Canter Bridge

Although the blessings held out to Israel in Moses’ final speeches are heart-warming, the corresponding curses test the mind’s capacity for confronting the white-hot heat of divine anger. The imaginative detail that is bent to articulating the shape of calamity is astonishing. A reader finds himself asking—as Moses was summoning Israel to do in this narrative moment—whether one can live with a God like this one. If the breadth of his mercies seems the only mitigation for our wayward instincts, so the severity of his judgment appears our sure undoing.

Whether or not one considers that literature like this projects into the reader’s life a description of reality, it is not difficult to accept that those who compiled it believed the deepest matters of human decision lay before us in just this kind of antithesis between the blessing and the curse.

Unembarrassed by the severities that we find offputting, the text chooses its own conceptual frame. It finds in the sharp and superficially balanced counterpoise of curse to blessing an overriding opportunity for restoration, even after one’s choice has brought on the calamity. In this light, the blessing and the curse do not share an identical weight:

When all these things have happened to you, the blessings and the curses that I have set before you, if you call them to mind among all the nations where the LORD your God has driven you, and return to the LORD your God, and you and your children obey him with all your heart and with all your soul, just as I am commanding you today, then the LORD your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you, gathering you again from all the peoples among whom the LORD your God has scattered you. Even if you are exiled to the ends of the world, from there the LORD your God will gather you, and from there he will bring you back.

One can rail against a God like this. Indeed, some of the voices enshrined in the Bible do so. Yet one must reckon with the world view of the writers and compilers themselves. They found in YHWH an over-riding quality, an abiding feature of his temperament that outlasts and finally adjusts—in narrative terms as in existential ones—the litany of blessings and curses that he pronounces. This quality is forgiveness, the bedrock upon which a nation or a person can place his bloodied feet and look towards a future.