1 It shall happen, when all these things are come on you, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before you, and you shall call them to mind among all the nations, where Yahweh your God has driven you,
Behold, I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil;
I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse: therefore choose life, that you may live, you and your seed;
yet if they shall repent themselves in the land where they are carried captive, and turn again, and make supplication to you in the land of those who carried them captive, saying, We have sinned, and have done perversely, we have dealt wickedly; if they return to you with all their heart and with all their soul in the land of their enemies, who carried them captive, and pray to you toward their land, which you gave to their fathers, the city which you have chosen, and the house which I have built for your name:
But from there you shall seek Yahweh your God, and you shall find him, when you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul. When you are in oppression, and all these things are come on you, in the latter days you shall return to Yahweh your God, and listen to his voice:
Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you shall listen to the commandments of Yahweh your God, which I command you this day; and the curse, if you shall not listen to the commandments of Yahweh your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods, which you have not known.
Behold, you have driven me out this day from the surface of the ground. I will be hidden from your face, and I will be a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth. It will happen that whoever finds me will kill me."
"'You shall make for yourselves no idols, neither shall you raise up an engraved image or a pillar, neither shall you place any figured stone in your land, to bow down to it: for I am Yahweh your God. "'You shall keep my Sabbaths, and have reverence for my sanctuary. I am Yahweh. "'If you walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. Your threshing shall reach to the vintage, and the vintage shall reach to the sowing time; and you shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. "'I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and no one will make you afraid; and I will remove evil animals out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land. You shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall chase ten thousand; and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword. "'I will have respect for you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and will establish my covenant with you. You shall eat old store long kept, and you shall move out the old because of the new. I will set my tent among you: and my soul won't abhor you. I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you will be my people. I am Yahweh your God, who brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their slaves; and I have broken the bars of your yoke, and made you go upright. "'But if you will not listen to me, and will not do all these commandments; and if you shall reject my statutes, and if your soul abhors my ordinances, so that you will not do all my commandments, but break my covenant; I also will do this to you: I will appoint terror over you, even consumption and fever, that shall consume the eyes, and make the soul to pine away; and you will sow your seed in vain, for your enemies will eat it. I will set my face against you, and you will be struck before your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you; and you will flee when no one pursues you. "'If you in spite of these things will not listen to me, then I will chastise you seven times more for your sins. I will break the pride of your power, and I will make your sky like iron, and your soil like brass; and your strength will be spent in vain; for your land won't yield its increase, neither will the trees of the land yield their fruit. "'If you walk contrary to me, and won't listen to me, then I will bring seven times more plagues on you according to your sins. I will send the wild animals among you, which will rob you of your children, destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your roads will become desolate. "'If by these things you won't be reformed to me, but will walk contrary to me; then I will also walk contrary to you; and I will strike you, even I, seven times for your sins. I will bring a sword upon you, that will execute the vengeance of the covenant; and you will be gathered together within your cities: and I will send the pestilence among you; and you will be delivered into the hand of the enemy. When I break your staff of bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver your bread again by weight: and you shall eat, and not be satisfied. "'If you in spite of this won't listen to me, but walk contrary to me; then I will walk contrary to you in wrath; and I also will chastise you seven times for your sins. You will eat the flesh of your sons, and you will eat the flesh of your daughters. I will destroy your high places, and cut down your incense altars, and cast your dead bodies upon the bodies of your idols; and my soul will abhor you. I will lay your cities waste, and will bring your sanctuaries to desolation, and I will not take delight in the sweet fragrence of your offerings. I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies that dwell therein will be astonished at it. I will scatter you among the nations, and I will draw out the sword after you: and your land will be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste. Then the land will enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate and you are in your enemies' land. Even then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. As long as it lies desolate it shall have rest, even the rest which it didn't have in your sabbaths, when you lived on it. "'As for those of you who are left, I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies: and the sound of a driven leaf will put them to flight; and they shall flee, as one flees from the sword; and they will fall when no one pursues. They will stumble over one another, as it were before the sword, when no one pursues: and you will have no power to stand before your enemies. You will perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies will eat you up. Those of you who are left will pine away in their iniquity in your enemies' lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall they pine away with them. "'If they confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, in their trespass which they trespassed against me, and also that, because they walked contrary to me, I also walked contrary to them, and brought them into the land of their enemies: if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled, and they then accept the punishment of their iniquity; then I will remember my covenant with Jacob; and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham; and I will remember the land. The land also will be left by them, and will enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them: and they will accept the punishment of their iniquity; because, even because they rejected my ordinances, and their soul abhorred my statutes. Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break my covenant with them; for I am Yahweh their God; but I will for their sake remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God. I am Yahweh.'" These are the statutes, ordinances and laws, which Yahweh made between him and the children of Israel in Mount Sinai by Moses.
Moses and the elders of Israel commanded the people, saying, Keep all the commandment which I command you this day. It shall be on the day when you shall pass over the Jordan to the land which Yahweh your God gives you, that you shall set yourself up great stones, and plaster them with plaster: and you shall write on them all the words of this law, when you are passed over; that you may go in to the land which Yahweh your God gives you, a land flowing with milk and honey, as Yahweh, the God of your fathers, has promised you. It shall be, when you are passed over the Jordan, that you shall set up these stones, which I command you this day, in Mount Ebal, and you shall plaster them with plaster. There shall you build an altar to Yahweh your God, an altar of stones: you shall lift up no iron [tool] on them. You shall build the altar of Yahweh your God of uncut stones; and you shall offer burnt offerings thereon to Yahweh your God: and you shall sacrifice peace-offerings, and shall eat there; and you shall rejoice before Yahweh your God. You shall write on the stones all the words of this law very plainly. Moses and the priests the Levites spoke to all Israel, saying, Keep silence, and listen, Israel: this day you are become the people of Yahweh your God. You shall therefore obey the voice of Yahweh your God, and do his commandments and his statutes, which I command you this day. Moses charged the people the same day, saying, These shall stand on Mount Gerizim to bless the people, when you are passed over the Jordan: Simeon, and Levi, and Judah, and Issachar, and Joseph, and Benjamin. These shall stand on Mount Ebal for the curse: Reuben, Gad, and Asher, and Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali. The Levites shall answer, and tell all the men of Israel with a loud voice, Cursed be the man who makes an engraved or molten image, an abomination to Yahweh, the work of the hands of the craftsman, and sets it up in secret. All the people shall answer and say, Amen. Cursed be he who sets light by his father or his mother. All the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he who removes his neighbor's landmark. All the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he who makes the blind to wander out of the way. All the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he who wrests the justice [due] to the foreigner, fatherless, and widow. All the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he who lies with his father's wife, because he has uncovered his father's skirt. All the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he who lies with any manner of animal. All the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he who lies with his sister, the daughter of his father, or the daughter of his mother. All the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he who lies with his mother-in-law. All the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he who strikes his neighbor in secret. All the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he who takes a bribe to kill an innocent person. All the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he who doesn't confirm the words of this law to do them. All the people shall say, Amen.
lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turns away this day from Yahweh our God, to go to serve the gods of those nations; lest there should be among you a root that bears gall and wormwood; and it happen, when he hears the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart, to destroy the moist with the dry. Yahweh will not pardon him, but then the anger of Yahweh and his jealousy will smoke against that man, and all the curse that is written in this book shall lie on him, and Yahweh will blot out his name from under the sky. Yahweh will set him apart to evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that is written in this book of the law. The generation to come, your children who shall rise up after you, and the foreigner who shall come from a far land, shall say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses with which Yahweh has made it sick; [and that] the whole land of it is sulfur, and salt, [and] a burning, [that] it is not sown, nor bears, nor any grass grows therein, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which Yahweh overthrew in his anger, and in his wrath:
and Yahweh rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as at this day.
Death shall be chosen rather than life by all the residue that remain of this evil family, that remain in all the places where I have driven them, says Yahweh of Hosts.
Because he considers, and turns away from all his transgressions that he has committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die.
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible » Commentary on Deuteronomy 30
Commentary on Deuteronomy 30 Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
CHAPTER 30
De 30:1-10. Great Mercies Promised unto the Penitent.
1-10. when all these things are come upon thee, … and thou shalt return … then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity—The hopes of the Hebrew people are ardently directed to this promise, and they confidently expect that God, commiserating their forlorn and fallen condition, will yet rescue them from all the evils of their long dispersion. They do not consider the promise as fulfilled by their restoration from the captivity in Babylon, for Israel was not then scattered in the manner here described—"among all the nations," "unto the utmost parts of heaven" (De 30:4). When God recalled them from that bondage, all the Israelites were not brought back. They were not multiplied above their fathers (De 30:5), nor were their hearts and those of their children circumcised to love the Lord (De 30:6). It is not, therefore, of the Babylonish captivity that Moses was speaking in this passage; it must be of the dispersed state to which they have been doomed for eighteen hundred years. This prediction may have been partially accomplished on the return of the Israelites from Babylon; for, according to the structure and design of Scripture prophecy, it may have pointed to several similar eras in their national history; and this view is sanctioned by the prayer of Nehemiah (Ne 1:8, 9). But undoubtedly it will receive its full and complete accomplishment in the conversion of the Jews to the Gospel of Christ. At the restoration from the Babylonish captivity, that people were changed in many respects for the better. They were completely weaned from idolatry; and this outward reformation was a prelude to the higher attainments they are destined to reach in the age of Messiah, "when the Lord God will circumcise their hearts and the hearts of their seed to love the Lord." The course pointed out seems clearly to be this: that the hearts of the Hebrew people shall be circumcised (Col 2:2); in other words, by the combined influences of the Word and spirit of God, their hearts will be touched and purified from all their superstition and unbelief. They will be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ as their Messiah—a spiritual deliverer, and the effect of their conversion will be that they will return and obey the voice (the Gospel, the evangelical law) of the Lord. The words may be interpreted either wholly in a spiritual sense (Joh 11:51, 52), or, as many think, in a literal sense also (Ro 11:1-36). They will be recalled from all places of the dispersion to their own land and enjoy the highest prosperity. The mercies and favors of a bountiful Providence will not then be abused as formerly (De 31:20; 32:15). They will be received in a better spirit and employed to nobler purposes. They will be happy, "for the Lord will again rejoice over them for good, as He rejoiced over their fathers."
De 30:11-14. The Commandment Is Manifest.
11-14. For this commandment … is not hidden … neither is it far off—That law of loving and obeying God, which was the subject of Moses' discourse, was well known to the Israelites. They could not plead ignorance of its existence and requirements. It was not concealed as an impenetrable mystery in heaven, for it had been revealed; nor was it carefully withheld from the people as a dangerous discovery; for the youngest and humblest of them were instructed in those truths, which were subjects of earnest study and research among the wisest and greatest of other nations. They were not under a necessity of undertaking long journeys or distant voyages, as many ancient sages did in quest of knowledge. They enjoyed the peculiar privilege of a familiar acquaintance with it. It was with them a subject of common conversation, engraven on their memories, and frequently explained and inculcated on their hearts. The apostle Paul (Ro 10:6-8) has applied this passage to the Gospel, for the law of Christ is substantially the same as that of Moses, only exhibited more clearly in its spiritual nature and extensive application; and, accompanied with the advantages of Gospel grace, it is practicable and easy.
De 30:15-20. Death and Life Are Set before the Israelites.
15-20. See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil—the alternative of a good and happy, or a disobedient and miserable life. Love of God and compliance with His will are the only ways of securing the blessings and avoiding the evils described. The choice was left to them, and in urging upon them the inducements to a wise choice, Moses warmed as he proceeded into a tone of solemn and impressive earnestness similar to that of Paul to the elders of Ephesus (Ac 20:26, 27).