Moses promulgates anew, with extraordinary solemnity, the law delivered on Mount Sinai. The adult people whom he had brought forth from “the house of bondage” had all died in the wilderness in punishment of their repeated sins and forgetfulness of the divine power and goodness shown in their deliverance. Of the “Three Deliverers,” Aaron and Mary had been called to their rest; even Moses, because he had once publicly doubted the power of his good God, was not to set foot within the promised land.
The new people, who obeyed Moses as they came within sight of the beautiful country of Palestine, were nearly all born in the wilderness; they had not tasted of the bitterness of Egyptian servitude, nor had they witnessed the terrible display of Jehovah’s power at the passage of the Red Sea. It was necessary, therefore, that he who, under God, had been the guide and parent of the nation in the crisis of its fate, should remind his followers of what God had done for them, and explain how truly the law which He gave them was a law of love—that the Covenant of the Most High with Israel was one pregnant with untold blessings to all who would faithfully observe it, while its violation was sure to be visited by the most awful chastisements.
Hence the Book is mainly taken up with the record of three discourses of the great Hebrew Lawgiver, delivered, all of them, in the plains of Moab, on the lofty eastern side of the Jordan, overlooking the Dead Sea. The country itself, the theatre of the most terrible vengeance of the outraged Majesty of Heaven on a favored but deeply sinning race, was eloquent of the suddenness and certainty of the divine retribution. Abraham, the father of the mighty multitude now assembled around Moses, had in his day witnessed the fate of the guilty “cities of the plain” of Jordan. A brackish sea now rolled its sullen waters where they had once stood in their beauty and pride amid all the fairest fruits of earth. Beyond and above toward the north, extended the fertile regions amid which Abraham and Sara had once tarried as pilgrims, and which had been promised as a lasting homestead to their posterity.
How well might Moses, himself about to close his earthy career, urge upon that posterity with all the fervor of a patriot and a parent the duty of being true to the God of Israel, of observing lovingly that Law which distinguished them from all the peoples of the earth, and fidelity to which should ensure them victory over every foe, with all the blessings of uninterrupted peace and prosperity!
1. The first discourse (chaps. i. to iv. 40) vividly recalls the causes for which their immediate ancestors were not allowed to take possession of the national territory. Then follows a most touching and eloquent exhortation to the perfect obedience in which their fathers had been so lamentably deficient. “And now, O Israel, hear the commandments and judgments which I teach thee: that doing them, thou mayst live, and entering in mayst possess the land which the Lord the God of your fathers will give you” (iv. 1).
There is nothing in the Old Testament more impressive or more fruitful in lessons of heroic generosity for parents and children and all who fear God, than these sublime pages, into which the dying Moses seems to have poured his great soul. “Behold, I die in this land (of Moab); I shall not pass over the Jordan: you shall pass and possess
