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The 10 Commandments... Again - Deuteronomy 5

Chapter 5 is basically just a rehashing of the 10 commandments but there are a few points that are interesting. The first has to do with the reference in the last chapter when Moses asked the people if they heard God speak to them from fire. In verse 4 Moses reminds the people that when the original covenant was made with their parents at Mount Horeb 38+ years ago, “the Lord talked with you face to face in the mount of the midst of the fire.” Moses also reminded the people that when God spoke to them directly, they were afraid and asked Moses to intervene on their behalf and have God speak to him so that they wouldn’t have to. TB mentioned that after the people told Moses that they were too scared to hear God personally and that they wanted Moses to talk to God and just tell them what He said, the people did stick around to wait and hear what God had to say, they just packed up all their stuff and went home. That’s interesting to consider because if the God of the whole universe is spe...
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Scattering & Gathering of Israel - Numbers 4

Chapter 4 is very long and TB makes a significant claim about it saying that Deuteronomy 4 is one of the top 10 chapters in the entire Bible that shows the nature and character of God and lectures for 2 ½ hours about it. I personally didn’t take it to be that way and I think that one of the reasons for that is because TB interprets the scattering and gathering of Israel to mean the literal dispersal of Hebrews from the land of Canaan and then the return of their DNA descendants that specific geographic space. From that perspective, yes, this chapter is very important to that narrative, I don’t share that perspective and we can talk about it later but that’s probably why I disagree with his emphasis on this chapter’s importance and I didn’t realize it until just now. Moses remind the Israelites what happened when they rebelled by committing adultery with the foreign women that infiltrated them under king Balak. The punishments for that disobedience was severe and Moses wants them to re...
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Recounting 2 - Deuteronomy 2 & 3

Chapters 2 and 3 are essentially Moses just rehearsing to the Israelites what they had just done as far as what their journey entailed recently. He talks about that they were supposed to pass by the Edomites and the Moabites because they are kin historically and God wasn’t going to give Israel that land anyway so don’t mess with the people. The problem became when Balak the king of Moab tried to curse Israel and ended up taking Balaam’s advice to infiltrate them and tempt them to commit sexual sin with his people so that God wouldn’t favor them anymore. To be fair, the Hebrew men shouldn’t have been tempted and shouldn’t have committed adultery with those women, but they were punished as well. The irony is that Balak was so worried about the Israelites conquering his people that he messed with the situation enough to get them destroyed even though it was never God’s intention to destroy them. Balak, with all his meddling, got his people destroyed when it wouldn’t have happened if he wo...
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Recounting - Deuteronomy 1

As we begin Deuteronomy there are a few important things to note as an introduction. First is that the name Deuteronomy is only the name of his book in the Christian version of the Bible. It means “the second law” because this is Moses giving the law again to the Hebrews before he dies. TB says that it’s because as they are about to go into the promised land, this is him interpreting the law for them once they get there because at this point they had only been living the law while wandering in the wilderness and things were going to change so they needed to know how to live the law once they settled. There was also a long discussion about how the first four books of the Torah, the 7th letters of the first 49 letters spelled out God’s name which indicated that those books were dictated by God to Moses, where as the book of Deuteronomy doesn’t have that. Instead it has the 7th letter of the first 48 letters spells out Torah. 48 letters instead of 49 indicate that this is from Moses becau...
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What's the Lesson - Numbers 33-36

The rest of Numbers, chapters 33-36, were mostly instructions on how to operated once in the promised land of Canaan and so we will go over them quickly. There are some interesting aspects of it, but for the most part it’s just names of people I don’t know and laws that we’ve already gone over before. The first part is a basic travel log of the journey taken by Israel from Egypt to where they are at that point. The significant part about that is that there are 42 points covered by this log, and TB points out that archeological evidence and other accounts don’t match up to this record and he hypothesizes that it is recorded this way because of the significance of the number 42. A quick google search says that the number 42 is significant because it “represents divine creation, transition, and spiritual journeys.” That makes sense that this record is less about where they physically were and more about the spiritual journey of Israel from disobedient freed slaves to the more subservient,...
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Wrong Side of the River - Numbers 32

Like I mentioned yesterday, the Midianites in general weren’t just one single tribe in one single place, they were spread out covering a lot of territory and when Israel defeated them, they only defeated one part of that territory. After they won their battle, the leaders from the tribes of Rueben and Gad noticed “hey this is some really great grazing land here and we have a lot of grazing livestock so maybe we should just stay here instead of going in to the land of Canaan and getting a land inheritance there. The group of “princes” approach Moses and Eleazar with this idea and TB makes sure to note that they aren’t demanding this or refusing to move forward like the previous people were, they just wanted to explain their position and see what Moses has to say about it. Their request at first took Moses back because he was like “you guys want to have your lands here and just not go into Canaan and fight for your brethren to obtain their lands of inheritance?” Basically, he didn’t wa...
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Midianite Battle - Numbers 31

Chapter 31 has a lot to do with the previous chapters concerning the event with Balaam and Balak where the king Balak hired the “priest” Balaam to curse Israel with evil so that Balak could defeat them in battle. At the end of their encounter, there was an uplifting account of Balaam refusing to curse Israel because it was so obvious to him that God had already blessed them and Balaam refused to go against God. Everyone went home and if that was the end of the story then that would have been just fine. The problem became that Balaam went back to Balak and told him that Israel was only protected by God if they were righteous to Him and encouraged Balak to send in his women to corrupt the Israelite men, and the Israelite men were happy to be corrupted. This resulted in God sending a plague upon the people, killing 24,000 of them and only ended because Phineas, a prominent priest and Eleazar’s son, speared an Israelite man while having sex with a Midianite women, killing them both. Becaus...
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