Moses' Farewell - Deuteronomy 31

This is essentially Moses’ farewell address. He says “I’m 120 years old and God said that I’m not going into the promised land, so this is it for me,” essentially. We talked about it previously, that Moses was forbidden by God from going into the promised land and the reason given was because Moses talked out of turn on a certain occasion. I don’t think that was it, I think that was the reason, but just like Joseph Smith not being the one to take the saints to Utah, Moses couldn’t be the one to take the people into the promised land. It had to be another leader, for a lot of reason which we discussed earlier. Moses reiterates to the people that God will win the military victories that it will take to clear the people out of the land of Canaan so that the Israelites can inhabit it. He also calls and talks to Joshua “in the sight of all Israel” indicating that Joshua is Moses’ successor, even though it’s going to be a split authority. Moses was the spiritual AND political leader of Israel, but Joshua isn’t going to occupy both of those roles. Joshua is going to be the political leader of Israel and Aaron’s son or grandson, I’m not sure who at this point, is going to be the spiritual leader of Israel.

Moses and Joshua are told by God to go to the tabernacle together, they do, and the Lord appears to them “in a pillar of a cloud.” God reminds Moses that he’s going to die and after he does, the people will turn away from God and he wants Moses to write a song “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.” This isn’t just a sing song type of thing that is supposed to be happy and frivolous, this is the type of song that teaches the commandments and the history of Israel so that when they fall into disobedience, “when many evils and troubles are befallen them, that this song shall testify against them as a witness; for it shall not be forgotten out of the mouths of their seed.” This song is important because from the dawn of human existence, history, rules, culture, etc have all been handed down by oral tradition because writing wasn’t available for most of it and then when it was, it wasn’t readily available to the masses.

When I was in college in Hawaii, I had to take a Hawaiian studies class and it changed my life in many ways. I had just gotten back from Iraq, my husband at the time was still in the army and getting ready to go back on deployment, so I was deeply steeped in the USA narrative and all that at the time and I had a lot of perspective shifts at that school. One of the things that I learned in that Hawaiian studies class was that for all of Hawaiian history, everything was passed down by oral tradition. The Hawaiian elders would teach the children hours long songs and poems that taught them their history, their religion, the culture, life lessons, really, everything that needed to be taught from one generation to the next would be recitation of these songs and poems, and each one could be hours long. It’s even been said that in primary, singing time is the children’s gospel doctrine. Music and singing in memory recall is very important so it’s no coincidence that God is commanding Moses to write a song for the people to memorize that will teach and remind them of what God has done for them and what God asks of them. It’s also so that when Israel will fall into disobedience, and God knows that they will, then He can point to the song and say “See you were taught, you knew what you were supposed to do.” And I think that this song comprises chapter 32 that we will discuss next week.

Moses calls all the elders together and just keeps reiterating that he know “ye will utterly corrupt yourselves, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you; and evil will befall you in the latter days; because ye will do evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger through the work of your hands.” TB asked why did we think Moses kept saying this over and over, and it’s because he had seen the people turn away from God like a hundred times previously. I was talking to an old bishop the other day about the concept of how Israel just kept rebelling against God so much and I look at my own life and I try so hard to do what is right, and I wonder, “am I rebelling against God just like the Israelites did?” It’s hard to know because there’s no way for me to compare because I have no actual knowledge of what it was like back then. I’d like to think that I’m not that far to be considered rebelling against God, but who knows.