Deuteronomy 32:1–18 (Second Song of Moses, Part 1)
As we have come to the New Year, we have been met by many poignant and wise commentaries upon life, and upon our generation. Recently a friend of mine posted on FB a citation from St. Basil. His situation in the fourth century, with the crisis of Arianism and newly established respectability for Christians, evidently made many nostalgic for the “old days,” just as some are today. He said, “The elderly lament as they compare the former time with the present; the young are even more pitiful because they do not even know what has been taken from them.” (Epistula 9:2). Nostalgia, of course, is not particularly effective. But being called to remember what has been lost has a strong purpose. The Second Song of Moses, Deuteronomy 32:1-43, immortalizes the call of the great Moses to a younger generation about to enter the Promised Land—they should take care to cleave to the LORD, and not to forget all that He has done for them. This passage is found in all Christian Bibles (despite an assertion from an Orthodox website that some Protestant Bibles omit it), and it is sung as a canticle in the Tuesday of Holy Week. At the beginning of 2023, though, it provides for us an appropriate perspective. This week we will read the first eighteen verses, which remind us to remember the days of old! Here are the verses:
Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; let the earth hear the words of my mouth. May my teaching drop like the rain, my speech condense like the dew; like gentle rain on grass, like showers on new growth. For I will proclaim the name of the Lord; ascribe greatness to our God! The Rock, his work is perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God, without deceit, just and upright is he; yet his degenerate children have dealt falsely with him, a perverse and crooked generation. Do you thus repay the Lord, O foolish and senseless people? Is not he your father, who created you, who made you and established you?
Remember the days of old, consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you; your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God; the Lord’s own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share. He sustained him in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young; as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions, the Lord alone guided him; no foreign power was with him. He set him atop the heights of the land, and fed him with produce of the field; he nursed him with honey from the crags, with oil from flinty rock; curds from the herd, and milk from the flock, with fat of lambs and rams; Bashan bulls and goats, together with the choicest wheat— you drank fine wine from the blood of grapes.
Jacob ate his fill; Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked. You grew fat, bloated, and gorged! He abandoned God who made him, and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation. They made him jealous with strange gods, with abhorrent things they provoked him. They sacrificed to demons, not God, to deities they had never known, to new ones recently arrived, whom your ancestors had not feared. You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.
This beautiful though challenging poem has so much in it that we can only touch on some of it today. Let’s concentrate on this week mostly upon the pictures by which we can understand our mysterious God, which call us to a humble remembrance of what He has done, and to turn away from false gods to Him alone. Moses’ admonition, though a little rough to hear, foreshadows Jesus’ own words to His generation, and to us, in the gospels. And Moses’ song is likewise not simply instruction to that first generation entering Canaan, but to everyone who hears it—he begins by telling even the HEAVENS to listen to the wise words that will bring necessary dew and rain upon the earth, cultivating new growth. How can we ignore such wisdom?
First, the song is chock-full of different pictures by which we can understand the characteristics of the unseen God. Moses tells us that his major purpose is to proclaim the name of the LORD, and to have us ascribe greatness to Him. Not only is He great, but His works are also perfect. Several times, from the initial notes of the song, he is called “The Rock!” We are meant to picture God first and foremost, then, as a strong foundation, immovable, unshakeable, firm. This is not a mechanical immovability, though, because we also hear that this “Rock” has given birth to His people, and that He is the Rock in the sense that He is faithful, without deceit, just and upright. We are besieged by passions: He is always the same, from age to age. It is upon God alone that we must build our lives, as Jesus reminds us in His sermon on the Mount, where He calls upon the faithful to build upon what they have heard from Him, so that their house will not fall.
Next, He is a Father. Father, of course, only became a proper name for God, and was fully understood with the coming of the Son. As Jesus said, “No one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom He reveals Him” (Matt 1:27). As the fourth gospel puts it, “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made him known” (John 1:18). This language of “Father,” then, is mysterious in the OT, and put alongside other ways of picturing the unseen God—Rock, King, Fortress, and so on. It is only at the Incarnation that we come to understand the utter significance of this name, when we see the mysterious relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit, and where we are told that it is on the pattern of the mysterious Father that ALL fatherhood, whether in heaven or on earth, takes its cue (Eph. 3:15). Moses challenges the younger generation of Hebrews, and we, too, hear this challenge as God’s called people: “Is not he your Father, who created you, who made you and established you?”
This challenge is one that is repeated to us by Jesus Himself, again in the Sermon on the Mount, where He tells us to “be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect,” and later, when He assures us that, when we are made like God, we shall “shine like the sun.” Going even beyond Daniel, who prophesied that the wise would “shine like the stars,” Jesus points to our theosis: “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Mat 13:43). Like Father, like children. We are not the children of angels, of lesser supernatural “sons of God,” but we are established by God Himself, as was ancient Israel, when God apportioned out the nations in this fallen world.
We see this in the way that God as Ruler is described by the Song of Moses. Consider the description that Moses gives of the authority under which each people group is organized by the Ruling God. “When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God; the Lord’s own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.” This allotment reminds me, too, of God’s parceling out of the Holy Land among the 12 tribes, and keeping the Levites, who were given no land, but temple-service, to Himself. Here he keeps the Hebrews for Himself, to nurture and protect. But other nations, in this harsh world outside of paradise, were given over to deputized help—other “sons of God,” or angels, as the LXX puts it. But Israel herself was protected by God, because from her would come the Torah and the Messiah, our LORD. Consider the tenderness and directness of God’s care; “He sustained him in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young; as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions, the Lord alone guided him; no foreign power was with him.” So, then, God Himself was the influence of the Hebrew people, just as God is our foundation, our helper, our nurturer. With that kind of care and direct contact, how can the children cease to become like the the providing father? It is not a “foreign power,” but God Himself who supervises.
This brings us to a fourth simile that is used for God in the song—He is like a mother, indeed, He is motherlike in stirring the nest, nursing the baby, even giving birth to the chosen people like a mother. It is significant that this characteristic is given, without the use of the name Mother. God is “motherlike” but the Scriptures stop short of doubling Father with the name Mother. This is because, iconically, “Mother” is the name that will be given to the Theotokos and to the Church of God, who cares for her children: but all good things, of course, come from God. And this is consonant with Jesus, who always calls God Abba, Father (never “Mother”), but sometimes pictures God’s care in maternal ways—as when He speaks of wanting to bring Israel under His wings like a mother bird. In this age of gender confusion, it is important to remember this careful way in which God is normatively imaged in the masculine (even the Holy Spirit, in John’s Gospel, is “He!”), while feminine pictures for God are also helpfully sketched, showing every manner in which God works among us. He is the God of all creation, male and female, masculine and feminine, but relates to us as Father and Bridegroom, while we play the role of Bride, and the Church as “Mother,” following the Theotokos.
All this was the gift of God to His ancient people. But Moses reminds the new generation entering the Promised Land that their ancestors did not remain grateful for what God had done, for all that God had richly given them: “Jacob ate his fill; Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked. You grew fat, bloated, and gorged! He abandoned God who made him, and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation…They sacrificed to demons, not God, to deities they had never known, to new ones recently arrived, whom your ancestors had not feared. You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.” Here is the classic case of the ungrateful and heedless child, who thinks that he or she has made it by himself, and then turns to other authorities, after abandoning God. We cannot truly “rule ourselves” and so, if we turn away from God, other powers will rush in! After all, we are people made, from the beginning, to worship—homo adorans, as Fr. Schmemann puts it. And this warning stands for us, not only for Israel. As St. Paul puts it,
For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did….We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents, nor grumble, as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer. Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.” (1 Cor 10:1-12).
Here, then, are wise words for 2023 for God’s own people, sung to us by Moses: Remember who God is, in all His richness, and all His marvelous acts! Ask those who have gone before, wise Orthodox in our midst, and the fathers whom we can read, about the might and love of our LORD, and all that He has done. Take heed to ourselves, that we not take Christ for granted, or grumble, or put our trust anywhere else. For God is with us!
Just a note: the next episode will be in three weeks, since I will be away at the International Orthodox Theological Association in Greece!
Edith M. Humphrey 