[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
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[00:00:37] Speaker B: Okay Good evening everyone.
Welcome back to our series covering the Book of Deuteronomy.
Real quick, I would like to start with a prayer, so if you would please bow with me.
Lord, thank you so much for this time that we get to come together to learn more about your Word for being able to live in a country that does not persecute us when we do come together, does not try to keep us from coming together.
And Lord, I pray that you help this lesson to guide us in our lives, to help us to live out your will to the best of our abilities, to be a light to the world and to go out and help the poor and the needy. Lord, I pray that you help us to reach out to others throughout the rest of our week and help us to get the most we can from this lesson. Name I Pray. Amen.
Okay, so for everyone who was not here last week, we are covering the Book of Deuteronomy here in this series and in this class. In this series I have a couple of objectives.
The first being when you when we are finished, I would like you to understand Deuteronomy as ethical guidance and a physical explanation of spiritual realities.
What that practically means is that I want you to be able to read Deuteronomy on your own.
I want you to be able to go pick a passage of Deuteronomy, understand where you are and how it should be interpreted.
Second, I want you to understand the literary framework, the design patterns, and the central themes that are found throughout Deuteronomy.
Not only that is, I my hope is that you'll be able to see them in other parts of Scripture, because what you'll find is a lot of times the biblical authors like to use the same design patterns over and over again.
And then finally, if you get nothing else from this class, my hope is that you come away with an understanding of how the New Testament authors interpret and apply Deuteronomy's teachings. So that when you go and read New Testament passages and they quote or reference some place in Deuteronomy, you know where that is and you can understand what the author is trying to tell you.
So in our last class, we covered a very specific question, right? What laws apply today?
Now, we came to that question because we started looking at a couple of different passages, the first being in Romans, chapter seven, Hebrews, chapter eight, that used language like we have died to the law, or we are opposite, or the law is obsolete, right? And that was very strong language for something like that. But then we also looked at some other examples, right, in Romans chapter 13 or in First Peter chapter 1, where the new Testament authors would use the laws in some authoritative manner, expecting the reader to know them and follow them, even though they had said that it was obsolete. And then we even looked at Jesus in Matthew chapter five, saying that not even an iota of the law would pass away, right?
He says that the one who relaxes the law and teaches others to do the same would be least in the kingdom of heaven, right? And that brought about this tension.
And how we fixed this tension was recognizing that you can read Scripture in many different ways, right? One way is through this lens of law, right? A binary. You do it or you don't. If you do it, you're a Christian. If you don't, you're not a Christian.
An example we use was baptism, right? Acts 2, 38, very famous example.
And so what we said was, well, if you go and read the law, like in Deuteronomy, as law, as this binary that you need to follow to the letter, then that is obsolete. That is what has passed away.
But if you go to the law and you try to read it as wisdom, right? As something that can have greater moral teachings that you can pull out and then apply today, such as Paul does in first Corinthians, chapter 10, then all of them apply. They can all apply to our lives today. Or you can go and read Deuteronomy through the lens of prophecy, right? As a way of trying to describe a spiritual question, to give answers through a physical description.
And so that's where we left off last week.
This week, I want to cover three questions.
The first, who wrote Deuteronomy, right? I want to discuss the authorship, what the time period was, what the people were going through at the time to try and help us understand the mindset of the author as they're writing the text of Deuteronomy.
The second is, how was Deuteronomy written?
Not the physical writing, but how it's organized, right? Where does it fit in the overarching biblical story?
How are the specific passages in Deuteronomy arranged and presented to us?
And then the final question, if we have time, I want to try to look at why was Deuteronomy written?
What was the driving question at the time that needed to be answered that prompted Deuteronomy to be authored in the first place?
So, first question, who wrote Deuteronomy?
Now, what you'll find if you start to read a bunch of different scholars is that they tend to land somewhere on a spectrum, actually.
Now, I would probably wager that almost everyone who walked in here today probably assumed that the only answer that was ever given is Moses.
And you would have good reason to believe that one. It's usually the traditional answer.
And there is very key evidence that feels very explicit, right? So, for example, in Deuteronomy itself, in chapter 31, verses 24 and 26, we read that Moses writes something that he calls the Book of the Law, gives it to the priests to be read every seven years to the Israelite people, and places it in the tabernacle.
And then if you fast forward over to Joshua, and I actually want to read this one because it's very interesting, in Joshua, chapter eight, we see a reference to the very book that Moses wrote.
So In Joshua, chapter 8, verses 30 through 32, that reads, that time, Joshua built an altar to Yahweh, the Elohim of Israel on Mount Ebal, just as Moses the servant of Yahweh had commanded the people of Israel, as it is written in the Book of the Law of Moses, an altar of uncut stones upon which no man has wielded an iron tool.
And they offered it on, offered on it burnt offerings to Yahweh and sacrificed peace offerings.
And there, in the presence of the people of Israel, he wrote on the stones a copy of the Law of Moses which he had written.
So that seems very explicit, right? The interpretation being that the law of Moses are these first five books that we refer to as the Law.
And in fact, that quotation that Joshua makes is from Deuteronomy itself in Deuteronomy 28.
So for a lot of scholars, this is enough to say that Moses wrote all of Deuteronomy.
However, over time, scholars have started pointing out other passages in Deuteronomy that doesn't quite make sense for Moses to have written Very famous example, if you'll turn with me over to Deuteronomy, chapter 34, and I'm going to read verses 5 through 6 that reads, so Moses, the servant of Yahweh, died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of Yahweh. And he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth Peor.
But no one knows the place of his burial to this day.
So beyond the obvious of, well, if Moses is dead, who is writing this?
There is this phrase here, right to this day, right? That implies that there has to have been some amount of time that that phrase actually means something, right? Like you wouldn't say, no one knows what I ate to this day when you ate dinner an hour ago, right? It has to be some meaningful amount of time.
Now, because of this, you kind of land. Some people land on the opposite end of the spectrum, which is that Deuteronomy wasn't written by Moses at all. It was written by some scribe around, probably around the 7th century BC, around the time of King Josiah.
And beyond some of these passages that don't quite make sense for Moses to have written, there's also this very somewhat famous, I'll say story in Second Kings, chapter 22, right? So if you're not familiar in this story, Josiah's ruling and there is a priest that somehow stumbles upon a book that is called the Law, and he finds it, quote, unquote, and then he gives it to Josiah and says, hey, look what I found. And this prompts Josiah to bring about a bunch of religious reforms.
So on this opposite spectrum, what these people will say is that, okay, they didn't really find this book. Actually, it was probably written by that priest or maybe a different scribe, or maybe even Josiah himself wrote it in order to convince the people that they should go with these religious reforms.
Now, to be honest, it's a bunch of hogwash.
I don't really buy into that. But if you do go read scholars, they talk about it sometimes where I tend to land and where I would say most really, of my favorite scholars, Old Testament scholars tend to land is kind of this mixed version where it seems obvious that Moses wrote some proto Deuteronomy or proto Law, some core original copy, but then inspired editors over time will then add certain sections as they are inspired by God to add.
One of the biggest evidence that kind of pointed me to, okay, accept that this was true is actually over in 1st Samuel, chapter 10, verse 25, Right? So if you're not familiar with the Story of first Samuel, what happens is the Israelite people get fed up with this kind of structure of judges, of which Samuel is one, and they ask God for a king, just like all the other nations. And after some back and forth, God finally says that, okay, I will give you this king. And that king ends up being Saul.
And during this ceremony to kind of make Saul king, we get this interesting verse in verse 25, chapter 10, verse 25.
Then Samuel told the people the rights and duties of the kingship, and he wrote them in a book and laid it up before Yahweh.
Then Samuel sent all the people away, each one to his home.
So why is that interesting?
Well, in Deuteronomy 17, when we get there, we'll see that there are laws for Israelite kings found in Deuteronomy.
So logically, it doesn't really make sense for Samuel to have to first tell them what the laws are for a king.
And second, it doesn't quite make sense for him to write it in a brand new book, right? It makes way more sense for him to write it in the book that is supposed to be read to them every seven years.
So this idea of kind of a proto Moses with later editors would say Moses wrote this core piece called Deuteronomy.
But then when God needed to grant a king, Samuel added, inspired by the Holy Spirit, this section about the king.
And so this is where I kind of land. And I really believe this to be true. And it can be very helpful for explaining why certain passages are the way they are.
I'll give another example if we go back to Exodus or Deuteronomy, chapter 34. I just want to read the last few verses. So verses 9 through 12.
And Joshua the son of nun, was full of the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him.
So the people of Israel obeyed him and did as Yahweh had commanded Moses.
And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel, like Moses, whom Yahweh knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and the wonders that Yahweh sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants, and to all his land, and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of all Israel.
Now notice this phrase here in verse 10. And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel, like Moses.
Now again, we'll talk a lot more about this in a later class, but that phrase one doesn't make sense for Moses to have Written, Right. He just died. Of course, there has not arisen a prophet like him.
But two, it tells us, is trying to tell us something more. There's something here that we're supposed to take out of the fact that a prophet hasn't arisen yet.
Part of it is in Deuteronomy 18, what we'll find is that through God, Moses tells the Israelite people that one day a prophet just like him is going to arise.
And they will. He will be their leader.
They should follow him.
Now, if you go to the Gospels, that it becomes very painfully obvious that that prophet is Jesus.
But in here we have an author telling us that there hasn't been someone yet to have risen.
So why would that be the case?
Well, to do that, we have to answer our second question, actually, which is how was Deuteronomy written? Specifically, where we find Deuteronomy in the biblical story.
So for those of you who don't know, there are many ways that the Old Testament can be organized, the most famous of which you will find in your Bible today. Very. In all Christian Bibles, they have this organization which is more topical, right? So you have the law, the historical books, the wisdom books, and then the prophets, usually major and minor.
However, that is, that organization comes around 4th century A.D.
right? When Christians decide and find the technology to bind their book all together, they have to have a way to organize it.
But there's actually a much older organization structure, and that is called the Tanakh. And actually, you'll find Jewish people still use this organization for the Old Testament structure.
And this is what most scholars refer to as the literary structure of the Bible.
Right? The bi. The structure in the Old Testament that the authors seem to have thought that they were writing in.
And specifically that structure is the Torah, the Neviim and the Ketuvim. Right? Law, prophets, writings, and even further, one of the reasons why Old Testament scholars really like this organization for the Old Testament is because it seems like Jesus himself also thought of the Scriptures as having this organization.
So if you go to the end of Luke, chapter 24, verses 44 through 49, what you will read is he'll say this phrase, everything must be fulfilled. That is written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets and the Psalms, which is the same phrasing used in the Talmud, the Mishnah, all these other Jewish writings at the time that Jesus lied to refer to not only the Old Testament, but specifically the Old Testament with this structure. Okay, so why should you care?
Well, one, it helps you understand where you are in the story when you go to read Deuteronomy. And it helps us understand phrases like this, right? When the author says, there has not arisen a prophet, since in Israel, like Moses.
Because in Deuteronomy, you are ending the Torah, and you're about to start this section called the Prophets that everyone reading the Old Testament knows is called the Prophets.
And the author is telling you, if you're looking for this specific person in this, in these books you're about to read, you're not going to find them.
He hasn't shown up yet.
So you have to read it for a different purpose. You have to keep reading and keep finding what that means.
Now, the other reason I talk about this is really because I want to situate Deuteronomy in its proper place, which is the Torah, which are the first five books of the Bible, both in this organization and kind of the standard organization.
And what's important is that the Torah also has a literary structure that you have to keep in mind when reading Deuteronomy.
And in academic circles, that would be called a concentric literary pattern, which is a very fancy word for pyramid.
It's a pyramid.
And the reason this pattern is very popular among the Old Testament authors is because it allows them to bring about a very point.
Right, right. In a plot, you might say this is the climax of the story.
And the Torah, that climax ends up being Leviticus.
And a fun fact in the middle of Leviticus. So the middle of the middle is the day of atonement.
Right. The day that this lamb, this perfect lamb, dies for the people's sins.
Just a fun fact.
So you have Leviticus at the center, kind of at the point of the story.
But then the next level you have Exodus and numbers, and then at the bottom level, you have Genesis and Deuteronomy.
Now, why do I say that they're kind of. They're on these levels? Well, what you find is that these books, Genesis and Deuteronomy, riff off each other quite often.
They use the same repeated words.
They'll have similar stories, they'll tackle similar problems, and they're expected by the author that not only do you know your stories in Genesis fairly well by the time you get to Deuteronomy, but also that you might even have it open with you so that you can go back and forth. I'll give some examples so that you're not just taking my word for it.
A very famous one that people tend to notice, even if they're not thinking about this pattern, is this choice between good and evil.
So very famously, again, Genesis opens up in the first three chapters with Creation, Adam being put into a garden and told he can eat from any tree other than this tree called the knowledge of good and evil, right? Giving him this choice.
And then he chooses poorly. And you know what happens from there? We get all this death and destruction that we have to deal with today.
But if you. When we fast forward and we get to Deuteronomy, specifically the end of Deuteronomy, we get, we'll find this phrase that Moses puts before the people. I set before you life and death, blessing and curse, good and evil.
So choose life.
And it's this riffing back and forth where the author is saying, we're ending the Torah. And you still have the same choice before you that Adam have, that Adam had. You still have to choose life or death, blessing or curse, good or evil.
And I've already shown you how that ends up if you choose poorly.
Now, the other example is one that I find really interesting, and it highlights this use of repeated words, specifically this word shema, which gets repeated all the time in Genesis and then again all the time in Deuteronomy.
Now, again, very famously, there are two times where people royally mess up in God's eyes. The first is the fall of humanity, Adam and Eve.
And when you read those first three chapters and you get to chapter three, verse 17, God is cursing Adam and he starts his curse like this, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree.
Okay, we'll put a pin in that. That's something to note. If we fast forward over To Genesis, chapter 16, we have Abraham and Sarah.
And Sarah is making this point that, hey, you can have a descendant if you impregnate Hagar, my servant.
And when Abraham decides to go through with this, we get this phrase in verse two, and Abraham listened to the voice of Sarai.
And so we have these two times that when the people decide to go against God, it's because they have listened to someone else.
And you fast forward and you get to Deuteronomy. And it should be no surprise that the phrase that keeps getting repeated is, listen, O Israel, because they're riffing off of each other. You've seen these stories of people constantly disobeying God and it never going well because they refuse to listen. So Deuteronomy, one call to action is, would you please just listen for once?
Now, I say all of this one, because we're going to talk more about this when we actually get to the passages.
But these are really good examples of why it's important to understand the kind of literary framework you find in the Bible and the design patterns.
Because in this Torah, the author assumes that you're going to do this.
He assumes that you're going to know all the stories in Genesis very well, or that you at least have it open with you. And so, as we go through Deuteronomy, I'm going to try and point these out as much as I can of the times where Deuteronomy is really just referencing back to Genesis.
Now, finally, probably the most important and the one that everyone should really care about and memorize is how is Deuteronomy itself organized?
Now, there are actually a couple ways Deuteronomy can be organized, and all of them are correct and very useful.
And if you go through and want to study Deuteronomy on your own and use one of those, I can point you to scholars or podcasts that do that.
But this is my preferred way of seeing Deuteronomy, and that's as an ancient Near Eastern treaty.
So what the heck is that?
Well, we actually have copies of treaties between kingdoms at the same time that Moses is writing Deuteronomy.
Specifically, we have these treaties between the Hittite kingdom and the Canaanite kings, and they always follow a very similar structure.
They start with a little preamble, and then they go into these historical events, trying to describe how the relationship has been in the past.
Now, that might be something along the lines of King so and so's father was a great friend to the Hittite kingdom, and this is all the things that he did for us throughout the time period.
And in Deuteronomy, we get the same thing right. In the first four chapters of Deuteronomy, what you'll find is God repeating all these stories that you've heard before, but really highlighting how they've affected the relationship between God and Israel and how they've been acting towards each other.
And then if you follow these Hittite treaties, you'll find these long list of stipulations of what you need to do to follow the covenant.
Now, they might follow something like King so and so, if the kingdom of the Hittites are attacked by this kingdom over here, you shall send troops to protect us.
Or it might say, if you find that the Hittite kingdom has sent an army through your land, King so and so shall allow them to pass, and you shall give them bread and water.
Now, if we go into Deuteronomy, as I've said before, we get 21 chapters of God talking about what it should look like for a 14th century BC Israelite farmer to have an ideal relationship with God, the actions they should take, how they should treat other people, how they should treat God.
Painting this picture of an ideal relationship, what the relationship should look like and what would and what you need to do to not break the treaty, just as kind of the Hittites do.
And then you get to these kind of long list or really short list of blessings and long list of curses, right? In the Hittite version, they would say if you break this covenant, then God so and so shall bring either you these blessings or he will bring you curse.
In Deuteronomy we get the same thing.
We get a short list of blessings that God bestows upon the people or a long list of curses that he will bring on the people if the treaty is broken.
And then it usually ends with this witness.
Usually this is some kind of poem, right? In the Hittite version, it's this poem that says, and God so and so shall live as a witness. If you break this covenant, he shall bring about these blessings and curses.
And then in Deuteronomy, it's this very famous poem called the Song of Moses where he talks about how God is going to be the witness.
And really eventually Israel is just going to break the treaty.
But what God will do instead of bringing curse is he will still fix
[00:29:42] Speaker A: it,
[00:29:44] Speaker B: that he's going to fix it one day.
And that's what we find Deuteronomy as now. The reason I really like this organization in particular is because it lends itself really well to that lens of wisdom we talked about.
In particular, when we start getting into what does an ideal relationship look like, it lends itself to one recognizing these are 14th century Israelite farmers that are living out this ideal relationship that God is putting forward. So it helps us to remember that we shouldn't be doing them.
But it also helps us to remember that this is the ideal relationship.
This is what the people should be doing in this time period.
So there should be ethical teachings that we can bring about and apply to our lives, just as Paul does in First Corinthians, chapter 1010.
And so going forward, I actually don't expect you to kind of memorize this structure unless you really want to go study Deuteronomy your own. What I'm I will do is I'm going to point out where we are within the structure so that we remember what we need to be thinking about, whether we are talking about the current relationship or what the ideal should be, or if we're talking about the blessing and curses. And specifically, I want to make sure we remember that God is borrowing a structure that people already know at the time. And that usually comes with a lot of rhetoric.
Now we get to talk about why Deuteronomy was written, right? The driving question that prompted Moses to one go through his speeches, but also to write this down.
So we finally get into the text and I will read the first five verses.
So Deuteronomy, chapter one, verses one through five.
These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan, in the wilderness, in the Arabah opposite Seph, between Paran and Tophel, Laban, Hazeroth, Disaba.
It is 11 days journey from Horeb by the way of Mount Seir to Kadesh Barnea.
In the 40th year, on the first day of the 11 month, Moses spoke to the people of Israel according to all that Yahweh had given him in commandment to them.
After he had defeated Sihon, the king of the Amorites, who lived in Heshbon, and Og, the king of Bashan, who lived in Ashtaroth and in Adriah beyond the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to explain this law, saying, okay, in Deuteronomy, it opens, we're on the banks of Jordan after these decades of wandering, and Moses comes in and says, okay, I need to make a speech because we're about to enter the promised land finally.
And you know, it's finally. And he's probably exhausted because he makes this very sarcastic phrase, right? He starts in verse two by noting that if you had followed the correct track from where we started to where we are now, should have taken 11 days.
And then immediately he says, and then the 40th year, which one brings about the question, well, why is it the 40th year?
Why did they take 40 years in an 11 day journey?
Well, it's because, if you remember back in numbers, when they tried to enter the land the first time, they refused because they were scared of these giants and they were scared that they were going to die and God wasn't really going to help them except for two people.
And so one, it reminds us and two, it tells us why Moses feels like he needs to make these speeches and really write this book.
Because something has to change, right? They're about to just do the exact same thing that they did 40 years ago. They're going to try to enter the land. And they have gone through this very long Journey of Israel constantly rebelling, just all the time, every time God gives them these rules and then they immediately break them.
And so Deuteronomy is written because they need something to change them or they're just going to mess it up again.
And what we'll find is that what really needs to fundamentally change is their heart.
Something has to give for them to be successful.
So Moses undertakes what he calls his goal to explain the law.
Now, this is a very interesting word because it's only used three times in the Bible. It's this word baer, which actually specifically means to make plain Deuteronomy 27, right? When he gives that law that Joshua will later quote in Joshua chapter eight, it says it's the same word used to describe making something legible, right?
Really to do something in an unmistakable manner.
So what he tells us is not only he's writing this to try and change their heart, to change something fundamentally about the Israelite people, but the way he's going to do it is to try and make God's teachings so plain that it is unmistakable that they cannot get wrong, it cannot be misinterpreted in his mind.
And that's his goal. And that's why we get this kind of treaty structure where we get these laws, because Moses is trying his best to tell them what this ideal relationship should look like, if only they would just change and listen finally to God.
Now, I will end with this, right? So this. This week we covered those three questions. Next week we get to finally go into the text itself very deeply. Specifically, we're going to be covering the historical parts, right? We're going to be talking about what the relationship has looked like between Israel and God and what we can learn about our relationship with God through that reminder. I'll remind you at the end of every beginning and end of every class what our objectives are, right?
Understanding Deuteronomy as ethical guidance and a physical explanation of spiritual realities.
Part of this is understanding that literary framework, understanding that God is trying to explain his ideal relationship to his people.
The second is, I want you to leave understanding the literary framework, the design patterns and central themes, right? That's what we mostly talked about today. And I know it can be kind of boring, except to me, I really nerd out about this stuff.
But it really is important to understand the full ideas that the authors are trying to portrayed to the people. And the fact that they use it all the time throughout other parts of the Bible means you really should be able to pick it out when you want to study deeper.
And then finally again, I hope that at the very least you understand how the New Testament authors interpreted and applied Deuteronomy's teaching as you go about your daily studies.
All right. Thank you for coming. I'll see you next week.
