#''I would murder every last one of you except I'm afraid somebody else might take the credit.'' —Yahweh

[andersunmenschlich]

The Song of Moses

In which Moses finally finishes listing all of Yahweh's laws and does some preemptive scolding. Feel free to turn to Deuteronomy 32 and read along!

First he tells the sky and the ground to listen to him. If you check the last bit of the previous chapter, you'll see that this is because he wants those two things to act as witnesses, so they can be called upon later to testify that yup, the Israelites were told how awesome Yahweh was and also what all of his laws are.

It made more sense when he said he wanted the record of all the laws to be a witness. That does tell people that the Israelites had all those laws. The sky and ground? Not so much.

Next he wishes that his words will drop like rain, distill like dew, and be like gentle rain on plants that need gentle rain, and heavy rain on plants that need that. Why? Because (he says) he's about to say Yahweh's name and tell everyone how great the supreme god is. These two things, apparently, are as important to the Israelites as water is to plants.

Then he begins.

The Rock, he says, does work that can't be criticized because everything the Rock does is in accordance with law.

This can't be argued. If what you do is up to divine code, it's definitely flawless! Who is the Rock, though? Odds are good he isn't talking about Dwayne Johnson. Perhaps he'll elaborate later.

The Rock, Moses says, is a certain type of god: a god that holds firm and steadfast, a god that stands by the law, who judges according to it and never breaches it. Like a rock, basically. Immovable. Unbending. Unchanging. Incorruptible.

The Rock's sons, however, have acted contrary to this. Rather than acting like rocks, they have become not-sons to him by acting like a generation of twisted, tangled up things.

Yes, the words here are specifically male.

Moses says this is no way to treat Yahweh (thus clarifying that the Rock is Yahweh), and insults the Israelites by calling them stupid and not a people—that is, not a cohesive tribe, not a family. "Isn't Yahweh your father?" Moses asks. "Isn't he your owner? Didn't he make you? Didn't he give you everything you have?"

Then he goes into a kids-these-days rant in which he tells his listeners to ask their fathers and grandfathers what things were like in the past.

The especially interesting part is coming up.

Once upon a time, apparently, the Most High god divided up the sons of Adam into separate nations. Obviously each of those nations would need to live somewhere, so he gave them territory—and what decided how many territories there were? According to what were the borders fixed?

The most obvious thing to do would be to fix the borders according to the number of nations.

The Most High god did not do that.

This is where the text diverges. The oldest versions we have (the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint) say that the Most High used the number of his sons to decide. He gave the sons of Adam their inheritance in land, and his own sons their inheritance in peoples. Yahweh got the Israelites: they were the people he inherited from the Most High, his father.

Later versions say the Most High used the number of Israel's sons. But Israel (also known as Jacob) didn't have any descendants at all back when the Most High was splitting Adam's descendants into nations. Now he has millions. What number between zero and millions do you suppose the Most High used? Or do you suppose he used a still farther future number, and went into the billions? And what would it mean for Jacob and his descendants to be Yahweh's allotted heritage if no one was assigning the various bundles of Adam's descendants to the different sons of the Most High god?

The Israelites are Yahweh's people because the Most High god (Yahweh's father) gave the Israelites to Yahweh. They're his heritage.

Yahweh met and took possession of his human inheritance (Moses says) in a desert land. A howling wilderness waste, in fact. Yahweh surrounded his inheritance, watched it at all times, and guarded it like you do the center of your eye—that is, reflexively and as violently as necessary.

Next Moses compares Yahweh to an eagle. Eagles, Moses says, wake up their nestlings and then hover over them checking to be sure they're all right. Yahweh does that, metaphorically speaking. He also metaphorically spreads his wings and carries the people his father gave him on his pinions (because flapping wings are a nice safe place to sit... or maybe eagles are strictly gliders, and never need to flap).

Never mind ornithology.

Moses emphasizes that Yahweh was the only god taking care of Jacob's sons. And that's as it should be, because Jacob's sons belong to Yahweh—other gods are alien to them, foreign.

The Israelites are Yahweh's inheritance. He is their owner; their master; their father; their lord; their god.

And (this is the important bit) their god is the one who has been taking care of them all this time. They have no right to desert him: he was the one taking care of them. Him alone. No other god has ever done anything good for them.

Next Moses tells us about all the good things Yahweh has done for Israel: the high places in the land are great and he made Israel ride them, he fed Israel the fruit and grain produced by the land, squeezed honey out of rocks and oil out of boulders for them, got them ox cheese and goat milk and fat tasty sheep, the best rams, the richest wheat, the finest grapes, etc.

And then darling little Israel got spoiled, and started disrespecting the god that had made him so strong and healthy. Decided he didn't want to hang out with the rock that had saved him.

According to Moses, the Israelites started hanging out with Yahweh's brothers—foreign gods! They were his people, his inheritance, his father gave them to him, and here they were treating his brothers like they weren't his property! You know what that is? That's an abomination. That's idolatry. That's adultery. Yes! It's like when your female who belongs to you starts treating some other man like she's his, that's what it's like! Israel made Yahweh jealous. They grieved him. They enraged him.

What's more, they even cheated on him with supernatural beings who weren't even sons of the Most High—with Johnny-come-lately deities their ancestors had never even heard of! Why, those aren't even gods at all, and here the Israelites were killing animals for them!

They ignored the rock that was a father to them, and forgot the god (a proper god, an actual son of the Most High) who had exerted himself extremely to make them what they were.

Obviously Yahweh saw this.

He saw it and rejected them the way they rejected him, because that's how a mature father responds to disrespect from his children: he says, "Oh, so you'd rather hang out with adults who aren't me? Give them kisses and gifts instead of me? Fine! You don't want me—I'll go away! No more support from me! Let's see how you do without me, you perverse, unfaithful brats! Make me jealous with people who aren't even family, will you? Make me angry by showering affection on non-people? I'll show you. I'll make you jealous with random kids who aren't even a part of any family; I'll make you angry with another, stupid group of kids!"

No, seriously. That is how mature Yahweh is in the Bible (at least according to Moses).

"They're giving sacrifices to non-elohim gods?" Moses shows Yahweh reasoning. "That makes me jealous, so I'll go find non-tribal people to bless, to make Israel jealous. They're (pointlessly) setting up idols to gods that aren't about to so much as give them the time of day? That makes me angry, so I'll shower blessings on a nation so stupid they won't ever thank me for it. (Another one, one that's not Israel. A different foolish nation.) That ought to make Israel as mad as I am!"

And he is very angry. According to Moses, he's so angry he could burn the entire earth right down to the bottom-most part of it, devouring the whole earth and every tasty and/or valuable thing on it, right down to the foundations of the mountains.

Note that the earth is flat.

In the Bible, the earth is always flat. You have to twist the words to make it mean anything else: in a plain reading, the earth of the Bible is flat.

When Yahweh (through Moses) says his anger burns to the depths of the lowest pit, turning the earth and everything on it to ash and setting the very lowest parts of all the mountains on fire, he's picturing a flat earth burning. That's the image he's evoking for us: fire falling from the firm arch of heaven and burning straight down through the flat earth itself until there's no place lower to go.

The fact that the core of the earth is already molten will never be mentioned.

Because the writer of Deuteronomy didn't know.

In any case, Yahweh goes on to threaten far worse than just leaving the people his dad gave him—he plans to hurt them as much as he possibly can. He'll heap disasters on them, spend every last arrow he has shooting them: he'll use famine to turn them into shriveled husks, burn them up with fever and poison them with plague, order in some sharp-fanged wild beasts to attack them, get some venomous snakes to bite them, make sure their kids are hacked to death outdoors and everyone indoors will be terrified no matter how old or what sex they are... he really gets into the list.

This is the way Yahweh treats his people, and it sets a pattern, doesn't it? If your wife cheats on you, this is how you treat her. If your kids don't appreciate you, this is how you treat them. Remember, this is the Rock! Everything he does is lawful and upright.

Some of his people started worshiping his brothers instead of him (and even gods who weren't members of his family at all and might not even exist).

The Most High gave them to him. They're his people. They don't get to choose who they worship. They worship him, or they die horribly. Simple as. And if they do worship him, like they're supposed to, like they're lawfully meant to, because they're his property—why, then he'll treat them so well! Of course he will! That's the law too, after all. Let no one say he isn't just.

In fact, there's only one reason why he isn't going to wipe his people out so entirely that it would be like they never were: Yahweh is afraid that if he does that, the Israelites's enemies will think they're the ones who did it.

That's right—he hates the thought that someone else might take the credit for his holocaust!

He's not worried about other gods taking credit. Apparently if some other god said "I'm the one who wiped out the Israelites!" he could do something about that. But if a group of humans said it, he'd be completely powerless to correct them! There would be nothing he could do at that point. They'd walk off happily thinking they'd won because they were stronger than their Israelite enemies, rather than that they'd won because Yahweh was murdering the Israelites.

If those enemies had any sense, Yahweh assures us (through Moses), they would understand the fate he had planned for them, too. Obviously they're not stronger. One of them would only able to chase off a thousand Israelites if he, Yahweh, had given his people up.

Those unspecified enemies, after all, don't have a god as awesome as Yahweh "the Rock" El. And they suck as people, too.

If we think of this unspecified nation as a vine, they're a vine from Sodom, that grew in the fields of Gomorrah, with poison grapes that taste bitter and make wine that might as well be snake venom.

Yahweh knows that. He knows they suck. He's a very just and righteous deity, and this unspecified nation has definitely been breaking his laws right left and center. He'll have his vengeance! And soon, at that. They'll definitely fall and be destroyed soon. In the meantime, Yahweh will judge his people, and then he'll be sorry for the ones who were his slaves—after he sees how horribly weak and few they've become, of course. And he'll make fun of them a bit first.

"Oh no!" he'll say. "I wonder where my brothers went? And whatever happened to the rock they used to run to for protection? Say, maybe the not-elohim you sacrificed animals and wine to will come and help you out!"

And then he'll gloat.

"See?" he'll say. "I'm the only one you can rely on. No god can stand against me. I can kill you. I can make you live. I can hurt you. I can heal you. And there is no one who can take you away from me."

Such amazing compassion! He's talking instead of killing you. And it gets even better.

"I lift my hand to the sky," he says, "and swear on my own immortality that when I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgment, I will most definitely revenge myself on those who have opposed me and reciprocate the hatred of those who hate me. My arrows will drink so much blood they'll get drunk on it, and my sword will eat flesh and drink the blood of those slain in battle, and those who surrendered and were taken captive, and the heads of the enemy leaders!"

Proportionate, isn't it?

Moses then announces that the sky itself should rejoice with Yahweh at such a time, and that all the other gods should bow down to him. Why? Because he's avenged the blood of his sons (which, if you'll recall from earlier, he spilled himself) and taken vengeance on the people who opposed him.

He repays hatred for hatred, and (through vengeance and blood-spilling) cleanses his people and their land.

Having recited this poem, Moses emphasizes that all the rules he listed earlier are not just words, they're the Israelites's very life, and they need to follow those laws as closely as possible or else.

The end!