Canter Bridge

For Deuteronomy, this quintessential treatise of the heart, gratitude is a most powerful force.

One glimpses layers of the Bible’s fecundity in medieval editorializing and in summary declarations. Let’s begin with the medievals: the verse and chapter divisions that were added during that era hew to the side of convention. Chapters in given work are of predictable length, verses are inserted according to patterns that can be recognized and described, and so on.

Against this backdrop of habitual treatment of the text, the lengthy chapter 28 of Deuteronomy-no fewer than sixty-eight verses-is a triumph of coherence over convention. By grouping the mirror-image blessings upon obedience and curses upon forgetfulness in one single chapter, the versifiers made a heroic concession to the poetics of justice and are to be lauded. Continue Reading »

Of all the possible exemptions from military service that one a man might imagine, delighting his new wife might seem the least probable and the most appealing.

If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay home and bring happiness to the wife he has married.

Thus does Deuteronomy’s prescription for an integrated society take aim at the peril of absence. Solitude, after all, was the Primordial Man’s first enemy in the early pages of Genesis, a threat long before the serpent appeared. The lawgiver here picks up that threat and assures that the company of the home outranks the camaraderie of the battlefield. Though it may be too much to posit a neat hierarchy of social duties, one that privileges the family over the nation, it is only a small leap to see such social theory beginning its gestation here. Continue Reading »

Famously labeled ‘Torah’, the first five books of the Bible are received as Moses’, the lawgiver’s, legacy.

Yet ‘Torah’ relates the verb ‘to teach’, not ‘to legislate’. Torah is before anything else instruction.

The substantive legal component of this Mosaic anthology is embedded in the story of Israel’s origins, a genesis that this people shares with humanity itself. Common ancestry does not dawdle, however, and the story quickly particularizes its focus onto Abraham’s descendants and then those of Jacob himself. He is renamed Israel, for his habit and privilege of struggling with God. Continue Reading »