DEVARIM
We now come to the fifth of the 5 books of Moses. This book is known in English as Deuteronomy (the second law) or in Hebrew as Devarim from the first sentence, “These are the devarim (words) that Moses spoke to all Israel.” The book is mainly a selective recapitulation, a retelling, of all that has gone on with Israel from after the revelation at Sinai up until the people stood on the cusp of conquering the Promised land. Like Leviticus, the action completely stops for an extended argument about who the Jewish people should be. An overarching dynamic of this book is the consolidation of religious power into Jerusalem and away from the countryside, and into the hands of what might be called Yahwist only Hebrew thinkers.
Devarim is probably mostly the text that was supposedly unearthed underneath the floor of the Temple in 622BCE (2 Kings 22:8) during the reign of Josiah, a fanatically YHVH only king, one of only three kings of Israel and Judea who did not tolerate in some way the indigenous religious practices followed by the bulk of the community. Deuteronomy also contains some post-exilic material, (material from after the destruction of the first temple in 586 BCE) according to scholars. The choice to add Devarim to the weekly reading cycle by the Jerusalem priests pushes Joshua’s triumphant conquering of the land out of the weekly cycle of reading instituted by Ezra and Nehemiah after the return from the Babylonian exile and instead emphasizes the teachings of law and ritual. Devarim, like Leviticus, is a text with very little material that originated as oral stories. This is a written text where Moses is miraculously transformed from someone heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue (Exodus 4:10) to a fluid speaker, full of words.
The parsha Devarim (1:1-3:22) begins with the people camped just across the Jordan river, a mere 11 days (and 38 years) from Mount Sinai (Horeb) (1:2). The text purports to be Moses’ rather long sermon/benediction of the fractious people he has led from slavery in Egypt to the point where their goal of the Promised land is within their grasp.
But he does not begin with the Exodus or even with revelation at Sinai, as I discuss more below. Instead, Chapter one begins with the recounting of the journey from Sinai with a military emphasis on the wars they fought. Moses discusses the institution of tribal chieftains as a way of managing the unruly group, recounts the sending of scouts to visit the Holy Land, their fear of the inhabitants and then the people’s rebellion against YHVH culminating in the decision to have that generation die out in the desert and not enter the Promised Land (that’s a lot of ground to cover). Chapter two lays out the peaceful relations with the descendants of Esau and Lot (but not Ishmael) and the total war against Sihon who refused peaceful passage to the Hebrews (2:30-36) The same thing happens to Og, king of Bashan. This allows for the settlement of Reuven, Gad and half the tribe of Menashe east of the Jordan river, as we discussed at the end of Numbers. Clearly, the stage is being set for the invasion of the Promised Land. The parsha ends “You shall not fear them, because YHVH, your God: He is the one fighting for you.” (3:22). We have YHVH as a warrior God.
I want to address the following four themes.
Sacred Frauds and the authorship of the book.
Ecstatic religious experiences and everyday religious practice.
The change in Moses.
YHVH as a warrior God
This book is a “sacred fraud”, in the sense that scholars commonly agree that most of it was written during the reign of King Josiah where it was “miraculously” discovered while the High Priest was cleaning up the Temple. (2 Kings 22:8). What scholars call “pious or sacred frauds” are pretty common in the history of religions. The idea is to ascribe the authorship of a given text to some ancient highly respected ancestor to give the teachings in the book more credibility. The Zohar’s ascription to R. Shimon Bar Yochai when it was actually written mostly by Moshe De Leon 1,100 years later is another example from our tradition. There are lots of examples from Buddhism. The Lotus Sutra is arguably the most influential text in East Asian Buddhism. It is ascribed to Gautama Buddha despite the fact that scholars agree it was started about 400 years later and written in multiple stages, with later stages responding to criticisms of earlier parts of the text.
Having a sacred text be a pious fraud doesn’t make it any less important spiritually. I have argued in these commentaries that myth is more important than history; the teachings of the Zohar, (the most important book in Jewish mysticism) for instance, are more important than whether it was actually written by R. Shimon Bar Yochai or Moshe De Leon. If you believe as I do that the first four books were written and edited by humans, Devarim just happens to be a later strata, that’s all. A pious fraud doesn’t make a text less important.
OK, Jared, that’s some interesting history, but so what? And what does any of this have to do with our relationship with the more than human world, a constant obsession of my comments?
Sacred frauds are only possible in the human world, as far as we can tell. We don’t know if Bessie the boss cow, for instance, can say to the other cows in the herd that we should move west for good grass because Elsie, my predecessor’s predecessor when I was just a heifer spoke about good grass to our west, according to my mother. This would be a sacred fraud if Elsie never communicated any such thing. As far as we can tell, this isn’t a possible conversation Bessie could have with her herd. Why? Because different bodies and different minds mean different abilities. Can you be as patient as a rock? I can’t.
Sacred frauds raise the question of authority and our relationship with it. Does the fact that we now believe that the text is a pious fraud weaken its claim to authority? Does the fact that the text has persisted in our imagination strengthen its truth claim? That’s the position of one of my favorite philosophers, Hans-Georg Gadamer about Western tradition. The significance of the persistence of a text is a notion that is under radical attack in academia where “old” has too often become code for “white patriarchal text we should disparage.”
Jewish tradition encourages us to engage with our sacred texts and not just blindly accept them. But that engagement has traditionally had certain boundaries. Those boundaries, for instance, used to include divine authorship of the 5 books. As it became clear from the work of 19nth Century German scholars that the 5 books were written by humans, liberal Judaism has settled into saying that our text is divinely inspired. These boundaries still include monotheism, so it is a significant tension to claim to be Jewish and yet reject monotheism, as I do.
There’s also a related tension around loyalty. It’s possible to be too loyal to a group or idea and thereby justify behavior that wouldn’t otherwise be acceptable. That’s certainly present in parts of the Jewish community around the levelling of Gaza. And it absolutely present in the Palestinian community where support for Hamas has increased because of the October 7nth murders and rapes of Jews because they were Jews. And yet it is also possible to not be loyal enough to anything, with the consequence of a lack of grounding in something larger than ourselves.
Does the fact that we now believe that the text is a pious fraud weaken its claim to authority? Does the fact that the text has persisted in our imagination strengthen its truth claim? Where do you think you are too loyal, where are you not loyal enough or not connected enough?
The question of where to start in the recounting of the history of the Hebrews under the leadership of Moses is a conscious decision. Why does the recounting start with tribal chieftains and not start with Egypt, his marriage to Tzipporah, the burning bush, Exodus or even revelation at Sinai? What follows is obviously speculation on my part.
Our priestly authors want, I believe, to emphasize a vision of centralized worship in Jerusalem run by the priesthood with tribes assigned to specified land and economic and spiritual roles. They are, like all religious establishment bureaucracies, highly suspicious of any kind of religious fervor that isn’t under their control. This includes all the elements of indigenous religion that are routinely condemned in the five books and other writings. But it also extends to canonical experiences like the burning bush, the exodus and the revelation at Sinai. This kind of wild, desert, spiritual energy is difficult to contain and channel. They desperately don't want another Moses, or later on John the Baptist or Jesus. That’s why, I am speculating, Deuteronomy avoids focusing on these ecstatic and foundational experiences.
I’m reminded of the famous Zen saying “Before Enlightenment, chopping wood and hauling water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and hauling water.” Enlightenment is really exciting, that’s what turns us on, motivates us to learn and to practice, but the thoroughly prosaic chopping wood and hauling water is where the rubber meets the road. We have the question of how do we enter ecstasy and see the divine, and we have the question of what do we do afterwards. This book, Devarim, is about what we do afterwards with a healthy dose of suspicion towards directly seeing the divine. Other approaches to spirituality, especially in our day, emphasize the ecstatic element but don’t have enough to say about everyday life.
The religiosity of Devarim is a city based spirituality. It is leery of the countryside, of the wild, or the more than human.
If you were Moses giving a summation of your life, where would you start? How well balanced is your spirituality and/or practice between the ecstasy of visions and the prosaic reality of chopping wood and hauling water?
The Moses of Devarim feels like a really different Moses than the character we’ve seen in the previous three books. There’s just nothing in Exodus, Leviticus or Numbers which suggest that Moses would give any kind of long speech to his people before he died. He remains, in the previous books, “heavy of mouth” and most of his long talks to the people are him saying the words of YHVH.
It feels, to me at least, more likely that the Moses of Exodus-Numbers would climb up the mountain to gaze at the Promised land that he would never enter and look back at the people he was leaving behind and think “good riddance.” He seems like a man who would happily lay down the weary burden of leading the people, not like the kind who would give the really long exhortation that is Devarim. He seems like he was the kind of leader who led by actions, much more than by persuasion through words. What changed? I would suggest that the author changed.
If you were Moses, what would you recount in your life as your deathbed address? What do your choices say about what you value in your life?
“You shall not fear them, because YHVH, your God: He is the one fighting for you.” (3:22). We have YHVH as a warrior God. Warrior Gods are really common in the history of religion. There are Greek Gods such as Ares and Athena, multiple Indian Gods including Durga, Kali, Skanda etc, the Zuni have twin Gods of war etc. Then there is Allah under whose banner the Arabs conquered an enormous amount of territory in the 100 years after Muhammed, the crusades—need I go on? YHVH is a God of war, and yet he is also a God of peace. U’fros aleinu sukkat sh’lomecha. “Spread over us Your shelter of peace.” I had a professor in Grad school who used to insist that Jihad in Islamic tradition was really about the internal war to wrangle the ego into alignment with the divine, rather than pursue its own private interests. Friedman in his book on the Exodus points out that thankfully, most of the bloodthirsty conquest and destruction depicted in the five books of Moses plus Joshua never really happened according to archaeological evidence.
Yet warrior Gods still give me the heebie jeebies. It’s too easy for people to turn this image into actual violence. Further, while we all need to struggle with ourselves to become more and more in alignment with the divine, does the metaphor of war with its destruction—is that really the most helpful metaphor?
I’d like to find some kind of metaphor here rooted in the more than human world that captures our human role in the possible journey to wholeness, to discovering who we truly are individually and in manifesting that in the world. Any suggestions?
How do you feel about the metaphor of a warrior God (or Goddess)? Is there a metaphor you would prefer to capture the unavoidable difficult effort needed to grow and mature?
QUESTIONS
Does the fact that we now believe that the text is a pious fraud weaken its claim to authority? Does the fact that the text has persisted in our imagination strengthen its truth claim? Where do you think you are too loyal, where are you not loyal enough or not connected enough?
If you were Moses giving a summation of your life, where would you start? How well balanced is your spirituality and/or practice between the ecstasy of visions and the prosaic reality of chopping wood and hauling water?
If you were Moses, what would you recount in your life as your deathbed address? What do your choices say about what you value in your life?
How do you feel about the metaphor of a warrior God (or Goddess)? Is there a metaphor you would prefer to capture the unavoidable difficult effort needed to grow and mature?
Josiah hearing the discovered scroll that is the basis of Deuteronomy