Canter Bridge

Moses’ valedictory addresses to the ‘children of Israel’ comprise the book of Deuteronomy, the so-called second law or second presentation of Torah in the Pentateuch (the five scrolls). Deuteronomy has its lawgiver burdened to recapitulate the calling to which YHWH has summoned his otherwise unremarkable tribes. This survey of the events that have led the gathered people to the place from which they will cross over the Jordan to possess the ‘inheritance’ that YHWH has reserved for them underscores both God’s fidelity to emerging Israel and their own jaw-dropping stubbornness.

That YHWH has not given up on this ‘stiff-necked’ people—a recurring and enduring description of self-interested myopia—is due in no small part to the intercessory exertions of Moses himself. The man has had to fight a war on two fronts. On the one hand, he cajoles his recalcitrant kin into managing their worst instincts in order to continue to ‘walk after YHWH’. On the other, he pleads repeatedly with the frustrated deity not to wipe them out and to create an entirely new ‘mighty nation’ out of Moses’ own favored loins.

In the midst of this grueling mediation, Moses distills YHWH’s expectations for his unpromising tribes into one of the Bible’s great ‘only this’ declarations:

So now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you? Only to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the LORD your God and his decrees that I am commanding you today, for your own well-being.

On the one hand, YHWH’s expectation is decidedly comprehensive. On the other, the ‘only’ clause requires that it rule out at least some presumed alternatives. If emerging Israel is to understand that YHWH expects only this, then a corresponding that must have been pared away from this short list of priority behaviors.

In my view, the thing excluded from YHWH’s core demands must be the cult. That is to say, Deuteronomy here unburdens itself of a declaration that the Bible is in most cases reticent to make: that cult, worship, liturgy correspond to a second order of things. Ethical behavior stands (almost) alone and unadorned in the first order.

If this is a distinction made with clarity only at lengthy intervals, it is because of the human penchant for creating either/or exclusions out of both/and gradations. Worship is paramount in the human response to divine fidelity that the biblical anthology would inculcate into the rhythms of a people’s shared life. Yet, paradoxically, it is not the First Thing.

So can Moses make his case that YHWH has required only this and then allow his context to clarify that ethical conduct—according to the demanding lines of the Mosaic legislation—is the essential thing.

The sixty-ninth psalm—if I may allude to just one conceptual parallel to this Mosaic distillation—employs a different vocabulary to carry the logic of gradated response still further along its path. Naked praise, we are led to believe, is more crucial than the complex physicality of sacrificial liturgy:

I will praise the name of God with a song;
I will magnify him with thanksgiving.
This will please the LORD more than an ox
or a bull with horns and hoofs.
Let the oppressed see it and be glad;
you who seek God, let your hearts revive.
For the LORD hears the needy,
and does not despise his own that are in bonds.

The sacrifice of bulls is no more diminished by this nuanced, poetic prioritization than are the cultic infrastructure and its pertinence endangered by the ‘only this’ ordering of the Mosaic kerygma.

Rather, the distressed life of a nation (Deuteronomy) and a mocked individual (Psalm 69) come together under the light of a persistent biblical truth that proves difficult to steward when absolutes beckon more enchantingly with the easier angularity of their claims: right conduct and naked praise trump formal and adorned worship all day, every day.

Yet that worship remains sublime.