_THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT_
DEUT. i.-iii.
After these preliminary discussions we now enter upon the
exposition. With the exception of the first two verses of chapter
i., concerning which there is a doubt whether they do not belong
to Numbers, these three chapters stand out as the first section of
our book. Examination shows that they form a separate and distinct
whole, not continued in chapter iv.; but there has been a great
diversity of opinion as to their authorship and the intention with
which they have been placed here. The vocabulary and the style so
resemble those of the main parts of the book, that they cannot
be entirely separated from them; yet, at the same time, it seems
unlikely that the original author of the main trunk of Deuteronomy
can have begun his book with this introductory speech from Moses,
followed it up with another Mosaic speech, still introductory, in
chapter iv., and in chapter v. begun yet another introductory speech
running through seven chapters, before he comes to the statutes
and judgments which are announced at the very beginning. The
current supposition about these chapters, therefore, is that they
are the work of a Deuteronomist, a man formed under the influence
of Deuteronomy and filled with its spirit, but not the author of
the book. This seems to account for the resemblances, and would
also explain to some extent the existence of such a superfluous
prologue. But the hypothesis is, nevertheless, not entirely
satisfactory. The resemblances are closer than we should expect
in the work of different authors; and one feels that the supposed
Deuteronomist must have been less sensitive in a literary sense than
we have any right to suppose him if he did not feel the incongruity
of such a speech in this place. Professor Dillmann has made a very
acute suggestion, which meets the whole difficulty in a more natural
way. Feeling that the style and language were in all essentials one
with those of the central Deuteronomy, he seeks for some explanation
which would permit him to assign this section to the author of the
book himself. He suggests that as originally written this was a
historical introduction leading up to the central code of laws;
a historical preface, in fact, which the author of Deuteronomy
naturally prefixed to his book. _Ex hypothesi_ he had not the
previous books, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, before him as we
have them. These now form a historical introduction to Deuteronomy
of a very minute and elaborate kind; but he had to embody in his
own book all of the past history of his people that he wished to
emphasise. But when the editor who arranged the Pentateuch as we now
have it inserted Deuteronomy in its present place, he found that he
had a double historical preface, that in the previous books and this
in Deuteronomy itself. As reverence forbade the rejection of these
chapters, he took refuge in the expedient of turning the originally
impersonal narrative into a speech of Moses; which he could all the
more blamelessly do as the probability is that the whole book was
regarded in his time as the work of Moses. This hypothesis, if it
can be accepted, certainly accounts for all the phenomena presented
by these chapters--the similarity of language, the archæological
notes in the speech, and the historic colour in the statements
regarding Edom, for example, which corresponds to early feeling,
not to post-exilic thought at all. It has besides the merit of
reducing the number of anonymous writers to be taken account of in
the Pentateuch, a most desirable thing in itself. Lastly, it gives
us in Deuteronomy a compact whole more complete in all its parts
than almost any other portion of the Old Testament, certainly more
so than any of the books containing legislation.
Moreover, that the Deuteronomic reinforcement and expansion of
the Mosaic legislation, as contained in the Book of the Covenant,
should begin with such a history of Yahweh's dealings with His
people, is entirely characteristic of Old Testament Revelation. In
the main and primarily, what the Old Testament writers give us is
a history of how God wrought, how He dealt with the people He had
chosen. In the view of the Hebrew writers, God's first and main
revelation of Himself is always in conduct. He showed Himself good
and merciful and gentle to His people, and then, having so shown
Himself, He has an acknowledged right to claim their obedience. As
St. Paul has so powerfully pointed out, the law was secondary, not
primary. Grace, the free love and choice of God, was always the
beginning of true relations with Him, and only after that had been
known and accepted does He look for the true life which His law is
to regulate. Naturally, therefore, when the author of Deuteronomy
is about to press upon Israel the law in its expanded form, to call
them back from many aberrations, to summon them to a reformation and
new establishment of the whole framework of their lives, he turns
back to remind them of what their past had been. Law, therefore,
is only a secondary deposit of Revelation. If we are true to the
Biblical point of view we shall not look for the Divine voice only,
or even chiefly, in the legal portions of the Scripture. God's
full revelation of Himself will be seen in the process and the
completion of that age-long movement, which was begun when Israel
first became a nation by receiving Yahweh as their God, and which
ended with the life and death of Him who summed up in Himself all
that Israel was called, but failed, to be.
That is the ruling thought in Scripture about Revelation. God
reveals Himself in history; and by the persistent thoroughness with
which the Scriptural writers grasp this thought, the unique and
effective character of the Biblical Revelation is largely accounted
for. Other nations, no doubt, looked back at times upon what their
gods had done for them, and those who spoke for these gods may often
have claimed obedience and service from their people on the ground
of past favour and under threats of its withdrawal. But earlier than
any other people which has affected the higher races of mankind,
Israel conceived of God as a moral power with a will and purpose
which embraced mankind. Further, in the belief which appears in
their earliest records, that through them the nations were to be
blessed, and that in the future One was coming who would in Himself
bring about the realisation of Israel's destiny, they were provided
with a philosophy of history, with a conception which was fitted to
draw into organic connection with itself all the various fortunes of
Israel and of the nations.
Of course, at first much that was involved in their view was
not present to any mind. It was the very merit of the germinal
revelation made through Moses that it had in it powers of growth and
expansion. In no other way could it be a true revelation of God, a
revelation which should have in it the fulness, the flexibility,
the aloofness from mere local and temporary peculiarities, which
would secure its fitness for universal mankind. Any revelation that
consists only of words, of ideas even, must, to be received, have
some kind of relation to the minds that are to receive it. If the
words and ideas are revealed, as they must be, at a given place and
a given time, they must be in such a relation to that place and
time that at some period of the world's history they will be found
inadequate, needing expansion, which does not come naturally, and
then they have to be laid aside as insufficient. But a revelation
which consists in acts, which reveals God in intimate, age-long,
constant dealings with mankind, is so many-sided, so varied, so
closely moulded to the actual and universal needs of man, that it
embraces all the fundamental exigencies of human life, and must
always continue to cover human experience. From it men may draw off
systems of doctrines, which may concentrate the revelation for a
particular generation, or for a series of generations, and make it
more potently active in these circumstances. But unless the system
be kept constantly in touch with the revelation as given in the
history, it must become inadequate, false in part, and must one day
vanish away.
The revelation then in life is the only possible form for a real
revelation of God; and that the writers of the Old Testament in
their circumstances and in their time felt and asserted this, is in
itself so very great a merit, that it is almost of itself sufficient
to justify any claims they may make to special inspiration. The
greatest of them saw God at work in the world, and had experience
of His influence in themselves, so that they had their eyes opened
to His actions as other men had not. The least of them, again, had
been placed at the true point of view for estimating aright the
significance of the ordinary action of the Divine Providence, and
for tracing the lines of Divine action where they were to other
men invisible, or at least obscure. And in the records they have
left us they have been entirely true to that supremely important
point of view. All they deal with in the history is the moral and
spiritual effects of God's dealing; and the great interests, as the
world reckons them, of war and conquest, of commerce and art, are
referred to only briefly and often only in the way of allusion.
To many moderns this is an offence, which they avenge by speaking
contemptuously of the mental endowment of the Biblical writers as
historians. On the contrary, that these should have kept their
eyes fixed only upon that which concerned the religious life of
their people, that they should have kept firm hold of the truth
that it was there the central importance of the people lay, and
that they have given us the material for the formation of that
great conception of supernatural revelation by history in which God
Himself moves as a factor, is a merit so great that even if it were
only a brilliant fancy they might surely be pardoned for ignoring
other things. But if, as is the truth, they were tracing the central
stream of God's redemptive action in the world, were laying open to
our view the steps by which the unapproachably lofty conception of
God was built up, which their nation alone has won for the human
race, then it can hardly seem a fault that nothing else appealed
to them. They have given God to those who were blindly groping for
Him, and they have established the standard by which all historic
estimates of even modern life are ultimately to be measured.
For though there were in the history of that particular nation,
and in the line of preparation for Christ, special miraculous
manifestations of God's power and love, which do not now occur,
yet no judgment of the course of history is worth anything, even
to-day, which does not occupy essentially the Biblical position.
Ultimately the thing to be considered is, what hath God wrought? If
that be ignored, then the stable and instructive element in history
has been kept out of sight, and the mind loses itself hopelessly
amid the weltering chaos of second causes. Froude, in his _History
of England_, has noted this, and declares that in the period he
deals with it was the religious men who alone had any true insight
into the tendency of things. They measured all things, almost too
crudely, by the Biblical standard; but so essentially true and
fundamental does that show itself to be, that their judgment so
formed has proved to be the only sound one. This is what we should
expect if God's power and righteousness are the great factors in
the drama which the history of man and of the world unfolds to us.
That being so, the suicidal folly of the policy of any Church or
party which shuts the Bible away from popular use is manifest. It is
nothing short of a blinding of the people's eyes, and a shutting of
their ears to warning voices which the providential government of
the world, when viewed on a large scale, never fails to utter. It
renders sound political judgment the prerogative only of the few,
and sets them among a people who will turn to any charlatans rather
than believe their voice.
It was natural and it was inevitable, therefore, that the author
of Deuteronomy, standing, as he did, on the threshold of a great
crisis in the history of Israel, should turn the thoughts of his
people back to the history of the past. To him the great figure in
the history of Israel in those trying and eventful years during
which they wandered between Horeb, Kadesh-Barnea, and the country of
the Arnon, is Yahweh their God. He is behind all their movements,
impelling and inciting them to go on and enjoy the good land He
had promised to their fathers. He went before them and fought for
them. He bare them in the wilderness, as a man doth bear his son. He
watched over them and guided their footsteps in cloud and fire by
day and night. Moreover all the nations by whom they passed had been
led by Him and assigned their places, and only those nations whom
Yahweh chose had been given into Israel's hand. In the internal
affairs of the community, too, He had asserted Himself. They were
Yahweh's people, and all their national action was to be according
to His righteous character. Especially was the administration of
justice to be pure and impartial, yielding to neither fear nor
favour because the "judgment is God's." And how had they responded
to all this loving favour on the part of God? At the first hint of
serious conflict they shrank back in fear. Notwithstanding that the
land which God had given them was a good and fruitful country, and
notwithstanding the promises of Divine help, they refused to incur
the necessary toils and risks of the conquest. Every difficulty they
might encounter was exaggerated by them; their very deliverance from
Egypt, which they had been wont to consider "their crowning mercy,"
became to their faithless cowardice an evidence of hatred for them
on the part of God.
To men in such a state of mind conquest was impossible; and though,
in a spasmodic revulsion from their abject cowardice, they made an
attack upon the people they were to dispossess, it ended, as it
could not but end, in their defeat and rout. They were condemned to
forty years of wandering, and it was only after all that generation
was dead that Israel was again permitted to approach the land of
promise. But Yahweh had been faithful to them, and when the time was
come He opened the way for their advance and gave them the victory
and the land. For His love was patient, and always made a way to
bless them, even through their sins.
That was the picture the Deuteronomist spread out before the eyes
of his countrymen, to the intent that they might know the love of
God, and might see that safety lay for them in a willing yielding
of themselves to that love. The disastrous results of their wayward
and faint-hearted shrinking from this Divine calling is the only
direct threat he uses but in the passage there is another warning,
all the more impressive that it is vague and shadowy. God is to the
Deuteronomist the universal ruler of the world. The nations are
raised up and cast down according to His will, and until He wills
it they cannot be dispossessed. But He had willed that fate for
many, and at every step of Israel's progress they come upon traces
of vanished peoples whom for their sins He had suffered others to
destroy. The Emim in Moab, the Zamzummim in Ammon, the Horites in
Seir, and the Avvims in Philistia, had all been destroyed before
the people who now occupied these lands, and the whole background
of the narrative is one of judgment, where mercy had been of no
avail. The sword of the Lord is dimly seen in the archæological
notes which are so frequent in this section of our book and thus
the final touch is given to the picture of the past which is here
drawn to be an impulse for the future. While all the foreground
represents only God's love and patience overcoming man's rebellion,
the background is, like the path of the great pilgrim caravans which
year by year make their slow and toilsome way to Mohammedan holy
places, strewn with the remains of predecessors in the same path.
With stern, menacing finger this great teacher of Israel points to
these evidences that the Divine love and patience may be, and have
been, outworn, and seems to re-echo in an even more impressive way
the language of Isaiah: "The anger of Yahweh was kindled (against
these peoples), and He stretched forth His hand (against them) and
smote (them); and the hills did tremble, and (their) carcases were
as refuse in the midst of the streets. For all this His anger is
not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still." Without a
word of direct rebuke he opens his people's eyes to see that shadowy
outstretched hand. Behind all the turmoil of the world there is a
presence and a power which supports all who seek good, but which
is sternly set against all evil, ready, when the moment comes, "to
strike once and strike no more."
Yet another glimpse is given us in these chapters of God's manner of
dealing with men. We have seen how He guides and rules His chosen
ones. We have seen how He punishes those who have set themselves
against the Divine law. And in chapter ii. 30 we are told how
men become hardened in their sin, so as to render destruction
inevitable. Of Sihon, king of Heshbon, who would not let the
Israelites pass by him, the writer says: "Yahweh thy God hardened
his spirit, and made his heart obstinate, that He might deliver him
into thy hand, as appeareth this day." But he does not mean by these
expressions to lay upon God the causation of Sihon's obstinacy,
so as to make the man a mere helpless victim. His thought rather
is, that as God rules all, so to Him must be ultimately traced
all that happens in the world. In some sense all acts, whether
good or bad, all agencies, whether beneficent or destructive, have
their source in and their power from Him. But nevertheless men
have moral responsibility for their acts, and are fully and justly
conscious of ill desert. Consequently that hardening of spirit or
of heart, which at one moment may be attributed solely to God,
may at another be ascribed solely to the evil determination of
man. The most instructive instance of this is to be found in the
history of Pharaoh, when he was commanded to let Israel go. In that
narrative, from Exodus iv. to xi., there is repeated interchange
of expression. Now it is Yahweh hardened Pharaoh's heart; now, as
in viii. 15 and 32, Pharaoh hardened his own heart; and, again,
Pharaoh's heart was hardened. In each case the same thing is meant,
and the varying expressions correspond only to a difference of
standpoint. When Yahweh foretells that the signs He authorises
Moses to show will fail of their effect, it is always "Yahweh will
harden Pharaoh's heart," since the main point in contemplation is
His government of the world. If, on the other hand, it is the sinful
obstinacy of Pharaoh which is prominent in the passage, we have the
self-determination of Pharaoh alone set before us. But it is to be
noted, and this is indeed the cardinal fact, that Yahweh never is
said to harden the heart of a good man, or a man set mainly upon
righteousness. It is always those who are guilty of palpable wrongs
and acts of evil-doing upon whom God thus works.
Now we know that the author of Deuteronomy had two at least of
the ancient historical narratives before him which are combined
in Exod. iv.-xi., and he takes up their thinking. Expressed in
modern language, the thought is this. When men are found following
their own will in defiance of all law and all the restraints of
righteousness, that is manifestly not the first stage in their moral
declension. This obstinacy in evil is the result and the wages of
former evil deeds, beginning perhaps only with careless laxity, but
gathering strength and virulence with every wilful sin. Until near
the end of a completed growth in wickedness no man deliberately
says, "Evil, be thou my good." Nevertheless each act of sin involves
a step towards that, and the sinner in this manner hardens himself
against all warning. Like the sins which work this obduracy, this
hardening is the sinner's own act. The ruin which falls upon his
moral nature is his own work. That is the inexorable result of the
moral order of the universe, and from it no exception is possible.
But if so, God too has been active in all such catastrophes. He
has so framed and ordered the world that indulgence in evil must
harden in evil. This it was which the Israelite religious mind saw
and dwelt upon, as well as upon man's share in the dread process
of moral decay. We also do well to take heed to this aspect of
the truth. When we do, we have solved the Scriptural difficulty
regarding the Divine hardening of man's heart. It is simply the
ancient formula for what every mind that is ethically trained
recognises in the world to-day. Those who recognise themselves as
children of God, and acknowledge the obligations of His law, are
dealt with in the way of discipline with infinite love and patience.
Those who definitely set themselves against the moral order of the
world which God has established are broken in pieces and destroyed.
Between these two classes there are the morally undetermined,
who ultimately turn either to the right hand or to the left. The
process by which these pass on to be numbered among the rebellious
is pictured in Scripture with extraordinary moral insight. The
only difference from a present-day description of it is, that here
God is kept constantly present to the mind as the chief factor in
the development of the soul. To-day, even those who believe in God
are apt to forget Him in tracing His laws of action. But that is
an error of the first magnitude. It darkens the hope of man; for
without a sure promise of Divine help there is no certainty of
moral victory either for the race or the individual. It narrows our
view of the awful sweep of sin; for unless we see that sin affects
even the Ruler of the universe, and defies His unchanging law, its
results are limited to the evil that we do our fellow-men, which,
as we see it, is of little importance. Further, it degrades moral
law to a mere arbitrary dictum of power, or to an opinion founded
upon man's purblind experience. The acknowledgment of God, on the
contrary, makes morality the very essence of the Divine nature, and
the unchangeable rule for the life of man.