Hear, Israel (2 of 2)

In context

Moses tells Israel to remember the forty years: the Lord fed them with manna “that he might teach you that man does not live by bread only, but man lives by every word that proceeds out of Yahweh’s mouth,” and their clothes didn’t wear out (Deuteronomy 8:2–4). Jesus answered the devil with those words after fasting forty days in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–4). In a land of “wheat, barley, vines, fig trees, and pomegranates,” Israel was not to forget the Lord once they were full (8:7–14).

The land was no reward for their goodness, Moses says, and he retells the golden calf: he broke the tablets and lay before the Lord forty days and nights, praying for the people and for Aaron too (9:4–29; Exodus 32). The new tablets were kept in an ark of acacia wood (10:1–5). He recalls, too, how the earth swallowed Dathan and Abiram with their households (11:6).

Moses asks, “what does Yahweh your God require of you,” and answers: to fear him, walk in his ways, love him and serve him (10:12). The Lord “executes justice for the fatherless and widow and loves the foreigner” (10:18). Unlike Egypt, watered from the Nile, the new land “drinks water from the rain of the sky,” the early rain in autumn and the latter rain in spring (11:10–14).