Part III.
Six hundred years after Paul preached the centrality of belief, God looked at Abraham’s descendants and saw disbelief all around. He sent scriptures (the Quran) to Muhammad, his messenger, articulating his dismay and anger formulated as a single-minded logic of the absolute: there is only one God. From that one absolute truth trickles down everything humans can and need to know. God creates all, knows all, sees and hears all; all time and all existence depend from God and no one else. Every human action takes place within that oneness. From God’s absolute point of view, humans either believe or disbelieve. Nothing else is significant.
Belief in monotheism can only mean submission. Submission is expressed in the Arabic consonantal root sin-lam-mim (s-l-m); it occurs 140 times in the Quran in 60 different words meaning — depending on context — peace or greet or submit or surrender or safe or ladder or paid. It is the root of Islam and Muslim. It’s the same root as in the Hebrew word sillem, which I discussed in Part I as being related to retribution and recompense but also to health, greetings, and peace. On the other hand, disbelief means punishment (the root ayn-dhal-ba), which occurs in the Quran 373 times in 60 verbal forms. God, of course, does as he wills, punishment or pardon, destruction and violence or mercy and grace.
Our text (“Vengeance and recompense are mine”) does not occur in the Quran. Yet, the Quran’s sole concern is the contextual meaning of Moses’ Song, his and God’s warning against repeated backsliding, of God’s repeated punishments, the rhythm of promised bounty and retributive loss. Over and over, Allah tells Muhammad the cycles of disbelief that define human history: God’s beneficence, human transgression (disbelief), and catastrophe. Each cycle has its messenger of warning. Thus, the Quran repeatedly recounts folkloric versions of the stories of Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, David, Solomon, Job, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, etc., of Zechariah, John, Jesus, and Elias, and, of course, of Muhammad, the men of wisdom, the prophets, the “warners.” And, each time, they are hounded and ridiculed and denied. Then, God visited with destruction all that they [the disbelievers] had ever built, [striking] at its very foundations, so that the roof fell in upon them from above and suffering befell them without their having perceived whence it came (An-Nahl 16:26, in the twentieth-century translation by Muhammad Asad, an Austrian Jewish convert to Islam).
In Al-Isra 17:2-8 we read God’s description of the destruction of the Temple and the Babylonian captivity — events which may have motivated the composition of Deuteronomy 32:35 by relating God’s punishment for disbelief to the tribe’s first view of the promised land. This small history ends with yet another repeat of that loss of the promised land five or six years after Paul’s death, the Roman conquest of Jerusalem and Titus’s destruction of the Second Temple.
And [thus, too,] We vouchsafed revelation unto Moses, and made it a [source of] guidance for the children of Israel, [commanding them:] ‘Do not ascribe to any but Me the power to determine your fate,/ O you descendants of those whom We caused to be borne (in the ark] with Noah! Behold, he was a most grateful servant (of Ours]!’/ And we made [this] known to the children of Israel through revelation: Twice, indeed, will you spread corruption on earth and will indeed become grossly overbearing!/ Hence, when the prediction of the first of those two [periods of iniquity] came true, We sent against you some of Our bondmen of terrible prowess in war, and they wrought havoc throughout the land: and so the prediction was fulfilled./ And after a time We allowed you to prevail against them once again, and aided you with wealth and offspring, and made you more numerous [than ever]./ [And We said:] ‘If you persevere in doing good, you will but be doing good to yourselves; and if you do evil, it will be [done] to yourselves.’ And so, when the prediction of the second [period of your iniquity] came true, [We raised new enemies against you, and allowed them] to disgrace you utterly, and to enter the Temple as [their forerunners] had entered it once before, and to destroy with utter destruction all that they had conquered./ Your Sustainer may well show mercy unto you; but if you revert [to sinning], We shall revert [to chastising you]. And [remember this:] We have ordained that [in the hereafter] hell shall close upon all who deny the truth.
We are reminded of Deuteronomy 32:26 where God tells Moses he would utterly destroy the tribe but for his desire to use its revival and further punishment as visible demonstration to the tribe that God, alone, causes its destruction and not the military might of its enemies.
Our text, then, even while specifically uncited in the Quran, forms its central thesis, expanding our text from a momentary assertion to Moses at the moment of his death to a universal principle of absolute divine dominance, from a historical address to Jews to an expression of man’s absolute subordination addressed to all people of all times: God and no one else punishes humans in both this life and in the afterlife for not following God’s demand to believe in him absolutely as the sole God of creation. Human action has no other cause and no other consequence and no other reason, except to be judged.
Aside from this central message God finds time to tell Muhammad and believers how to conduct themselves in daily life, the rules of proper social and familial behavior, and even to answer specific quandaries of Muhammad. One of these is especially pertinent (Al-Baqara 2:217): They will ask thee about fighting in the sacred month. Say: ‘Fighting in it is an awesome thing (grave transgression); but turning men away from the path of God and denying Him, and [turning them away from] the Inviolable House of Worship and expelling its people there from – [all this] is yet more awesome (greater transgression) in the sight of God, since oppression is more awesome (greater transgression) than killing.’ [Your enemies] will not cease to fight against you till they have turned you away from your faith, if they can. But if any of you should turn away from his faith and die as a denier of the truth – these it is whose works will go for nought in this world and in the life to come; and these it is who are destined for the fire, therein to abide.
This verse clearly was the sacred textual basis for Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel. The attack was named “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” referring to what had occurred at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Holy Mount in Jerusalem (the “Inviolable House of Worship” of this verse), six months earlier during Ramadan (“the sacred month” in this verse), when armed Israeli police repeatedly attacked worshipers at the Mosque injuring some 50 and arresting some 400 worshipers because they had barricaded themselves in the Mosque to prevent Israeli worshipers from sacrificing a goat there. The “flood” recalls God’s favorite punishment for disbelievers in the stories of Noah and Moses (together mentioned almost 600 times in the Quran).
Unlike Israel and unlike the US, Hamas’s actions in this war are strictly in obedience to God’s words. One can only assume that it acts as God’s instrument in full submission to God’s will. If one believes in the Abrahamic God, then, one can legitimately wonder if the world is not witnessing another tragic dispersal of the tribe that honors its state above its God.
Thanks for an excellent exegesis of this scripture coupled with the historical and political context to which it attaches today. I was reminded of the best of my seminary professors in my failed attempts to wrestle my way into faith in the sixties through attendance at three seminaries. Unfortunately they (and I) were all southern and my imitations of Amos and other eighth century rowdies landed me in jail and out of seminary. I recall one case where I was arrested on the picket line of a wildcat strike at GE in Louisville passing out a flyer that paraphrased Amos’s “for three trangressions and for four, you have threshed the workers with steel, therfore I will send a fire to the house of GE!”