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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
Deuteronomy 6:7: You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.
We don’t worship simply by putting a service on the calendar and showing up. We put the service on the calendar and show up so that we can do the work of worship, the chief work of the church.
In the same way, as Pastor Sumpter has said, discipleship is not accomplished by a program. Programs and plans are vehicles that enable discipleship to take place. Scheduled events put us in the same place at the same time so that we can pray and study and be accountable and so grow up together into maturity in Jesus Christ.
Growing as a disciple, and leading others to be disciples, involves more than showing up at a discipleship group. Israelite parents trained their children in the daily rhythms of life, in, with and under all the changing postures of a day’s work and rest.
This was Israel’s pattern, and it is ours, because it is the Lord’s pattern. God invites us to His house. He spread a meal before us, and He speaks His statutes and judgments and ordinances. He is our great Father and Brother who teaches us as He walks with us, stands with us, rises and lies down with us, above all when He comes near to sit enthroned with us at this table in His kingdom.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, January 1, 2012 at 8:37 am
The shema is often taken as a declaration of monotheistic faith, or at least of henotheism.
In ANE context, it may have another aspect to it. Yitzhaq Feder (Blood Expiation in Hittite and Biblical Ritual (Writings from the Ancient World Supplements/Society of Biblical Literature)
In an essay in Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World)
Perhaps this is the mentality behind the high places of ancient Israel – not a new deity, nor a transfer of Yahweh, but a split divinity. But Israel’s confession is, Yahweh our God is Unsplit. To be One God is to have One House; the shema is a declaration of liturgical and sanctuary monotheism. And to be One God is to have One Name given under heaven whereby we must be saved.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 8:22 am
My friend, Ralph Smith, has published several excellent books on the Trinity (Paradox and Truth: Rethinking Van Til on the Trinity
He makes his case first by examining a handful of explicit Father-son passages in Deuteronomy (1:31; 8:5; 14:1-2; 32:5-6, 18-20). More cleverly, he examines two sets of allusions that run through the entire book.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, October 14, 2011 at 2:53 pm
The NASB renders Deuteronomy 30:9 this way: “Then the Lord your God will prosper you abundantly in all the work of your hand, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your cattle and in the produce of your ground, for the Lord will again rejoice over you for good, just as He rejoiced over your fathers.”
If you follow the literal translations in the margin, it comes out this way: “Then the Lord your God will make you have excess for good in all the work of your hand, in the fruit of your womb and in the fruit of your cattle and in the fruit of your ground, for the Lord will again rejoice over you for good, just as he rejoiced over your fathers.”
What’s lost in translation? One might say nothing substantive is lost. But a great deal of the artistry of the verse is suppressed.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 8:11 am
Genesis ends with Jacob blessing his sons (Genesis 49). Deuteronomy ends with Moses blessing the tribes that have descended from Jaob’s sons (Deuteronomy 33). Moses is a new Jacob, the father of the tribes of Israel as Jacob was the father of the tribal ancestors.
As the father of a new Israel, Moses adds to and sometimes reverses the destinies that were spelled out by Jacob. The most striking example is the tribe of Levi. Because Levi joined with Simeon to slaughter the Shechemites, Jacob curses the two tribes by saying they will be scattered throughout the land of Israel, and have no tribal area. Moses, however, commends the violent zeal of the Levites, who did not consider father, mother, or brothers in avenging Yahweh’s name at Sinai and Massah and Meribah (Deuteronomy 33:8-11). Moses does not cancel Jacob’s curse, but he turns it inside out. Because Levi showed such zeal for the word of Yahweh, they shall teach that word to Jacob (33:10), and because of the prior curse of Jacob, that teaching will be widely scattered throughout the land.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 7:57 am
Deuteronomy 23:14 warns the Israelite army to maintain a sanitation system in the war camp so that Yahweh, who walks in the midst of the camp, will not find any “thing of nakedness.”
The very same phrase appears in Deuteronomy 24:1, but there is describes a “thing of nakedness” that a husband finds in his wife, and provides a rationale for divorce.
The Israelite army is the corporate fighting bride of Yahweh, and their success depends on their Husband’s presence in their midst. They are warned not to do anything that would lead their Husband to sue for divorce.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 7:53 am
If Israel is faithful, Yahweh promises to make her triply fruitful. Deuteronomy 28:11 uses the word “fruit” three times (bizarrely translated in different ways by the NASB): fruit of the womb, fruit of the beast, fruit of the ground. Children, animals, plants will all proliferate.
Body, beast, ground are the triple sources of Israel’s fertility. And the triad refers back to the creation account. Plants, animals, and adam come from the ground, and all three are to be fruitful and to multiply. The ground is the underlying source of all the fertility, and in giving the land to Israel Yahweh is giving them the fundamental resource that will produce her triple fertility.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, October 15, 2010 at 3:04 am
Isaiah opens his prophecy with a call to heaven and earth to bear witness as Yahweh presents His case against Israel (1:2). Heaven is called to “hear” and earth to “give ear,” a testimony of two witnesses.
The same words in different combinations are found at the beginning of the song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32. Moses calls on the heavens to “give ear” and the earth to “hear.”
The parallels at the beginning set up one template for the book of Isaiah: It is, from one angle, a long set of variations on the theme of Moses’ Song.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 8:12 am
The Bible typically provides measures of “length and breadth” when it is talking about holy places and cosmic models. The ark’s “length and breadth” are recorded (Genesis 6:15), and so is that of the land (Genesis 13:17). Frequently, this combination appears in relation to the tabernacle and its furnishings, Solomon’s temple, the visionary temple of Ezekiel, the restored holy city of Jerusalem (Zechariah 2:2).
Then we have Deuteronomy 3:11, which gives a detailed description of Og’s bed. We learn that the bed is iron, that it was placed in Rabbah of the Ammonites, and that it had a length of nine cubits and a length of four cubits. Soo….Og had a really big bed. So what?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 7:01 am
Israel enters a land of Canaanites, seven nations of them, stronger than Israel (Deuteronomy 7:1; Acts 13:19). Taking down seven nations is a sevenfold decreation.
But the land also contains seven fruits – wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, honey (Deuteronomy 8:8) – so a new creation awaits once the Canaanites are destroyed.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 4:57 am
Deuteronomy 4:20 uses an arresting image to describe the exodus: “Yahweh has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, from Egypt, to be a people for His own possession.”
The context is crucial. Yahweh is warning about making graven images (vv. 16-18, 23) and about turning to heavenly bodies in worship (v. 19). ”Don’t forge idols in your furnaces,” Yahweh says, but instead remember that I forged you in the factory of Egypt.
It’s not that there are no graven images of Yahweh on earth. Israel isn’t supposed to make any images because Yahweh Himself forged an image, and it’s Israel.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 6:19 am
An SBL paper attempts to apply post-colonial theory to the “Deuteronomistic” view of women as de-humanized sexualized temptresses. He of course places Deuteronomistic history late, and thus itself “post-colonial,” and he conveniently claims that any contrary evidence in Deuteronomy (eg, ch. 21).
Most problematic: What does he gain with his use of the theory? Not much. He already knows what view of women Deuteronomy will have before he looks at the text. Theory tells him. Who needs to do research?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, November 23, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Yahweh curses Israel for breaking covenant. More specifically, Israel will become a sign and wonder to the nations “because you did not serve Yahweh your God with joy and a glad heart, for the abundance of all things” (Deuteronomy 28:47). What satisfies God is not just obedience, but joyful obedience.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, August 9, 2007 at 6:43 am
INTRODUCTION
We should pray God’s promises back to Him. But God has not only issued promises; He has also issued threats. Faithful prayer asks God to be true to both.
THE TEXT
“Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; and hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. Let my teaching drop as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, as raindrops on the tender herb, and as showers on the grass. . . .” (Deuteronomy 32:1-43).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 28, 2006 at 6:53 am
According to Deuteronomy 20, any man who had built a house, planted a vineyard, or married a wife without enjoying their benefits and joys was excused from military service. While it was certainly possible for a 20-year-old Israelite to be unmarried and propertyless, it would seem that the military was largely made up of men who already had these benefits of peace. I base this on the supposition that men would be entering on an independent adulthood at 20, the same age they became eligible for military service. Also, I’m assuming that Israelite ages of marriage were comparable to other ancient civilizations; Roman girls, for instance, were considered marriageable at 12 and adults at 14, at which age men would begin to call them “domina.” Thus, Israel’s army would largely consist of men who already had some experience of the benefits of adult life in peacetime.
This has important effects on the makeup and psychology of the military. First, the men going to war had some sense of why they were fighting and what they were defending. Second, home, vineyard, and wife provided a triple anchor that kept an Israelite warrior from getting too attached to the battlefield. This was particularly important in the ancient world, when war was for some men was life, not an irritating interruption of life.
Nearly 99,000 of the total 281,000 members of the Air Force are single, and about 112,000 of the total number are under 25. (See www.afpc.randolph.af.mil/demographics/ReportSearch.asp.) What kind of incentives are we building into our military by sending twentysomethings with no life at home and nothing to lose into battle?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, July 11, 2005 at 7:30 pm
Sandra Richter gave a very stimulating paper on the use of the phrase “place my name there” in Deuteronomy. Her main concern was to argue that the “place where my name dwells” in Dt 12 is fulfilled within Dt in chapter 27, with the ceremony of covenant-renewal at Mount Ebal. She suggested that Ebal looms much larger in biblical history than many have believed.
The most interesting part of the paper for me, however, was Richter’s interpretation of the phrase “place my name there.” Frequently, this is seen as a move toward a more “transcendent” view of Yahweh; He cannot be contained in heaven and earth, and so he cannot dwell in a temple directly. He must instead dwell in his “name,” a quasi-hypostatic reality that is yet distinct from Yahweh. I have pushed this phrase in a Trinitarian direction in the past. (Barth does too, BTW.)
Richter argued, however, that the phrase is well-known in ANE texts, and refers to the erection of a “display monument” marking a victory and a claim to the land where the monument is erected. Originally, “placing the name” meant inscribing the name of a deity on a stele to mark out a particular place as a place claimed by the deity; stele of this sort are frequently found in connection with altars at cultic sites. Eventually the phrase came to refer to the inscription of a stele, whether it was a name or not. In Dt 27, the stele erected at Gerazim and Ebal are not inscribed with the name YHWH, but with the Torah. Finally, the phrase comes to mean simply the erection of a display monument as a whole; the “name” comes to mean the monument itself.
Richter’s doctoral dissertation is on this subject, and includes some discussion of 1 Kings 8′s use of the phrase. I haven’t seen the dissertation yet, so what follows is merely my speculative and hot-brained extrapolation from Richter’s thesis. If by the time of Solomon the “name” referred to the monument as a whole, the temple itself seems to be the monument in view. Yahweh chooses a “place to set My name there” (an alliterative and assonant phrase in Heb), and the name is the temple itself. This is His claim to ownership of the land, of victory over the enemies in the land, and therefore presupposes the rest or peace that Solomon says is the prerequisite for the building of the temple. It is also a sign that Yahweh has bequeathed the land as a covenant grant to His people. Finally, the Trinitarian dimension may still work, but at a different level. If the “name” is the monumental architecture of the temple, then an identification of the “name” with the coming Messiah is still possible. The temple itself is the name, and this anticipates NT talk both about Jesus as temple and Jesus as the Word of the Father. This also helps to explain the “mediatorial” role that the temple plays in Kings; prayer is made “toward this house,” and the house serves as an interchange between Israel on earth and Yahweh in heaven.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, November 22, 2004 at 8:56 pm
Commenting on Deuteronomy 30:9ff in his new translation of the Pentateuch, Robert Alter offers the following comment on “Who will go up for us to the heavens, etc”:
“The Deuteronomist, having given God’s teaching a local place and habitation in a text available to all, proceeds to reject the older mythological notion of the secrets or wisdom of the gods. It is the daring hero of the pagan epic who, unlike ordinary men, makes bold to climb the sky or cross the great sea to bring back the hidden treasures of the divine realm ?Eas Gilgamesh crosses the sea in an effort to bring back the secret of immortality. This mythological and heroic era, the Deuteronomist now proclaims, is at an end, for God’s word, inscribed in a book, has become the intimate property of every person.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, October 5, 2004 at 9:14 am
Several interesting articles in the current issue of JSOT:
1) Yairah Amit of Tel Aviv University writes on “Progression as a Rhetorical Device in Biblical Literature.” The concept is fairly simple: He’s pointing to places where, in narrative or speech, the biblical writers list a series of events or points, which progress toward a climax (or a nadir). Progression arranges the elements of the text in “an ascending or descending order: from the general to the particular, or vice verse; from minor to major, or the reverse; from the expected to the unexpected; the impersonal to the personal, and so on. Often the final step in the progression is the climactic one, while each of the preceding steps plays its part in expanding or narrowing the sequence, and thereby shedding more light on the subject” (p 9).
Some of Amit’s examples are particularly illuminating. He points out, for example, the sequence in the account of the results of the battle of Aphek in 1 Sam 4: Israel is routed, many die, the ark is taken, and Eli’s sons are killed (vv 10-11). This follows the same order as the introduction to the battle in vv 2-4, which records another defeat of Israel, the fact that many were killed, and then indicates that the ark was brought by the priests (vv 2-4). Thus, these two progressions form an inclusio around the account of the battle. But within that inclusion, there is a sharp contrast between expectation and result, particularly in the last two elements of the sequence: the arrival of the ark and priests in vv 2-3 evokes hope of victory, but the climax of the story shows the ark in captivity and the priests dead. The same events are found in the announcement to Eli later in the account, but the order of the last two elements is changed: Israel fled, a great slaughter, sons dead, ark taken. And it is the last element that causes Eli to topple from his seat and break his neck.
Another interesting example is the story of Delilah and Samson (Judg 16:4-21). There is no progression apparent in Samson’s lies about the source of his strength, but there is an increasingly manipulative and aggressive response from Delilah. At first, she asks politely to know her lover’s secret; then she complains, but still politely; the third response is more aggressive and vigorous, and lacks the polite touches Delilah deployed earlier; finally, she questions Samson’s love for her, which causes him finally to give in.
2) Ronald Bergey traces the intertextual links between the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 and the prophecy of Isaiah, particularly chapters 1, 5, 28, 30. He is excruciatingly careful about assessing the verbal parallels, and makes a good case that Deuteronomy 32 plays a “compositional role” in Isaiah’s prophecy and that Deuteronomy influenced Isaiah rather than the reverse. This has important implications for the dating of Deuteronomy, the hinge of the documentary hypothesis (which still, astonishingly, has wide acceptance). It may also have a number of interesting implications for NT theology. NT Wright has argued that the latter chapters of Deuteronomy provide a narrative subtext for much of Paul’s theology, and showing that Isaiah is expanding on Deuteronomy (at least at some points) could enrich the background of Paul’s teaching. Working in the opposite direction: Baker is publishing a series of volumes examining the influence of Isaiah’s “new exodus” theme on the gospels and Acts, and noting the links with Deuteronomy 32 would enrich our understanding of the gospels. Putting these two together, seeing the links between the two OT texts might be an important aspect of an effort to show the continuity between the gospels and Paul.
3) Keith Bodner offers what in my judgment is an unsuccessful treatment of the role of Eliab, David’s older brother, in 1 Sam. Eliab is the brother who appears before Samuel, and is also the brother who rebukes David when the latter inquires about the reward for defeating Goliath. Bodner says that Eliab’s narrative role is to reveal (to the reader) complexities and dark corners of other characters. In particular, his harsh rebuke to David, that he has an “evil heart,” is partly true, or at least a warning to us that David is not so squeaky clean as he might appear. I’m not at all persuaded, partly because this interpretation relies on recent work that presents a much more negative picture of David than the Bible itself does (“David’s secret demons,” and all that). When a scholar finds things troubling in David’s actions that the biblical writers do NOT find troubling, we seem to have reason to suspect that the scholar is bringing his own sensibilities to the text rather than explaining what the ancient writer wanted to convey. Some modern scholars don’t like David, and find him unnerving; but they shouldn’t pretend that the biblical writers thought the same. Further, Bodner’s treatment misses a crucial element of the typology in this section of Samuel. David is being presented as a new Joseph: the youngest son in a family dominated by males; he is successful and “acts wisely” in his service to Saul (ch 18), but is persecuted unjustly; and, his brother attacks him when he offers to take care of the giant, as Joseph’s brothers resented and attacked him. Bodner perhaps would respond by defending Reuben, Simeon, and the rest, or be suggesting that the character of Joseph is as “artfully complex” as David’s. It’s far more plausible that the writer of Samuel surrounded David with an aura of Joseph-ness to commend the young hero, and to present him as a “savior” of Israel. Bodner’s article is a good example of how literary-critical treatments of the Bible can go astray, mainly by assessing biblical narratives as if the writers had the same literary interests as modern novelists.
4) L. Daniel Hawk has a fascinating article on the parallels between the Oresteia and the account of the rise of Israel’s monarchy. I want to read this one more carefully before summarizing it, however.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 29, 2003 at 7:26 am
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