NOTES for Deu 27:10

The words "commandments" and "this day" are met almost 19 times in the same verse in the Bible, and all these cases are in the book of Deuteronomy. This book is penetrated by the sensation of the immediacy of our relationships with God. Certainly, they have a prehistory, but God's Word, His commandments, His love are not something that was only some time ago, at the creation of the world, or upon the establishment of the covenant on the Mount Sinai, or at the Crucifixion and resurrection, but it is what is here and now. The voice of the Lord sounds now also – let’s listen to it.

On the threshold of the Promised Land, as Israel crosses the Jordan, the people must once again remember the terms of the Covenant. The whole people must answer “Amen,” meaning “True, indeed,” to the ritual curses pronounced upon those who break it. There are things that cannot be taken into a new life in a new land. This is worth considering. We have heard that “neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor thieves will inherit the Kingdom of God,” and we are ready to repent when the Kingdom appears on the horizon. But the Kingdom begins here and now, and many of us have already entered a new life; the first Christians understood the Jordan as the waters of baptism. So, after repeating the solemn “Amen” with the Israelites, let us throw our heavy bundles into the water—they will not be needed in the new land—and move on without fear or heaviness in our hearts.

The series of ritual curses given in this chapter of the book appears quite archaic in both form and content. The same is true of the requirement to build an altar on Mount Ebal: it plainly contradicts the idea of centralizing the cult, with the Jerusalem Temple as the only place for the worship of Yahweh, which is consistently carried through in the Book of Deuteronomy. Before us, apparently, is a reflection of some more ancient tradition that preceded the writing of the Book of Deuteronomy even in its earliest, pre-exilic form.

Here, above all, attention is drawn to the mention of the Torah and the failure to fulfill it, the final curse in the list, which in a sense sums up everything else. At the same time, the number of curses connected with various kinds of sexual perversions and with sexual morality in general is striking. There is, of course, a mention of unjust judgment toward the sojourner, disrespect toward parents, and the inviolability of boundary markers, but all of this takes up less space than the main theme: the violation of the seventh commandment. Such priority is given to questions of sexual morality most of all because in antiquity their violation was associated with the idea of a person's defiling himself.

Much here was connected with traditional fertility cults, and above all with the cult of the Great Goddess. It had a fairly pronounced erotic character, often with elements of ritual prostitution, and all violations in this area were regarded as defiling a person, as returning him from Yahwism to pre-Yahwistic pagan cults of the earth, cults of fertility and childbearing. A similar defilement, though of different origin, was the violation of a boundary and the destruction of a boundary stone: among pagans, all such stones were under the protection of the thunder god, as were sojourners, who, having left their own land, came under the protection of the thunderer for the whole time of their journey until they returned home.

Besides the general requirement to keep the Torah, it had to be especially noted that although there is no place for the former gods in the new life, everything that was formerly attributed to pagan gods concerning justice does not lose its force at all. God preserves justice and watches over it no less carefully than the former gods did in the eyes of the pagans who worshiped them. The new life received from the old everything right that was in it, for it was right insofar as it came from God.