.
8. to stand before the LORD, to minister unto Him. The first of these two phrases has the idiomatic sense of “stand in attendance,” so the two phrases are virtual synonyms, deployed to underscore the role of the Levites as authorized officiants in the LORD’s cult.
10. As for me. The initial, emphatic first-person pronoun, weʾanokhi, here serves to mark a transition, taking us back to Moses’s narration of his time on the mountain before God after the interruption of the unit that begins with the death of Aaron and ends with the designation of the Levites for cultic duties. Perhaps a contrast may be suggested between the regularized ministrations of the Levites “standing before the LORD” in the established cult and Moses’s lonely stand before God on the mountain, desperately pleading on behalf of Israel.
12. And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you. These words signal the beginning of a new unit: after Moses’s narrative report of the events at Sinai, we have an exhortation or sermon. Several commentators have noted the similarity between these words and those of the prophet Micah: “It was told you, man, what is good and what the LORD demands of you—only doing justice and loving kindness and walking humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).
14. the heavens and the heavens beyond the heavens. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “the heavens of the heavens.” This structure often indicates a superlative (as in “the Song of Songs,” which is to say, the finest of songs). The basic meaning of the phrase, then, is something like “the utmost heavens,” but it is important to retain the repetition of “heavens” in order to suggest the powerful rhetorical flourish the Hebrew achieves through repetition.
15. Only your fathers did the LORD desire. Deuteronomy touches here on a fraught theological paradox: its version of Creator and creation is resoundingly monotheistic—YHWH is no local deity but the God of all the heavens and the earth, and yet, unaccountably, He has decided to choose this one people and show it special affection.
chose you. This second “chose” is added in the translation in order to clarify the syntax, which otherwise would be confusing in English.
16. you shall circumcise the foreskin of your heart. This bold metaphoric application of the idea of circumcision to the organ of understanding and feeling amounts to a symbolic reinterpretation of the meaning of circumcision. Here it is not merely the sign in the flesh of Abraham’s covenant with God, as enjoined in Genesis 17, but it also betokens the removal of an impeding membrane, achieving a condition of responsive openness to God’s word. Paul surely had this verse in mind when he announced the replacement of the circumcision of the flesh by the circumcision of the heart in Romans.
17. the God of gods and the Master of masters. Although both these epithets in all likelihood are linguistic fossils of an earlier view in which YHWH was conceived as the most powerful god, not the only one, the plausible sense here is a superlative (as in “the heavens of the heavens”), i.e., “supreme God and supreme Master.”
the great and mighty and fearsome God. The imperial monotheism of Deuteronomy often is expressed in this sort of hymnic style, and it is scarcely surprising that this book should have been mined by later Jewish liturgy (this string of divine epithets appears at the beginning of the Amidah prayer recited three times daily).
shows no favor and takes no bribe. There may be a causal connection between this affirmation about God and the previous one: because He is the absolute master of all things, He is absolutely disinterested as judge of humankind since He is beyond all dependence on human gifts and human attempts to curry favor.
18. doing justice for orphan and widow and loving the sojourner. Divine disinterestedness is joined with divine compassion for those in the society who are most vulnerable to exploitation—the widow and the orphan and the resident alien. Israel is then exhorted (verse 19) to emulate this attribute of compassion on the grounds of its own experience as an exploited alien people in Egypt.
21. He is your praise. Probably, this means that it is Israel’s glory to worship the one great God, though the phrase could also mean that the LORD is the object of Israel’s praise.
22. With seventy persons. This concluding sentence is an orchestrated invocation of three antecedent texts: the report of Jacob’s descent into Egypt with seventy persons in Genesis 46 and in Exodus 1 and the promise to Abraham that his seed would be multitudinous as the stars in Genesis 15.