1“And now, Israel, listen to the laws and to the judgments that I’m teaching you to do, so that you’ll live, and you’ll come and take possession of the land that YHWH, your fathers’ God, is giving you
4:1. so that you’ll live. This theme of choosing life begins here and will recur several times in the course of Moses’ speech, and culminate in his last sentences (Deut 30:19). See the comment there.
2You shall not add onto the thing that I command you, and you shall not subtract from it: observing the commandments of YHWH, your God, that I command you.
4:2. You shall not add … and you shall not subtract. This is an essential command: it governs the way Israel is to observe all the other commandments. The second part—not to subtract from the law—is more obvious than the first, but that makes the recognition of the first part all the more important. One may think that, by doing more than the law requires, one is doing better, being more religious, more observant, when one is in fact thus violating the law. And when one imposes such additions to the law on others, one puts them at risk of violation as well.
This is stated here in the last book of the Torah as a command, but it was already conveyed through a story at the beginning of the Torah, when the woman says to the snake that God commanded that they not eat from the tree or touch it, though God had said nothing about touching it (see the comment on Gen 3:3). Adding to a command is as dangerous as taking away from it. Indeed, as Rashi noted in his comment on that verse in Genesis, adding to it may lead to taking away from it. One must, therefore, use extreme caution in interpreting and expanding the laws in the Torah. This is sometimes a delicate task because in postbiblical Judaism a principle developed of “building a fence around the Torah.” One starts to observe the Sabbath early, before sunset, so as not to risk violating the Sabbath by mistakenly starting late. But there is a difference between sincere care for the law, which is done out of reverence for it, and extreme expansion of the law, which is done for other motives: fear, power over others. The law is presented in the Torah as divine, but it requires human strength and wisdom to carry it out.
3It’s your eyes that saw what YHWH did at Baal Peor, that every man who went after Baal Peor: YHWH, your God, destroyed him from among you.
4But you who were clinging to YHWH, your God: you’re all alive today!
5See: I’ve taught you laws and judgments as YHWH, my God, commanded me, to do so within the land to which you’re coming to take possession of it.
6And you shall observe and do them because it’s your wisdom and your understanding before the eyes of the peoples, in that they will hear all these laws and will say, ‘Only a wise and understanding people is this great nation.’
7Because who is a great nation that has gods close to it like YHWH, our God, in all our calling to him?
8And who is a great nation that has just laws and judgments like all this instruction that I’m putting in front of you today?
9“Only be watchful, and watch yourself very much, in case you’ll forget the things that your eyes have seen and in case they’ll turn away from your heart, all the days of your life. But you shall make them known to your children and to your children’s children:
10the day that you stood in front of YHWH, your God, at Horeb, when YHWH said to me, ‘Assemble the people to me, and I’ll make them hear my words so that they’ll learn to fear me all the days that they’re living on the land, and they’ll teach their children.’
11And you came forward and stood below the mountain, and the mountain was burning in fire to the heart of the skies: darkness, cloud, and nimbus.
4:11. the mountain was burning. The text in Exodus does not in fact use this word for burning. It says that “Mount Sinai was all smoke because YHWH came down on it in fire” (Exod 19:18). This word was rather the term for the burning bush. And so we learn only now that the burning bush that Moses experienced was already a sign of what was to come. And this in turn may answer the old question of what is meant when God says to Moses at the bush, “This is the sign for you that I have sent you. When you bring out the people from Egypt you shall serve God on this mountain” (Exod 3:12). What is the sign? The miraculous burning bush itself. And it prefigures what will happen when the people come back to that mountain. This point is supported later in this chapter (4:36) when Moses reminds the people that at Sinai “you heard His voice from inside the fire”—which recalls how Moses himself heard God call “from inside the bush” that was on fire (Exod 3:4).
12And YHWH spoke to you from inside the fire. You were hearing the sound of words, but you weren’t seeing a form, just sound.
13And He told you His covenant that He commanded you to do, the Ten commandments, and He wrote them on two tablets of stones.
4:13. His covenant … the Ten Commandments. The Ten commandments are the covenant. All the other commandments are important, and there are rewards for keeping them and consequences for breaking them. But the Ten Commandments on the tablets are different. Violation of them by the community (for example, widespread pagan worship or injustice) risks the breaking of the covenant. They are the essence of the covenant itself.
14And YHWH commanded me at that time to teach you laws and judgments, for you to do them in the land to which you’re crossing to take possession of it.
15And you shall be very watchful of yourselves—because you didn’t see any form in the day that YHWH spoke to you at Horeb from inside the fire—
16in case you’ll be corrupted, and you’ll make a statue, a form of any figure, a design of a male or a female,
17a design of any animal that’s in the earth, a design of any winged bird that flies in the skies,
18a design of anything that creeps on the ground, a design of any fish that’s in the water under the earth,
19and in case you’ll raise your eyes to the skies, and you’ll see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the array of the skies, and you’ll be moved so that you’ll bow to them and serve them, when YHWH, your God, has allocated them to all the peoples under all the skies.
4:19. the array of the skies. Again the last book of the Torah recalls the beginning of the Torah. The term “array” has not been used to refer to the heavenly bodies since the creation story (Gen 2:1). There it was used in the account of God’s creation of the cosmos. Now Moses warns that one might be inspired by their awesome quality to worship them.
4:19. allocated them to all the peoples. This is doubly extraordinary: (1) God is understood to have provided the pagan deities that the other nations worship. (2) There is no criticism here of the other nations for worshiping them. There is nothing wrong with other people’s following their own faiths. They are only criticized elsewhere in the Torah for specific practices in their religions that are abhorrent to Israelites, such as human sacrifice.
20But YHWH has taken you, and He has brought you out from the iron furnace, from Egypt, to become a legacy people for him, as it is this day.
21“And YHWH had been incensed at me over your matters, and He swore that I would not cross the Jordan and not come to the good land that YHWH, your God, is giving you as a legacy.
22So I am dying in this land. I’m not crossing the Jordan. But you are crossing, and you shall possess this good land.
4:22. good. The word “good” recurs nine times in the first chapters of Deuteronomy. It culminates when Moses ends this section of his speech with the instruction to keep all the commandments “so it will be good for you” (4:40). It is reminiscent of Genesis 1. There God declares each stage of the creation to be “good.” That is, the world starts off in a state that is positive, but it soon goes into a variety of troubles relating to human behavior (“The ground is cursed on your account,” Gen 3:17). And now Moses tells the people over and over that the land they are entering is “good.” It too starts off in a positive state, and they have the opportunity to keep it good or to ruin it.
23Watch yourselves, in case you’ll forget the covenant of YHWH, your God, that He made with you, and you’ll make a statue of any form about which YHWH, your God, has commanded you,
24because YHWH, your God: He is a consuming fire, a jealous God.
4:24. a consuming fire, a jealous God. Here Moses emphasizes the harsh, frightening side of God. But he immediately softens it in his next few sentences. See the comments on vv. 29 and 31 below. (On the term “jealous,” see the comment on Exod 20:5.)
25“When you’ll produce children and grand-children and will have been in the land long, and you’ll be corrupt and make a statue of any form and do what is bad in the eyes of YHWH, your God, to provoke Him,
26I call the skies and the earth to witness regarding you today that you’ll perish quickly from the land to which you’re crossing the Jordan to take possession of it. You won’t extend days on it, but you’ll be destroyed!
27And YHWH will scatter you among the peoples, and you’ll be left few in number among the nations where YHWH will drive you.
4:27. scatter. The threat of scattering a people is frightening itself, and, again, it harks back to the early part of Genesis, where YHWH scatters the people of the world in the matter of the tower of Babylon (Gen 11:9).
4:27. few in number. The other occurrence of this expression in the Torah is where Jacob reprimands his sons Simeon and Levi for massacring the city of Shechem; he says that he is vulnerable now because he is few in number (Gen 34:30). And the denouement of this matter comes when, on his deathbed, Jacob condemns Simeon and Levi to be scattered (Gen 49:7), using the same word that is used for scattering in the first half of this verse. The double parallel makes a notable reminiscence of Genesis here.
28And you’ll serve gods, the work of human hands, wood and stone, there, that don’t see and don’t hear and don’t eat and don’t smell.
4:28. work of human hands. This verse is a brief expression of what is said in Ps 115:4–8.
29“But if you’ll seek YHWH, your God, from there, then you’ll find Him, when you’ll inquire of Him with all your heart and all your soul.
4:29. But if you’ll seek … then you’ll find. Even though Moses has just told the people that God will destroy and scatter them, he still returns to the idea that they can repent and that God will forgive them. The conception of God is always based in compassion. No matter what the people’s offense, God is forgiving and merciful, and there can be a new reconciliation.
30When you have trouble, and all these things have found you, in the future days, if you’ll go back to YHWH, your God, and listen to His voice,
31He won’t let you down, and he won’t destroy you, because YHWH, your God, is a merciful God, and He won’t forget your fathers’ covenant that He swore to them.
4:31. a merciful God. This is the first time that Moses mentions to the people a portion of the divine formula that God revealed to him at Sinai in the moment of Moses’ greatest revelation, when he saw God (Exod 34:6). Until this point, Moses had only spoken of it to God Himself (when Moses pleaded with God not to destroy the people in the spies episode; Num 14:18). Later these come to be the most quoted words of God in the Tanak: in the prophets (Joel 2:13; Jon 4:2; Nah 1:3), Psalms (86:15; 103:8; 111:4; 112:4; 145:8), and later history (2 Chr 30:9; Neh 9:17,31). During their travels the people have seen much of God’s just, punishing side. But now, as they are about to begin their life in the promised land, Moses informs them that God is, in the first place, not a wrathful God, but a merciful God.
32Because ask of the earliest days that were before you, from the day that God created a human on the earth, and from one end of the skies to the other end of the skies: has there been anything like this great thing? or has any-thing like it been heard of?
33Has a people heard God’s voice speaking from inside a fire the way you heard—and lived?
34Or has God put it to the test, to come to take for Himself a people from among another people with tests, with signs, and with wonders and with war and with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm and with great fears like everything that YHWH, your God, has done for you in Egypt before your eyes?
4:34. a strong hand and an outstretched arm. More correctly, the first noun (y
d) means “forearm” and the second (z
r
‘a) means “arm.” In Hebrew, kp is the hand, up to the wrist; yãd is the forearm, from the fingers up to the elbow; and zr‘a is the entire arm, from the fingers up to the shoulder (see Gen 49:24). I have retained the traditional translation, “a strong hand and an outstretched arm,” because it is a famous biblical phrase. And I frequently translate yd as hand because the word sometimes can mean just the hand and because of factors of English usage. (See also the comment on Deut 11:24.)
35You have been shown in order to know that YHWH: He is God. There is no other outside of Him.
4:35,39. He is God. The Hebrew is written with the definite article (literally, “He is the God,” not just “He is God” or “He is a God”). Grammatically, it excludes the possibility of saying the same thing about any other god as well. That is, it is a purely monotheistic statement. The sentence that follows it in v. 35 confirms this: “There is no other outside of Him.” The sentence that follows it in v. 39 does likewise: “There isn’t another.” And these sentences were written by the seventh century B.C.E. at the very latest. They weigh against the claim of some scholars that monotheism was a late concept in biblical Israel (later than the Babylonian exile in 587 B.C.E.).
36From the skies He had you hear His voice in order to discipline you, and on the earth He showed you His great fire, and you heard His words from inside the fire.
37And because He loved your fathers He chose their seed after them, so He brought you out in front of Him from Egypt by His great power,
4:37. their seed after them. Grammatically, the text reads “his seed after him”—using the singular even though the antecedent is the plural “your fathers.” I do not know if there is some special meaning to this.
38to dispossess bigger and more powerful nations than you in front of you, to bring you, to give you their land as a legacy as it is today.
39And you shall know today and store it in your heart that YHWH: He is God in the skies above and on the earth below. There isn’t another.
40And you shall observe His laws and His commandments that I command you today so it will be good for you and for your children after you, and so that you’ll extend days on the land that YHWH, your God, is giving you forever.”
41Then Moses distinguished three cities across the Jordan toward the sun’s rising,
42for the manslayer who would slay his neighbor without knowing—and he had not hated him from the day before yesterday—to flee there, so he would flee to one of these the cities and would live:
4:42. from the day before yesterday. Meaning: he had no prior hatred of the person he killed. The killing was accidental and without malice.
43Bezer in the wilderness of the plain for the Reubenites, and Ramoth in Gilead for the Gadites, and Golan in Bashan for the Manassites.
44And this is the instruction that Moses set before the children of Israel.
4:44. this is the instruction. In the original context here in Deuteronomy, the word “Torah/instruction” refers only to the things that Moses says to the people across the Jordan from Canaan in his last speech (4:44–46). Jews now sing this verse when the Torah is held up for all to see after it is read each week. These words, “this is the Torah that Moses set … ,” have therefore come to be understood in that context to refer to the entire five books on the Torah scroll.
45These are the testimonies and the laws and the judgments that Moses spoke to the children of Israel when they went out from Egypt,
4:45. testimonies. Meaning: things that have been witnessed. Moses has called the skies and the earth to witness what he has instructed the people (4:26). He will do so again at the end of Deuteronomy (31:28; 32:1).
46across the Jordan in the valley opposite Beth Peor, in the land of Sihon, king of the Amorites, who lived in Heshbon, whom Moses and the children of Israel struck when they came out from the land of Egypt.
47And they took possession of his land, and of the land of Og, king of Bashan, the two kings of the Amorites who were across the Jordan at the sun’s rising,
48from Aroer, which is on the edge of the Wadi Arnon, to Mount Sion—that is Hermon—
49and all the plain across the Jordan eastward to the sea of the plain below the slopes of Pisgah.
