PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Deuteronomy
Harper, Andrew · 161,366 words · 197 reading sections
Preface.
Transcriber's note: Transcriber's Note: Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals. * * * * * _Editor of "The Expositor"_ NEW YORK A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON 51 EAST TENTH STREET 1895 PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND OLD TESTAMENT EXEGESIS, ORMOND COLLEGE WITHIN THE UN…
350 wordsSECTION 2_The Authorship And Age Of Deuteronomy_
PAGE THE AUTHORSHIP AND AGE OF DEUTERONOMY 1 THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT 48 DEUT. i.-iii. THE DECALOGUE--ITS FORM 60 DEUT. v. 1-21. THE MEDIATORSHIP OF MOSES 106 DEUT. v. 22-33. LOVE TO GOD THE LAW OF LIFE 116 DEUT. vi. 4, 5. EDUCATION--MOSAIC VIEW 146 DEUT. vi. 6-25. THE BAN 168 DEUT. vii. THE BREAD OF THE SOU…
1,121 wordsSECTION 3_The Authorship And Age Of Deuteronomy_
As regards authorship, the ordinary opinion still is that Deuteronomy was written by Moses. This was the view handed over to Christianity in pre-critical ages by the Jews, and accepted as the natural one. But if the Mosaic authorship of the whole contents of the other books of the Pentateuch is now given up, much more …
726 wordsSECTION 4_The Authorship And Age Of Deuteronomy_
[5] Cf. _Pentateuch Kritische Studien_ in Luthardt's _Zeitschrift_, 1880. Under these circumstances, the question immediately suggests itself to what degree this representation of Moses' legislation can be regarded as purely and unmixedly Mosaic. Was this legislation given in the main or entirely by Moses, and, if it…
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Now, as it happens, in the course of the analysis of the Pentateuch it has come to be all but universally acknowledged that Exod. xx.-xxiii. form part of a document which can be traced, dovetailed into others, from Genesis to Joshua, and perhaps beyond it. This document has been called by Wellhausen the Jehovist docume…
733 wordsSECTION 6_The Authorship And Age Of Deuteronomy_
[8] Josh. xxiv. 30. The next step is suggested by Gen. xxxvi. 31-39, a passage from JE in which a list of Edomite kings is given with this heading: "These are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom before there reigned any king over the children of Israel." That sentence clearly cannot have been written before kin…
902 wordsSECTION 7_The Authorship And Age Of Deuteronomy_
The theory held by those who most strenuously deny this assertion is that all the laws in the Pentateuch are Mosaic in the strict sense, that the codes were given by Moses in the order in which they now stand in the Pentateuch, and that they were enacted with all their modifications in a period of not more than forty y…
1,527 wordsSECTION 8_The Authorship And Age Of Deuteronomy_
Now if so far matters have been far from clear on the traditional supposition of the date and order of these codes, a glance at Deuteronomy will produce absolute confusion in every mind. As we have seen, Deuteronomy represents Moses as restricting sacrifice most rigorously to one altar after the building of the Temple …
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[10] Cf. for the passages on which this statement is founded Driver's _Introduction_, p. 80, and note in small print. The first attempt we know of to centralise worship was made by Hezekiah; a second and more strenuous attempt was made under Josiah, but the work was not actually accomplished till after the Return fro…
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[11] Dillmann, _Exodus and Leviticus_, p. 199. [12] Josh. iii. 14-17 and _passim_. In Deuteronomy, on the contrary, the priests are very prominent; they are called, however, the Levitical priests, or priests simply, but never sons of Aaron. The whole tribe of Levi is regarded as priestly in some sense. They constitut…
699 wordsSECTION 11_The Authorship And Age Of Deuteronomy_
It is suggested, in reply, that allusions in Deuteronomy _imply_ the existence of a system of a much more elaborate kind than any that we could construct from the explicit statements of the book, and that is certainly true. But no reasonable interpretation of these allusions can lead us to a system identical with that …
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[14] See further in exposition of chapter xvii; xviii. The same conclusions follow when the regulations are examined which bear upon the support of the priestly tribe. The outstanding matters in this department are tithes and firstlings. Space will not admit of a full discussion of these topics; but if the reader will…
652 wordsSECTION 13_The Authorship And Age Of Deuteronomy_
The actual date of Deuteronomy still remains to be settled. Already it has been brought down to post-Solomonic days. How much later must it probably be put? The book must have been written before the eighteenth year of Josiah, 621 B.C., for the Book of the Law which was then found in the Temple was undoubtedly not the …
1,058 wordsSECTION 14_The Authorship And Age Of Deuteronomy_
But it may still be asked, what are we to think of the Mosaic speeches, which, as has been seen, contain, to say the least, much non-Mosaic matter? The answer probably is that in these, as in the laws, the author relies upon earlier documents. From the appearance in the codes of laws which would have little or no meani…
658 wordsSECTION 15_The Authorship And Age Of Deuteronomy_
[21] _Answer_, pp. 41 f. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that to the minds of the working ministry and of their earnest fellow-labourers, who come into constant contact with the actual needs of men, the change should be unwelcome. But it cannot now, in my judgment, be avoided. Even the best and most scholarly …
673 wordsSECTION 16_The Historic Setting Of Deuteronomy_
Whatever may be the date of the first publication of Deuteronomy, there can be no doubt that it was accepted by Josiah and the people of his time with an energy and thoroughness of which we find no previous example. Its main lessons were learnt and put into practice by them, and from that period the religious conceptio…
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The causes of this are not far to seek. During the greater part of Hezekiah's reign Isaiah had received only moderate support. According to his own vision of his future work, he was to preach without success; he was to say, "Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye, but perceive not"; and, so far as the mass of t…
1,268 wordsSECTION 18_The Historic Setting Of Deuteronomy_
All this apostasy brought with it worldly success. Manasseh reigned long, and under him the land had peace. Assyria _could_ have no quarrel with a people and a king who anticipated its very desire by eager submission. Peace brought material prosperity. The land was so naturally fertile that it always grew rich when war…
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Now it is obvious that the whole hopes of the religious party would naturally be fixed upon it. They would turn to it as eagerly as the Reformers turned to the Bible, after it had been rediscovered by Luther at Erfurt. For obviously, if the people could be got to acknowledge the law, the axe would be laid at the root o…
549 wordsSECTION 20_The Divine Government_
DEUT. i.-iii. After these preliminary discussions we now enter upon the exposition. With the exception of the first two verses of chapter i., concerning which there is a doubt whether they do not belong to Numbers, these three chapters stand out as the first section of our book. Examination shows that they form a sepa…
949 wordsSECTION 21_The Divine Government_
That is the ruling thought in Scripture about Revelation. God reveals Himself in history; and by the persistent thoroughness with which the Scriptural writers grasp this thought, the unique and effective character of the Biblical Revelation is largely accounted for. Other nations, no doubt, looked back at times upon wh…
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For though there were in the history of that particular nation, and in the line of preparation for Christ, special miraculous manifestations of God's power and love, which do not now occur, yet no judgment of the course of history is worth anything, even to-day, which does not occupy essentially the Biblical position. …
722 wordsSECTION 23_The Divine Government_
That was the picture the Deuteronomist spread out before the eyes of his countrymen, to the intent that they might know the love of God, and might see that safety lay for them in a willing yielding of themselves to that love. The disastrous results of their wayward and faint-hearted shrinking from this Divine calling i…
855 wordsSECTION 24_The Divine Government_
Now we know that the author of Deuteronomy had two at least of the ancient historical narratives before him which are combined in Exod. iv.-xi., and he takes up their thinking. Expressed in modern language, the thought is this. When men are found following their own will in defiance of all law and all the restraints of…
557 wordsSECTION 25_The Decalogue--Its Form_
DEUT. v. 1-21. As the fourth chapter belongs to the speech which concludes the legislative portion of Deuteronomy both in contents and language (see Chapter XXIII.), we shall pass on now to the fifth chapter, which begins with a recital of the Decalogue. As has already been pointed out, the main trunk of the Book of D…
1,452 wordsSECTION 26_The Decalogue--Its Form_
[22] See this brought out in detail in Robertson Smith, _Old Testament in Jewish Church_, p. 431. [23] Wellhausen, _Prolegomena_, p. 439. But there is still other, and perhaps stronger evidence, that the universality of the Decalogue is no indication of a late date. On the contrary it would seem, from Professor Muir…
705 wordsSECTION 27_The Decalogue--Its Form_
But if it be Mosaic, at first sight the conclusion would seem to be that the form of the Decalogue given in Exodus is the more ancient, and that the text in Deuteronomy is a later and somewhat extended version of that. Closer examination, however, tends to suggest that the original ten words, in their Mosaic form, diff…
656 wordsSECTION 28_The Decalogue--Its Form_
"I am Yahweh thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. "I. Thou shalt not have any other gods before Me. "II. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. "III. Thou shalt not take the name of Yahweh thy God in vain. "IV. Remember (_or_ Keep) the day of rest to sanctify …
1,172 wordsSECTION 29_The Decalogue--Its Substance_
That the Decalogue in any of its forms must have been the work of one mind, and that a very great and powerful mind, will be evident on the most cursory inspection. We have not here, as we have in other parts of Scripture, fragments of legislation supplementary to a large body of customary law, fragments which, because…
1,126 wordsSECTION 30_The Decalogue--Its Substance_
The first four commandments show that Yahweh was already conceived as a spiritual being, removed by a whole heaven from the gods of the Canaanite nations by whom Israel was surrounded. These were mere representatives of the powers of nature. As such they were regarded as existing in pairs, each god having his female co…
702 wordsSECTION 31_The Decalogue--Its Substance_
[25] Granting that the commandment did not exist, one asks, _What_ was it in Yahwism which determined the Jerusalem Sanctuary to be imageless? The arguments advanced by Kuenen and Wellhausen for a contrary view, beyond those we have just been considering, rest on an undue extension of the prohibition to make any lik…
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A moment's thought will show how the teaching that Yahweh alone was to be worshipped broke away from the main stream of Semitic belief, and prepared the way for the ultimate prevalence of the belief that God was one. That He was supersensuous, so that He could not rightly or adequately be represented by any likeness of…
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The remaining commands, those which deal with the relations of men to each other, are naturally introduced by the fifth commandment, which, while it deals with human relations, deals with those which most nearly resemble the relations between God and man. Reverence for God, the deliverer and forgiver of men, is the sum…
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After the fifth, the commandments deal with the purely human relations; but in coming down from the duties which men owe to God, this law escapes the sordidness which seems to creep over the laws of other nations, when they have to deal with the rights and duties of men. The human rights are taken up rather into their …
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Some of those who adopt the other view do so in the interests of the authenticity of the commandments. They say, We must be careful not to put into them any idea which transcends what was possible in the days of Moses; otherwise we must agree with those who bring down the date of these marvellous ten words to the middl…
954 wordsSECTION 36_The Decalogue--Its Substance_
[32] See Page Renouf, _Hibbert Lectures_. Moreover the acceptance of the view now opposed does not get rid of the necessity for supernatural enlightenment in Israel. It only transfers it from an earlier to a later time. For if the knowledge of Israel in Moses' day was below the Wolgal standard, then it would seem inex…
681 wordsSECTION 37_The Decalogue--Its Substance_
"Far-off Divine event To which the whole creation moves." The Divine purpose of the revelation must be the true measure of the thoughts revealed, and the Divine purpose can best be learned by studying the results as they have actually evolved themselves in the course of ages. Consequently, while the fundamental point…
957 wordsSECTION 38_The Decalogue--Its Substance_
How gradually, and how naturally, the advancing thoughts and changed circumstances of Israel affected the Decalogue may be seen most clearly in the differences between its form as originally given, and as it is set forth in Exodus and in Deuteronomy. If the original form of these commandments was what we have indicated…
975 wordsSECTION 39_The Decalogue--Its Substance_
The truth is that all along the leaders of Israel had a quite overawing sense of the moral greatness of Yahweh and of the stringency of His demands upon them. "Be ye holy, for I am holy," was His demand; and so among this people, as among no other, the sense of sin was heightened, till it embittered life to all who ser…
768 wordsSECTION 40_The Decalogue--Its Substance_
The result was that human nature as it is seemed to the one much more worthy of respect and much less seriously compromised than it did to the other. Comparing man as he is, only with man as he easily might be, the Greeks took a much less serious view of his state than the Hebrews, who compared him with God as He had r…
1,091 wordsSECTION 41_The Mediatorship Of Moses_
"Stern Lawgiver! yet Thou dost wear The Godhead's most benignant grace Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon Thy face." That expresses the Hebrew feeling also. Drawn upwards by the infinite and unchangeable love and goodness of Yahweh, the Hebrews felt the clog of their innate sinfulness as no other rac…
842 wordsSECTION 42_The Mediatorship Of Moses_
On one point only does the parallel seem questionable. If we followed it alone as our guide, we should have to set down the mediatorship of Moses, as a mere part of the method, as belonging to the formal side only of the great revelation. In other words, we should have to ask whether the statement we have in Deut. v. 2…
1,024 wordsSECTION 43_The Mediatorship Of Moses_
But there is another subsidiary reason why a mediator was necessary to Israel at this stage. Behind all that Moses taught his people lay necessarily the ancient popular religion of the Hebrews. Now, except in so far as it may have been changed in Egypt, that was in its main features the same as the religion of the othe…
687 wordsSECTION 44_The Mediatorship Of Moses_
Another point on which this narrative of Deuteronomy corrects and restores that which the tendency of modern thought has perverted is an even more important one. We have seen that the Old Testament view, as stated here, and as it is interwoven with the central fibres of the Old Testament conception, is that all men who…
565 wordsSECTION 45_Love To God The Law Of Life_
DEUT. vi. 4, 5 In these verses we approach "the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments" which it was to be Moses' duty to communicate to the people, _i.e._ the second great division of the teaching and guidance received at Sinai. But though we approach them we do not come to them for a number of chapters yet. W…
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Under these circumstances, it was not merely natural that the author of Deuteronomy should dwell with insistence upon the hortatory part of his book; it was necessary. He could not feel Wellhausen's haste to approach his restatement of the law. To him the exhortation was, in fact, the important thing. Every day he live…
1,321 wordsSECTION 47_Love To God The Law Of Life_
Israel was saved from the same spiritual disease by the great words which succeed the assertion of Yahweh's oneness. The writer of Deuteronomy did not desire to set forth this declaration as an abstract statement of ultimate truth about God. He makes it the basis of a quite new, a quite original demand upon his country…
755 wordsSECTION 48_Love To God The Law Of Life_
As we have already seen, the earlier narratives represent the men to whom Moses spoke as acknowledging that they could not, as yet at any rate, bear to remain in the presence of Yahweh. Between their God and them, therefore, there could be no relation of love properly so called. There was reverence, awe, and chiefly fe…
680 wordsSECTION 49_Love To God The Law Of Life_
[36] Augustine's _Confessions_, p. 64. Of course with the mass this assent had little depth; but in the hearts of the true men in Israel the joy and assurance of their great discovery, that Yahweh their God was open to, nay, desired and commanded, their most fervent affection, soon produced its fruit. From the fragmen…
1,123 wordsSECTION 50_Love To God The Law Of Life_
[38] _Geschichte des Alterthums_, p. 249. [39] _Religion of the Semites_, p. 330. But besides the small kingdoms which immediately surrounded Palestine, Israel had for neighbours the two great empires of Egypt and Assyria. She was exposed therefore to influence from them in even a greater degree. Long before the Exod…
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[40] Cf. Wiedemann, _Religion der alten Aegypter_, p. 3. [41] Wiedemann, p. 1, 35. [42] Cf. Meyer, p. 71. [43] _Egypt under the Pharaohs_, Brodick's edition p. 423. Of the Assyrian religion and its influence it is also difficult to speak in this connection, for notwithstanding the amount of translation that has bee…
752 wordsSECTION 52_Love To God The Law Of Life_
[46] Meyer, p. 178. Cf. however Sayce, _The Higher Criticism and the Monuments_, p. 114. Sayce maintains that the Assyrian epic attributes the flood to the moral guilt of men. But that is by no means proved, for it is more than doubtful whether sin to the Assyrian was not always mainly a ceremonial matter. On this…
681 wordsSECTION 53_Love To God The Law Of Life_
Moreover, that God should seek or even need the love of man threw other light on the Old Testament religion. If, without revelation, Israel had widened its mental horizon so as to conceive Yahweh as Lord of the world, it may be questioned whether it could have kept clear of the gulf of pantheism. But by the manifestati…
781 wordsSECTION 54_Love To God The Law Of Life_
In all these ways the religious life of the individual was being cultivated and strengthened; but this demand made in Deuteronomy lifts that indirect refreshment of soul, for which the cultus and the covenants made no special provision, into a recognised position, nay, into the central position in Israelite religion. T…
849 wordsSECTION 55_Love To God The Law Of Life_
In the first place, selfishness dies out. Those to whom God has given Himself have no more to seek. They have reached the dwelling "of peace imperturbable," and know that they are secure. Nothing that they do can win more for them; and they do those things that please God with the free, uncalculating, ungrudging forget…
798 wordsSECTION 56_Love To God The Law Of Life_
But it was not so perverted in all. There always was an Israel within Israel that refused to let go the truths they had learned, and kept up the succession of men inspired by the free spirit of God. Even among the Pharisees there were such--witness St. Paul--men who, though they were entangled in the formalism of their…
373 wordsSECTION 57_Education--Mosaic View_
DEUT. vi. 6-25 Those great verses, Deut. vi. 4, 5, form the central truth of the book. Everything else in it proceeds from and is informed by them, and they are dwelt upon and enforced with a clear perception of their radical importance. There is something of the joy of discovery in the way in which the unity of Yahwe…
1,232 wordsSECTION 58_Education--Mosaic View_
To him, as to all ancient lawgivers, a commonwealth without religion was simply inconceivable, and the hampering, confusing, and confused difficulties of to-day lay far beyond his horizon. Parents must take over this great heritage and lay it deeply to heart. They must then make it the subject of their common talk. The…
757 wordsSECTION 59_Education--Mosaic View_
Further, its qualities especially fit it for use in the education of children. In many respects a child's mind resembles the mind of a primitive people. It has the same love of concrete examples, the same incapacity to appreciate abstract ideas, and it has the same susceptibility to such reasoning as this: God has been…
673 wordsSECTION 60_Education--Mosaic View_
In the remaining verses of the chapter, vv. 10-19, we have a warning against neglect and forgetfulness of their God, and an indication of the circumstances under which it would be most difficult to remain true to Him. These are uttered entirely from the Mosaic standpoint, and are among the passages which it is most dif…
685 wordsSource & rights
Public domain in the USA; original historical text digitized by Project Gutenberg.
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Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.