Deuteronomy 32. 1-43.
A shorter version of this article was published by the Israel-America Renaissance Institute, March 2, 2012.
The Song of Moses is the last thing God commands Moses to tell the Israelites, although not the last thing Moses says to them. Moses’ last words to the Israelites are his blessing, but we do not know that God told him to speak the blessing. God does tell Moses to write the song. This gives the song more authority than the blessing has, and God wants it that way. He wants every child of Israel to hear it and to sing it, to know it.
God chose the Israelites to be His people, among all the peoples of the earth. God set down the terms and conditions of the Israelites’ way of life in His Covenant, His laws. In taking this people as His own, God rules them in the most profound way in which any people can be ruled: God provides the Israelites with a foundation for politics, the activity of ruling and being ruled. He gives them a political regime designed to enable them to serve His purposes and their good..
A political regime consists of four dimensions: the person or persons who rule a community; the institutions by which he or they rule; the common purpose or purposes the rulers intend to accomplish; and the way of life which prevails in that community, given the example the rulers set, the commands they enact, and the directions in which the ruling institutions set them, guide them. A regime fosters a certain character in the people, a character formed as their souls attend to their rulers and live according to their laws and institutions. A good regime will foster good character; the rulers will rule for the good of the ruled. A bad regime’s rulers will rule for their own good, and make the people fear them so much that they will not resist—or so bad rulers hope.
To see this, consider my mother. She was born in Cliffwood Beach, New Jersey in 1912. But what if she had been born of the same parents in Moscow—Russia, not Michigan—that year? It was five years before Lenin and his colleagues changed Russia’s regime with the Bolshevik Revolution. She would have had exactly the same genetic constitution and the same family influences. Yet would she not have grown up with radically different schooling, experiences, expectations? Would she not have been a different person, or at least a different kind of person? Now think of anyone else you know and ask the same questions, make the same kind of comparison. Think of yourself. That is why regimes matter. In many crucial respects, the regime of your time and place makes you who you are.
Who are the Israelites? God’s people. That is who and what they are. God is not only the founder of their regime, as Washington, Jefferson, and others are founders of the American regime; He is their regime, or rather the living and personal center of it: their ruler, their king, now and forever. Through Moses, he sets down their ruling laws and institutions, the form of His regime. And also through Moses, especially through Moses’ example, He shows them the way of life he sets out for them to walk. All three of these dimensions of God’s regime reveal the kind of character God wants His people to have, who He wants them to be. Just as He breathed His spirit into the clay He had formed to make the first man, making man distinct from all the other animals, so God breathed His spirit into the laws and institutions of the Israelites, making them distinct from all the other peoples.
Canaan featured a number of small political communities, allied with and subordinated to Egypt. With the escape of the Israelites, Egypt declined and Canaan succumbed to increasing disorder. Meanwhile, the Israelites declared their subordination not of course to Egypt but to God; the Covenant amounts to a treaty solemnizing that alliance, a treaty they renewed by oath before entering the Promised Land. But this treaty also amounts to something stronger, a constitution, an ‘institutionalization’ of the regime of God for the good, the salvation, of the Israelites. If the basic principle of the treaty is obedience to God, the rightful ruler of the Israelites, the basic principle of the constitution extends that obedience to every aspect of the Israelite way of life while also establishing equality as the principle governing relations among the Israelites themselves. “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God’s: and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me, and I will hear it” (Deuteronomy 1.17). This principle even extends to foreigners who live among the Israelites. God hold all three ‘branches of government’—legislative, executive, and judicial. In a human ruler this would portend tyranny, but God’s unfailing wisdom and justice entitle him to such power.
In liberating the Israelites from Egypt and bringing them to the Promised Land, God does not ‘free’ them in our sense of ‘freedom.’ He does not release them to do whatever they want. There is no such freedom. No one exchanges one regime for no-regime. There is always some form of rule. Even a man alone on a desert island quickly establishes a regime or daily regimen for himself, or he perishes. To achieve a good life, a person or a nation needs wisdom, the practical understanding of how to get from where they are to the right way of life, to the ‘promised land,’ so to speak, of all human striving. Moses sees one big thing: God is the wisest of all, the One who knows man best because He created man, the One who knows what ‘makes man tick’ because He was the one who made man tick in the first place. In choosing the Israelites and legislating for them, not leaving the form of their regime up to the legislators who are all-too-human, God would establish them in the only genuine national greatness.
Thus Moses teaches them:
“Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it.
“Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.
“For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we called upon Him for?
“And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?” (Deuteronomy 4.4-8)
In the words of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, “Every other nation became a nation through its land and then made laws for that land. But you became a nation through the Law and received a land for that Law.” Only the Israelites received their spiritual gift before they received their material gift, but that is the only right order in which to receive things, the only order that ‘has its priorities straight.’ The right way of life, the right regime, provides the men and women who live under it both the means of preserving life and habits conducing to the good life because God, the source of all life, is also the source of the true law that guides His people to that way of life and because God is also the living ruler/protector of the God-obeying, Law-abiding people of God. All other peoples practice idolatry, the purpose of which was to draw the supposed deity to the place where the idol stands. But the true God chooses both the place and the people. An idol is literally mindless. Why would any true mind be drawn to it? Why should a human mind be drawn to it? The First Commandment is also first in importance: “Thou shalt have none other Gods before Me” (Deuteronomy 5.6). That sets the human mind straight, sets down the indispensable precondition for the right regime.
The way of life of God’s regime must be lived internally, in your soul, as well as externally, in your actions, or it won’t be lived externally for long. Nothing could be further from the true character of God’s regime than the claim that Israelites were reduced to a condition of rote memorization of and robotic obedience to God’s Law. On the contrary, God show Himself to be supremely alert to the inner lives of His people, of how they respond to His rule. The Israelites tell Moses that they have heard him. God heard them and said to Moses,
“I have heard the voice of the words of this people, which they spoken unto thee: they have well said all that they have spoken.
“O that there were such an heart in them, that they would fear me, and keep all my commandments always, that it might be well with them, and with their children for ever!” (Deuteronomy 5.28-29)
“Well with them”: God wants not mere life, but the good life, happiness, for His people. Fear of God and love for God should animate the soul of every Israelite, leading each to love but never to fear one another, each an image of that God but not himself God. Every regime that does not depend upon fear must depend upon mutual trust among its citizens. Shared trust in God, shared obedience to His Law, fosters trust among men.
Israelites live under a king, but He is a constitutional monarch. He rules His people through laws, and limits His own actions by treaty, which is a form of law. As Creator, God has no duties in principle. But He does have duties He chooses, announced in His Covenant. He does so for the benefit of His people, as a good parent rules his children, not as a master rules slaves. Israelites were well-situated to know the difference between parental rule and masterly rule; they had already experienced masterly rule in Egypt. In exchanging Pharaoh’s masterly rule for God’s kingly rule they went from tyranny to justice.
However, if God, being all-powerful, cannot successfully be mocked or finally thwarted, He can be disobeyed. Being made in the image of God, God’s people—all peoples—can defy his just rule and attempt to escape all rule, achieve anarchy, or attempt to rule themselves, in some other regime. Further, if God’s rule will truly benefit the ruled, they must consent to it—recognize its wisdom and justice. The Israelites must allow the wisdom and justice of God to enter into their souls. God and Moses tell the Israelites of the blessings, the benefits of such obedience, and then warn them at some length of the curses, the injuries, consequent to disobedience. It is for them to choose.
They choose to ratify the Covenant. But God is not satisfied with this outward consent. He wants the Israelites’ secret, inner consent. He wants His people to love their life-giving God, the One who loves them, gives them life. You did not create yourself; God knows you better than you know yourself and loves you better than you love yourself; because He knows you better than you know yourself He can love you better than you love yourself. He knows what is best for you, better than you do. Moses, who is about to die, without even entering the Promised Land he had led the Israelites toward for forty years, nonetheless urges his people to choose life, the best life, the way of life God has marked out for them in His Covenant.
Moses follows his own teaching; he obeys God. Upon God’s command, he publicly designates Joshua as his successor. If Moses had been a petty, small-souled man he would have made it difficult for Joshua to succeed him. But he tells the Israelites: This is my man, and this is God’s man, now follow him. He further follows God’s commands by writing down the laws, so that the regime will not only have a human ruler designated by God but a set of institutions by which they will be ruled. These laws are written down so that everyone will know them, not only the priests. The equality principle extends to Israelite law and Israelite institutions. Moses leaves the Israelites with a fully-formed regime before they enter the land God promised, and will now deliver.
But God is still not satisfied. God reveals some things to man, but conceals other things. Man can disobey God, but he cannot conceal anything from Him. God tells Moses, “I know their imagination.” He knows that they intend to “forsake me, and break my Covenant which I have made with them” (Deuteronomy 31.16). There are no secrets from God; He knows the people have not really chosen Him and His regime. “For when I shall have brought them into the land which I sware unto their fathers, that floweth with milk and honey; and they shall have eaten and filled themselves, and waxen fat; then will they turn unto other gods, and serve them, and provoke me, and break my Convenant” (Deuteronomy 31.20). Their secret desire for the life of the body has already overcome their public profession of desire for the life according to the way of God, the life of the spirit. They want the fruits of the land without the life-giving God who gave them the land, and created the land that bears the fruits they would consume.
“Now therefore write ye this song for you, and teach it the children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel” (Deuteronomy 31.19). A witness: The people of Israel will be tried and punished by the just God for failing to deal justly with God. Unlike human founders, the Founder-God never dies, as his founding agent, Moses, must do. With God’s founding, with his monarchic regime, there can be no real ‘crisis of succession,’ as the Ruler is eternal. But what of his agent, his human ‘co-founder’?
Consider, for a moment, what Moses must think and feel at this moment, He is 120 years old. He has devoted the final third of his life to teaching the ways of God to the children of Israel—Israel, who held onto God, despite injury, in order to obtain God’s blessing, Israel, who would not let go of God. Israel’s children are all too ready to let go of God. Moses never let go, either, continuing to obey God even after God punished him, preventing him from entering the Promised Land. Now, Moses learns, his whole project will fail. The children of Israel will enter the Promised Land, because God follows through on His promises, upholds His side of the Covenant, but they will betray God and Moses, be killed and driven off. Why should Moses obey God now, write a final song, sing it to this wayward people? One of the great rabbis has written, “You wish to sing praise while the crown is on your head. I would like to hear how you sing after being slapped in the face.” God has now slapped Moses down twice. And yet Moses still obeys.
He does so because he cares more about God’s mission than he does about any mission of his own. Like God, Moses cares about the very long term, when God’s people will return to God, working with Him to constitute the regime of God. The work of justice is not the work of a day, or even of forty years. It will turn out to be the work of millennia. God can wait; Moses, who can no longer wait, nonetheless remains faithful in his consent to the regime of Him who alone is truly just.
Moses had sung to the Israelites before: at the beginning of the exodus, at the parting of the Red Sea by God, at the beginning of the liberation of the Israelites from the regime of tyranny. Now, at the end of the forty-year journey, he sings the song of the founding of the regime of God. Songs are good for liberation, and good for foundings, because songs lodge in your memory. You want people to remember the terms and conditions of their liberation, you need a stirring declaration of independence. Equally, you want people to remember the principles of their founding, the foundation of their regime. You want those principles in their souls, even if, especially if, they are tempted to depart from those principles—as they always are. One way to get a principle into a soul is to sing it in.
The founding principle of Israel is not a principle but a person, the LORD. “Just and right is He.” The LORD is so fundamental that Moses calls him the Rock, whose work is perfect. God had punished Moses after trying to draw water from a rock, instead of relying on the true Rock, the Creator who lives above all rocks and all water. As Rabbi Ari Kahn has written, by calling God the Rock, the Rock of all rocks, so to speak, Moses accepts the justice of that punishment, the logic of preferring the Creator to the things the Creator creates.
Moses says that the teaching of his song will drop as the rain on the grass. He wants his song to have the same effect on Israel as the rain has upon the grass; he wants the earth to “grass grass,” as the Book of Genesis puts it. He wants a kind of new genesis. He knows he will not get one, as the unstable and crooked people will defy the eternal Rock. The grass will not grow; it will wither, refusing God, the source of its life. This is why Moses begins the song by addressing neither God nor the people but the Heavens and the Earth—God’s creation, the result of God’s life-giving intention from the moment of Creation, on.
But Moses soon addresses the Israelites, sternly. “Do ye thus requite the LORD, O foolish people and unwise?” As befits a political community, Moses says “requite,” using the language of justice. Because the people do not fear God they think and act unwisely, imprudently, failing to perceive their own good, failing to honor their benefactor, “the father that hath bought thee,” made thee, established thee, as a father does his child.
Aristotle, the wisest of political philosophers, identifies two kinds of monarchies, two kinds of regimes ruled by one person. The regime ruled by the one for the benefit of the one is a tyranny; it resembles the rule of the master over the slave. The regime ruled by the one for the benefit of the ruled is a kingship, resembling the rule of the parent over the child. The children of Israel are the children of the man who held fast to God. If they let go, they de-constitutionalize themselves. Or so it seems for now.
Moses sings, “Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will show thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee.” Who else could know about the days of old, in this society with no knowledge of books? The elders are the living links to father Israel, and before him father Abraham, and to God, the living Father of fathers, who established Israel as the man whose children God would choose for Himself.
“When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.” Man’s injustice in building the Tower of Babel provoked God to separate humanity into nations. God then justly gave each nation its inheritance, as a father allocates an inheritance to so many sons. He set the bounds of the several nations in relation to the population of Israel. Jacob, who wrestles with God and holds on, inherits God’s blessing and becomes ‘Israel’; at the same time, God ‘inherits’ Jacob. God and Israel belong to one another.
Parents and children also belong to one another. “As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings: So the LORD alone did lead [Israel] and there was no strange god with him.” God did not set Israelites down on the land but lifted them up. As the eagle forces her eaglets out of the nest, catching them on her wings, God makes Israel “ride with him on the high places of the earth.” The advantage of the heights is that you can survey all the earth, select its choicest riches, the fattest lambs, the finest rams, and “the pure blood of the grape,” that is, the best wine, the red wine symbolic of the blood that is life. The eagle tends to her nestlings but readies them to see the whole of Creation, to select the choicest parts of it for themselves, and to deserve what they choose because she has nurtured in them the courage that lets them open their eyes and look at the world without fear, and thus really to see it, calmly and clearly.
Now Moses lets the Israelites know that he knows their hearts, their secret thoughts, having learned from God. “But Jeshuran waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation.” The Israelites would eat the fat of the land, the best of Creation, but then grow fat in the bad sense—surfeiting themselves on the physically best, ignoring the hard, demanding spiritual best: the God who created all physical things. Like spoiled children they will cease fearing their Father, kicking at Him in their tantrum.
When one does not fear God he does not stop fearing altogether. He fears false gods: “They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods, with abominations they provoked him to anger,” sacrificing to devils, gods their fathers did not fear. But such gods did not form you. They are not yours, and you are not theirs; they lack a father’s love of their own. They are not the eagle or the rock; they are neither He who soars to the heights, taking His people with Him, to see all Creation, nor are they the One who underlies everything, the permanent foundation of all Creation and especially of that portion of His Creation that is most like Himself, man, and of that portion of men most ‘his own’: Israel. “Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and has forgotten God that formed thee.” The mind, the spiritual part of man, the part God breathed into the clay—this is what the fattened, spoiled child has covered up. He has turned his mind toward the satiation of the senses. What is more, if he ever stops fearing his false gods he will not kill his fears altogether; he will begin fearing death, and other men.
The true parent is jealous of the beloved child who goes astray. “And when the LORD saw it, he abhorred them, because of the provoking of his sons, and of his daughters. And He said, I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end shall be: for they are a turnabout generation, children in whom is no faith.” God will send them men to fear, but men who “are not a people,” a “nation of fools” who will drive them out of the Promised Land. Rabbi Hirsch suggests that this paradoxical ‘non-people’ means a nomadic people, a people with no land of its own, such as the marauding Amalekites. Whoever these people may be, they will number as one missile among a barrage of curses: fire, arrows, hunger, beasts, and serpents. “The sword without and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray hairs.” No fear of God? Very well then: fear of everyone and everything that can harm. “I would scatter them into corners, I would make the remembrance of them to cease from among men.” They will be the nomads, now. Having forgotten Me, they will be forgotten, no longer one people with one true Ruler, one set of just laws, one right way of life.
This would be an entirely just punishment, were the Israelites all that God needed to consider. But they are not. God sees that if He allowed Israel’s enemies to scatter and destroy His people, the Amalekites would take credit for Israel’s defeat. Were the Amalekites not “a nation void of counsel,” of wisdom, they would understand that they, a no-people, could hardly overcome a people blessed with a rightly-framed regime on its own land. The Amalekites’ regime and all of the regimes that make themselves the enemies of Israel and therefore of God are regimes that rest not on the Rock of salvation but on the soil of Sodom and Gomorrah. Their fruits are bitter and poisonous, not life-giving, not from God, the Source of all Life. God intends Israel to enlighten the nations; Israel’s utter destruction, just ‘in itself,’ would ruin God’s ‘geopolitical’ plan for His Creation, above all for mankind.
Not the Amalekites but God wields the sword of just vengeance. He will punish the Israelites; He will also punish their enemies. His justice towards Israel will not permit the elevation of Israel’s enemies forever. “For the LORD will judge His people, and repent Himself for His servants, when He seeth that their power is gone, and there is none shut up, or left.” He will not merely punish but educate: “And He shall say, Where are their gods, their rock in whom they trusted, which did eat the fat of their sacrifices, and drank the wine, of their drink-offerings?” They are nowhere, and all peoples shall see that they are nowhere.
Moses began his song with the desire to be heard. By its end its hearers have heard what God wants them to see. God has laid out His proofs, made His case before the jury of mankind. “See now that I even I, am He, and there is no god with Me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand. For I lift up my hand to heaven”—swearing, as in a court of law—”and say, I live for ever.”
God is more than the witness in this court. He is also judge and executioner in defense of the laws He has made and handed down. “If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will repay them that hate me. I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh; and that with the blood of the slain and of the captives, from the beginning of revenges upon the enemy.”
Far from mere threats, the promised acts of God give mankind its only genuine hope. “Rejoice, O ye nations, with His people: for He will avenge the blood of His servants, and will render vengeance to His adversaries, and will be merciful unto His land, and to His people” Without such just punishment, dark gods would rule. The law of God expresses the love of God. God stands ready to enforce that love, through that law.
And so Moses, knowing he will never live under God’s regime in God’s promised land, ends his song and tells his people to obey the laws of that regime in that land. Only such command and such consent, from one generation to the next, can save them. “For it is not an empty thing for you; because it is your life: and through this thing ye shall prolong your days in the land.”
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