Lecture

In this twenty-fourth and final lecture, we must finish the book of Deuteronomy. We had finished the first eleven chapters, and now chapters twelve to twenty-six deal with a great many miscellaneous laws. Many of these laws could stand considerable individual comment. Because of lack of time, we can give only a few of the high spots and the implications of these laws and the studies that have been made on them.

In chapter 12, we have the law of the central sanctuary. Here the author Moses says you shall overthrow the alters and pillars that the Canaanites have made. When you go into the land, you shall not worship as they have done. They worshipped under every green tree and on every high hill, but he says no, you shall go “to the place which the LORD your God shall choose out of all your tribes to put his name there, And there thou shalt come:” chapter 12 verse 5. There you shall bring your burnt offerings and your sacrifices. This is the centralized worship.

It is the claim of critics that this did not happen in the early days of Israel, that it only happened in the days of Josiah at 620 BC and we have taken this up as one of the main points of higher criticism. I think that it is certainly unnatural to suppose that the children of Israel had their temple and their centralized national government all this time and that there was no effort to centralize the worship. I think we must protest against the idea that because there were times when the Israelites did not worship at the central sanctuary, that, therefore, there was no law that they should. I may remark that there were some laws on the books of America that are not always adhered to by all of the people of the country and so it was in ancient Israel. There were times of apostasy and there were people who did not care. It is not true that everybody always worshipped at the central sanctuary, but this does not mean that there was no law.

Exceptions are noted in the Old Testament and critics say that because of these exceptions, there was no law of a central sanctuary in the early days. The exceptions, however, do not prove as much as they are thought to prove. We remember that Samuel did not worship in the central sanctuary. The reason was because he could not. The Philistines, after all, had conquered Shiloh, the tabernacle was burned, the ark of God was taken away for a while and finally ended up at the home of a private individual. When Samuel went through the nation in his great revival work, he sacrificed at various places. This was natural; it was far better for him to sacrifice irregularly at different places than not to sacrifice at all. We might even make the remark that the Jews of today do not sacrifice. Of course, Christians do not sacrifice either because we hold that the Old Testament sacrificial system has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world as John the Baptist put it.

Remember that the Jews have no warrant for changing the Old Testament sacrificial law or for disobeying it or not bringing sacrifices. Their excuse, of course, is that there is no central sanctuary. But notice that when Samuel had no central sanctuary, he sacrificed anyhow. When Elijah was not able to gather all of the northern kingdom to worship at Jerusalem as he obviously could not, Elijah sacrificed to God on Mount Carmel and God accepted his sacrifice. This was not because it was a good thing to sacrifice just any place, but it was far better to sacrifice irregularly at the top of Mount Carmel and there to have a great witness and testimony than not to sacrifice at all. It is true that there were times when sacrifices were offered, not at the central sanctuary, and critics make much of these times. But they can be understood as due to the accidences of different occasions.

The law of the central sanctuary is an important law, but it is very remarkable that if this law was invented in the days of Josiah by priests who discovered Deuteronomy and pawned it off on the king as the work of Moses, it is very strange that there is no reference to a temple, and there had been a temple in Jerusalem for a long time, and no reference to Jerusalem in all of these chapters of Deuteronomy or of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers either for that matter. Much more logical to say that here we have the declaration of Deuteronomy where Moses told the people that they should worship at a central sanctuary when they’re settled in the land of Canaan and the situation was appropriate for them to do so. In the wilderness, of course, there was just the one place of worship. But in Canaan, conceivably they would be tempted to worship at different places as the Canaanites did and Moses warned them against it.

Then chapter thirteen speaks of the test to the false prophet. Chapter 13 and chapter 18 go together in this matter. Here the test of the false prophet is if the sign or the wonder that the prophet speaks of comes to pass and he says let us go after other gods, you shall not harken to the words of that prophet. Here the test of the false prophet is a false message. Certainly Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the others apply this test to false prophets in their day.

There was, of course, another test of false prophets and this is given in chapter 18. It says that God will raise up a prophet like Moses. Moses, of course, was the great prophet. Numbers speaks of Moses as a prophet that spoke face to face with God and directly, not through visions or dreams; but there was a special intimacy of Moses. But Moses was a prophet, and the great prophet, and a type of Christ. Here there is a reference to a future prophet that God will raise up, indeed, to the line of prophets issuing in Christ, because the prophetic office was itself typical of Christ.

It says in 18:21, “And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken?” The answer is if the prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and the thing does not come true, he was prophesying lies. He was speaking out of his own heart. You shall not be afraid of him. So here are two tests of a prophet. If he speaks a false doctrine or if he gives a false prediction. We may add another one that appears in the other parts of the Old Testament. If a prophet gives a miracle, if he works a miraculous event, the same argument is given by Christ. In that case, you may know that the kingdom of God is come nigh unto you Jesus said. Christ healed the sick and raised the dead in order that men might know that here there was a messenger from God with a supernatural message.

So the prophets of ancient times, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, and these others, performed miracles as a sign that they were speaking the words of God. So all of these tests combined to allow the ancient Israelites to know who was a true prophet and who was not. These prophets then, thus accredited to the people, were able not only to speak the word of God, but many of them also were used by inspiration to write down the words of God and that is why the Old Testament was called, in the New Testament and by Christ, the Law and the Prophets. The Law of Moses, who was a prophet, and the books of the other prophets who wrote down through the years. Of course, we don’t know the names of all of the prophets who wrote some of the books, and some of the men who presumably wrote books, we do not know how the people of their day knew they were prophets, but we may be assured that they were. For instance, the book of Joshua. We know that Joshua was a prophet; at least, the Lord spoke to him by revelation and people would have known that. Joshua did work miracles before the people, and when he wrote the book of Joshua, it was the word of the Lord, and as it says in the book of Joshua, he added this on to the law of God, the word of Moses.

We have important teaching here in chapters thirteen and eighteen on prophets. In chapter 14, we have already referred to this in connection to chapter 11. Chapter 14 parallels chapter 11, much of it, in the book of Leviticus. It gives the dietary laws. It is of interest that here we have only the dietary laws whereas in the book of Leviticus, we have also the other laws of what the King James Version calls leprosy. We argued there that this was not leprosy, but that it was any skin rash, any communicable disease, and the cure for it or the public health law, the cure for the nation, was quarantine. Deuteronomy quotes part of Leviticus, but not the rest. This is typical of Deuteronomy. It has some references to the earlier laws and some it does not bother to repeat.

In chapter 15, we have also some repetition concerning the sabbatical year. This sabbatical year was an important thing in the Hebrew economy. It was observed sometimes; sometimes, surely, it was not observed. When it was not observed, it was a hardship for the poor and it was part of the breakdown of the nation. Also in this chapter we have the laws concerning caring for the poor. You shall open your hand wide unto the poor, it says in 15:8. You “shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need.” Don’t think that there’s no use because soon it will be the seventh year, the year of release and the debt will be forgiven and I will lose my money. You are supposed to go ahead and give to the poor and needy brother in any case.

Chapter 16 is a chapter on the Passover and the feasts. We have in several places, we’ve already referred to them, the different feasts of the Jewish year, the three pilgrimage festivals. In Deuteronomy 16:16, it says, “Three times in a year shall all thy males appear before the LORD thy God in the place which he shall choose; in the feast of unleavened bread,” that would be Passover in the spring, “and the feast of weeks,” this would be Pentecost, fifty days later on Sunday. Then “the feast of tabernacles,” this would be the seventh month of fall—the fruit festival. It says, “they shall not appear before the LORD empty.” This is one reason why these pilgrimage festivals were given so that they would bring their tithes to the central sanctuary and there they would be apportioned because these tithes were, of course, the living salary of the priests and the Levites.

It is in chapter 17 that we have laws concerning witnesses; here idolaters are to be stoned. There is much talk in our current days about capital punishment. Capital punishment is, thought by some, to be cruel and unusual and that it has even been outlawed at one time by the Supreme Court. We are not here to discuss the question of capital punishment in America particularly, but it is certainly clear that in the Old Testament, capital punishment was required. There was nothing immoral or wrong about capital punishment. Indeed, the idea that capital punishment is harsh is contradicted by the statement in Genesis 9:6, in that section, where it says that capital punishment is required because murder is so terrible a thing. Murder these days goes unsolved and seems to be a matter of course taken in our stride, and we are not shocked sufficiently. But in the Old Testament it says that man is made in the image of God. Human life is sacred. It is not the attitude of the modern secularists, but the Bible says a human life is sacred. This, of course, is a statement also of our Declaration of Independence coming doubtless from these same ideas. Because human life is sacred, therefore it must be avenged. So it says here that if a person is an idolater, he should be stoned to death.

Here we have something different in the Old Testament from what we have today. Here we have a capital punishment for a religious offense. Of course, this was done during the middle ages in the inquisition. The difference is that in the Old Testament time, there was a theocracy by God’s command. God had promised to give His Holy Spirit to the Israelite nation and those that did not agree with the religion of Israel were to be cut off from His people, which probably meant that they were to be excluded, not necessarily killed; although in some cases some crimes of this nature were capital offenses, but it says that that soul should be cut off from people means that he should be excluded from the nation of Israel; he should go elsewhere.

There was, therefore, not a pluralism as we have in the present dispensation. In the present age, God has not promised to bless all of Americans in a time of revival to have all Americans saved as was the case in ancient Jerusalem. Therefore, in our day, there is a separation of church and state by God’s command just as there was a union of church and state by God’s command in that former time. Jesus said in our day we must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. Therefore, we believe that in our time, it would be wrong to have civil penalties for religious offenses.

This does not mean that the religious offenses are less serious in the eyes of God. But it does mean they are not to be judged by the secular arm. This was, of course, a fault of the early puritans, who, like the inquisition of the middle ages, felt that it was up to them to kill witches, for instance. There were not many witches killed in Salem and the New England colonies but there were a few. My understanding is that there were six; there were more killed in England, and they have been perhaps over emphasized by secular historians. But it is true that there was, in those days, a false idea of the union of church and state from which in later American light, we have been delivered to the biblical idea of the separation of church and state, for which we should be very, very thankful.

It does specify here and also in a later section that no person should be condemned, either in the capital case or in other cases, except at the mouth of two or three witnesses. The rights of the accused are very carefully given here. Nobody was tortured to get their confession; there was not the use of the ordeal as there was in ancient Mesopotamia.

In Mesopotamia, if a person was accused of a crime and there were no witnesses, you could bind him and throw him into the river. If he sank, he was guilty. If he floated, he was either innocent, or perhaps you might say stout or might have learned how to float. But this was the ordeal. It was used also during the middle ages. It was a cruel form of deciding whether a person was innocent or not. There is nothing like that in the Old Testament.

There is one place in the book of Numbers where a woman may be accused by a jealous husband of infidelity, and she is brought to the priest, there are no witnesses, and the priest makes her swear that she is innocent and he gives her what is called bitter water, some water which has dust of the tabernacle floor mixed in with it, and before God she takes an oath that she is innocent. But remember that the water is not dangerous. The water would not kill or harm. It was not like the ordeal. Rather it was more like a lie-detector test. A woman that could swear in the holy place before the priest in such solemn circumstances that she was innocent, if she could do that without batting an eye, she probably was innocent. And if not, God in his providence, it says, would afflict her and sickness would come and she would be shown to be guilty. But this, I say, is not an ordeal and the laws of the Old Testament are worthy laws with regard to penalties and with regard to witnesses and judicial procedure. We have an example of that right here.

In chapter 17 also, we have a section concerning the king. Yet I think if we look at this carefully, chapter 17, verses 14¬-20, we see that it would not be a suitable law to be promulgated in the days of Josiah. The reference to a king is all hypothetical. If there should be a king, he should not multiply horses; he should not get himself rich, he should not go back to Egypt and so on, he should not multiply wives to himself. If this was written in opposition to any particular king, it should have been written in the time of Solomon, not in the time of Josiah. No, there were kings all around and here the Lord is forbidding the Israelites from having a king or at least is regulating kingship if they desire to have one.

So this would fit fine, the idea that the Israelites would face the matter of kingship before they went into the land of Canaan. But the point is not so much that they should not have a king, but if they get a king, in verse 18, when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests and Levites. The Levites were the keepers of the law, and the law of God in the hands of the Levites should be given to the king. We must point out that the kingship in ancient Israel, when it did come, was not the despotic, absolute monarchy that sometimes occurred in oriental countries or even in the French monarchy and so on. The kingship was limited by the priesthood. Kingship and priesthood both were checked by the prophets who declared the word of the Lord, which was above the king and which was above the individual. It was the word of God.

In chapter 19 verse 21, we have a famous verse in connection with a controversy. If false witnesses rise up against a man and a false witness causes an innocent man to be punished, then when the evil is discovered, the judge shall do to the false witness what he caused the innocent man to suffer. The conclusion is that I shall not pity but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. This is a famous lex talionis as it is called or law of retaliation.

In the New Testament this is referred to, of course, in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5 and there Christ says that you have heard it has been said “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you.” Some people argue that here we have an evolution in ethics. In ancient times there was a great deal of retaliation. Moses limited it to even-Steven, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Christ did away with all that.

This view is not one that is very honoring to the Old Testament. I may say that I have discussed it somewhat in a book of mine, Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible, on page 51. I go into it more in details than we can here. Let me just say that this verse is found three times in the Old Testament—Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20 and here in Deuteronomy 19:21. If you will check those verses, you will find that in each case, this is a law for the Judges. By the way, there is no evidence that it was carried out literally. A similar law is found in the law of Hammurabi and there, too, there is no evidence that it was carried out literally. It was, apparently, an idiomatic and hyperbolic expression that really teaches the judges that they should make the punishment fit the crime. That they should not go beyond nor should they go under. They should give stiff penalty for serious offenses. Lesser penalty for lesser offenses. It was a law that the judge should not listen to bribery or to influence, but that he should judge righteous judgment.

The New Testament does not say that this law was a bad law for ancient Israel. The trouble was that the scribes were taking this law of justice for the courts of Israel and making it a principle of private retaliation. What Christ was opposed to was not the judges of ancient Israel, nor to the law of God, but to the use made of this law by the Pharisees. Christ says for the individual that he is to overlook offenses, that he is to turn the other cheek and to take it rather than to insist on a pound of flesh. This law, I think, has been much misinterpreted. It is a good law if it is taken in its context and the way it is intended.

Chapter 20 gives laws of warfare. Among the laws of warfare is the statement that when in chapter 20:11, if you go to a city to fight, that you should proclaim peace to the city, and if it makes an answer of peace and gives in, you are to take the spoil and so on. But the people are not to be slaughtered. This is for cities at a distance. This was not for cities in the land of Canaan. In the land of Canaan, they were to be annihilated. This was the law of total war, which we have spoken already. On the other hand, we must remember that this law of total war did not mean that everybody in Canaan was to be killed. It just meant that there was such a fright to be given to the Canaanites that thousands of the Canaanites would move off and not fight and be displaced persons and flee and take up residence elsewhere and leave the children of Israel with this land. This was the purpose of Joshua, and it was a purpose that partly worked, although not completely, because it was not fully carried out.

There are many more miscellaneous regulations which we may not refer to. The law of inquest and unsolved murder in chapter 21 and then the laws in chapter 22. We say in America, ‘finders, keepers,’ but this is not the case. If you find your brothers ox or sheep going astray, you must bring it back unto your brother and so on.

In chapter 24, we have the law of divorce. When a man has taken a wife and married her and she finds no favor in his eyes and she goes and marries someone else, or the other person divorces her also or dies, she may not come back and marry the first husband. This has been taken by some as the law of divorce. This, too, I’ve discussed in that same place around page 51 in my book on inspiration. I would simply say that this is not a law that tells the details of divorce. It is a law that prevents remarriage. But why should remarriage be prevented in a case like this? Did it happen very often? It doesn’t happen so very often today; it doesn’t seem to be very natural. But in those days, a wife was sold and there was a danger that a wife would become chattel. When she would be sold by her father, he would get money for her. If a husband was in need, he could perhaps sell his wife and then when he recouped his losses, he could perhaps buy her back. In this way, a wife could be just sold like cattle. This is what this law strikes against. It is against wife trading rather than to encourage or even give the provisions for divorce.

The following chapters, the concluding chapters, in the book of Deuteronomy give us Moses’ great messages of challenge and exhortation for the people. Chapter 27 and 28 tell, for instance, of the blessings of Mount Ebal and Gerizim that I referred to. Here half of the tribe stand on one side of the valley and the other half stand on the other side of the valley. They’re named here, all twelve of the tribes of Israel. One side says blessed be those who do so-and-so and the other side says cursed be those who pervert justice and so-and-so. This very elaborate ritual, the children of Israel declare their adherence to the laws of God and these laws were to be written on plaster, on great stones, so that all might read.

Then the last chapter of the book of Deuteronomy brings its own problems. Chapter 32 and 33, the great song of Moses and the blessing of Moses, chapters which have been studied from the poetic angle by Dr. Albright and some of his school, and have been judged to be early poems on the basis of the language concerned. The last chapter brings certain questions because it is a description of Moses’ death. Now as I’ve already said, if this last chapter is not by Moses, this certainly does not touch the question whether the main sections of the Pentateuch were by Moses. But I think we must remark that there was a policy in ancient times to put on the bottom of one clay tablet, a line which would be repeated on the top of the next clay tablet so that a person in a sequence would know which tablet to take first and which to take next. They did not have pagination. Clay tablets were not bound in book form. Neither were scrolls bound together. So it was necessary to have what was called catch lines, or colophons too as sometimes referred to, at the bottom of a tablet, which would tell you who was the scribe and so on.

And so, in the books of the Old Testament, you find this principle. Strangely, you have at the end of Chronicles and the beginning of Ezra, two verses repeated to show that these books, one follow the other. The same way in the book of Judges/Ruth, which were bound together in ancient times. At the end of Ruth, you have a genealogy of David that takes you on down into the days of Samuel. In the last chapter of Joshua, tells of the death of Joshua. Those verses are repeated in the second chapter of Judges. Here in Deuteronomy, we have a kind of a catch line; we have a chapter, I believe, written by Joshua, tacked onto the end of Deuteronomy in order to show the unity of the book of Deuteronomy with what follows because the Pentateuch does not stand by itself. It is part of the larger work, the word of God, the Old Testament, and Moses the great prophet was followed by many others who carried on the work and will of God.