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 because he is less than God which is represented by the 49 and the word Torah means this is Moses’ interpretation and not dictated by God directly, etc. This was one of the ways that he knew that these books were genuinely written by the same person, and weren’t corrupted by translators, etc. It was an interesting discussion but I’m not going to rehash it here.

Secondly, Deuteronomy is 3 separate sermons given by Moses to the people of Israel because they were going to the promised land and he was not. He was going to die and so these were his final words to them, kind of like King Benjamin. TB likened this to when Jesus gave his sermon on the mount, that was Jesus expounding on the ways that the people were meant to obey the law then in the new circumstances similarly to how Moses is expounding on the ways the people were meant to live the law once they got to the promised land.

He starts by recounting why they are just then entering the promised land and why they didn’t do it 40 years earlier. At first I didn’t understand why Moses was recounting this and he does it in an accusatory way saying things like “I spake unto you at that time,” but the thing is the people that he did speak to at that time were dead and the ones he was speaking to then were children at the oldest. TB pointed out that he was doing this because he wanted to explain to the people he was speaking to that they could have been born and raised in the land of milk and honey but their parents were disobedient so now their children had to go in and take the land by force instead. Moses recounts him setting up the judicial system that they had because the burden of caring for the problems of that many people were too many so he had to delegate some of the responsibility to the other tribal leaders. He next recounted what happened when the scouts went out to survey the land 38 years previously and they came back and didn’t want to fight because they were scared of the inhabitants of the land and didn’t think that they could beat them.

Considering they had almost exactly the same amount of troops at this time as when they scouted out the first time, it’s interesting to consider just how large and numerous their enemies were initially. I can’t imagine that 38 years before the armies of their enemies had been so numerous that they were outnumbered at 640,000 troops and suddenly now they had significantly less soldiers. It would stand to reason that if Israel’s troop count stayed the same over the 38 year period, their enemies probably had similar numbers to what they had previously, meaning both Israel and their enemies probably had relatively stable populations and didn’t experience an explosion in population or a significant increase in men of fighting age. This means that the enemy facing Israel now would be the same exact threat as the enemy facing Israel back then that their parents were so afraid of. It also begs the question just how many soldiers are we talking about here. When Israel fought the Midianites, they only took 12,000 troops and they won. I don’t know how many soldiers they were facing but I think the number would have been more than 12,000 simply because they took 32,000 virginal women prisoner so the amount of men of fighting age from that population would have been significantly more I would think. That’s just me speculating though. If there were and are 640,000 men of fighting age in Israel’s population, then I wonder just how many enemy troops they are facing that made their parents so afraid 38 years ago. The number 640,000 troops came from a general population of around 3 million people so using that equivalency is going to be my standard. 38 years ago the scouts didn’t survey the whole land, just a small portion of it, so it makes me wonder if the small portion that they did survey contained more fighters than Israel had, how did that small amount of land support 3 million people as well. Does that make sense? I’m just trying to put together if the parents were scared of fighting because there was an actual threat that was so daunting by size and number that they didn’t think they could win or was it just that they didn’t want to risk their lives no matter what the actual threat level was? I hadn’t considered that until now, but it’s interesting to think about.

Anyway, Moses recounted all the promises made by God to the people saying, ‘Dread not, neither be afraid of them. The Lord your God which goeth before you, he shall fight for you.” I’ve never heard the “dread not” before but it is something I needed to hear because I am full of dread right now, dread for the future, any future, dread for the way that things will work out, dread that everything is just going to be bad all the time forever, dread for the rest of the life that I have to live. But reading “dread not” is interesting and definitely something that I needed to hear right now. Moses points out that the people rejected that counsel and refused to fight and that’s why the people were banned from entering the promised land and that’s why their kids had to do all the work now. He also noted that their parents eventually did decide to trust God but that it was too late and they went to battle to take the promised land against God’s advice and they were destroyed. Very much a stark contrast, if they had obeyed when told they would have had God fight their battles for them and won their promised land, but they refused. But when they decided to take matters into their own hands they expected God’s same protection and were sorely disappointed in the outcome. Interesting commentary. There is never a wrong time to be obedient and keep your covenant promises but it does appear that there is a right and wrong time for opportunities which is interesting to think about.