New Year sermon from a pagan

Part I.

The text is Deuteronomy 32:35, a truly crucial passage of the Torah. Moses is 120 years old and is dying. He calls the people together to remind everyone of the tribe’s history, its covenant with God, and God’s promise of a land over Jordan. He will die without crossing Jordan, but he passes the leadership to Joshua. Before that happens, he sings the Song of Moses of which Deuteronomy 32:35 is part. The passage in the Geneva Bible of 1640 – the basis for the King James Version – reads, with modern spelling, “Vengeance and recompense are mine: their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their destruction is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them, make haste.” I use this translation because its language shows a feudal and theocratic preservation and understanding of a tribal hierarchy of social relations in which slavery, indentured servitude, and exclusivity were normal. The archaic language should remind us how abnormal that society and its structural relationships are for us. Yet, in spite of that difference, the meaning seems clear enough: God, at the absolute pinnacle of that hierarchy, asserts his right of vengeance, but on whom and for what aggression? Who is the “they”?

The Song of Moses only summarizes the last part of the history of the Jewish wanderings and wars in Deuteronomy. Specifically, the Song refers to the tribe’s failure to abide by God’s law and its conquest by other peoples and its scattering: “And he said, I will hide my face from them” (Deuteronomy 32:20); “Fire is kindled in my wrath” (32:22); “I will spend plagues upon them: I will bestow mine arrows upon them” (32:23). Indeed, God tells Moses that he would destroy the tribe irrevocably (32:26) except that he fears people will not understand that all the destruction is his doing and not that of Israel’s enemies. He wants it known that he and he alone has showered catastrophe on the tribe. Thus God’s vengeance refers figuratively to the future conquest of Israel, the destruction of Solomon’s temple, the Babylonian captivity (events close in time to the writing of this passage): a recompense for the tribe’s disobedience. God’s vengeance is upon the Jewish tribe, not on the people who attack it. “They” are the tribe.

The text is a warning, not just to the Jews but to their enemies, that all worldly action is subject to God’s will, that disobedience of the Law brings God’s judgment. Only after this warning does God command Moses to “Go up into this mountain of Abarim, unto the mount Nebon” (32:49) from where he will be able to see the promised land (ha’aretz hamuvtakhat in Hebrew). There, Moses will die, seeing the land of Canaan but unable to reach it because he himself has broken a commandment and thus is not allowed to enter that promised land: “Thou shalt therefore see the land before thee, but shalt not go thither, I mean, into the land which I give the children of Israel.” (32:51). This is a second warning. Indeed, the land of Palestine promised to the Jews in modern day Israel’s foundation myth is hemmed in by warnings. Central to the concept of a promised land, therefore, should be the companion concept that God’s response, repayment, for disobedience is vengeance in the form of death and destruction meted out to individuals and to the whole tribe of Israel and the withdrawal of the promised land of Canaan.

For someone outside the Abrahamic peoples, not Jewish, Christian, or Muslim – peoples who all profess to follow the revelations of Moses – Deuteronomy 32:35 seems clearly something that needs contemplation today in the decades long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet, it seems ignored. Isn’t the destruction and killing heaped onto Gaza revenge for what happened on October 7th? And isn’t this the state of Israel and its supporters taking into their own hands the vengeance that God clearly says belongs to him alone?

We need to ask, what is vengeance? In Deuteronomy, the people’s violation of Law brings on God’s “vengeance.” That is not what we today in English mean by the word. God’s havoc is more what we would call “punishment.” Revenge is between more or less equal agents. Here, God’s relation to the Jewish tribe is absolutely asymmetrical. The tribe disobeys; God punishes as an overlord. The Hebrew word here is naqam, and indeed in Exodus 21:20 it is used clearly to mean punishment and not revenge: “And if a man smite his servant, or his maid with a rod, and he die under his hand, he shall be surely punished.”

Then there is the other action in our text that God claims is his and which is designated by the 17th-century English translators as “recompense.” The Hebrew word is sillem (the root meaning lying in the consonantal sequence s-l-m in English letters). Its use here is unique in the Torah. The modern gloss on this word is “retribution,” but the word derived from salem, which not only means completion and peace but was the former name of Jerusalem. Another related term is shalom, the common greeting meaning “peace and health.” It seems out of place in the context of punishment, unless we pay attention to the context of the Song of Moses.

The third-century BCE Septuagint gives a clue. Its Jewish authors translated sillem into Greek as antapodosis, which means in its roots (ant+apodosis) “the opposite of giving back.” In a debt situation it might mean repayment, or in a judicial situation it might mean retribution, but it can mean simply a taking, not a giving, or perhaps in our text a taking back. At issue here and throughout Deuteronomy, then, is the covenant, specifically, the Mosaic covenant in which God gives his favor in exchange for compliance to the Law. The covenant is not a contract between equals. It is a feudal contract, a promissory covenant (as scholars of ancient mid-Eastern contracts say), between a suzerain lord and a vassal. These contracts are sealed by the exchange of sacrificial flesh – in Hebrew the word for covenant derives from beniyth, literally a “cutting.” Violation of the covenant brings punishment and withdrawal of favor, not quite what we mean by “vengeance.”

With our text, then, Moses is reminding the Jews, as a tribe being formed into a unified nation through the acceptance of a single God and his Laws, that the promised land over Jordan is conditioned on obedience. God gives and he takes, depending on how the nation, as a whole, acts. The promised land is not the nation’s to have and hold, but God’s. That is the covenant. Israelis today who feel threatened and insecure because of the decades long conflict with the Palestinians have a reason for doing so. But they are mistaken if they think the Palestinians or Hamas are the cause of the threat. Our text asserts that God threatens them, and he judges their conformity. The covenant is again being broken, and God may indeed be withdrawing his favor from the tribe by means of attacks by neighboring peoples. Will the promised land be once again withdrawn?

I am reminded of God commanding Jeremiah, who lived at the time of the Babylonian captivity, to cry in the ears of Jerusalem, And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof, and the commodities of the same: but when ye entered ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination (Jeremiah 2:7),

Notice that in our text, the object of punishment, or vengeance, is the collective and not the individual. Deuteronomy 32:35 is not about individual action but tribal action, the violation of worshiping other Gods, sacrificing to national desires above sacrificing to God. The punishment that God reserves for himself is collective punishment, the very kind of punishment the IDF is taking on itself to mete out to the Gazans. This reflection will lead us to the next part of the sermon from a pagan.