Torah Posting: דברים
We’ve come to the final book of the Torah, which — as ba’Midbar did before it — deserves a moment of reflection on its name. While ba’Midbar is my favorite Book of Moses name overall, Dvarim definitely wins the “least improved by translation” award. “dEuteRoNoMY” is a ridiculous name for purely phonetic reasons, but the worst thing about it to me is that it’s an extremely bored-sounding description. It means “repetition” or “duplication.” Someone who reads the Torah as if it is a sort of computer program for human morality would probably find most of this book extraneous, as though the whole Torah should be refactored to only say things once. As anyone this far into Torah Posting should know by now, that is not how the people whose sacred text it is read the Torah.
It is true that the book of Dvarim restates a lot of the teachings Mosheh has already given over, not that that hasn’t happened already in many places. But here, as in each of those prior places, it is important to consider what is being restated and where and why. We’ve been through a lot of words by this point, as the children of Yisra’el have been through a lot of desert trials. They’re about to enter the promised land, which means a big, scary war is coming. And Mosheh, their leader and teacher for two generations, is not coming with them! This is his last chance to impart the kernel of his prophetic understanding.
Accordingly, this book is largely an oration by him in a different narrative voice than the rest of the Torah uses, namely the first person, Mosheh’s own perspective. In that voice, many of the teachings and retellings are given in much more beautiful and passionate language. This is a great place to bring back to mind our explorations of the documentary hypothesis, as a new narrative voice and restatements of laws already given — sometimes with slightly different language — are possible indicators of a different source for the text.
So what does דברים (“dvarim”) mean? Well, it means “words” most plainly, and yes, you might be forgiven for taking that to be not much more of a title than dEUterOnoMy. But this is Hebrew. It’s deeper than that. For one thing, if you didn’t notice, this is the same ד–ב–ר root as in the name of the previous book, במדבר (“ba’Midbar”). As I explained there and have mentioned throughout, that root expands the meaning of the plain translation, “In the wilderness,” with the connotations of that interesting word, מדבר, which is also the verb “speak.” So I gave the slightly more mystically elaborated translation of במדבר as “in the Speaking Place,” and surely you see how the wilderness can be described that way in the Torah.
But there’s actually more to that root, and it kind of takes us all the way back to the Beginning, i.e. the creation of the universe. You might say that the reason Hebrew words (דברים) are so deep is that דבר means both “word” and “thing,” and thus God can speak words and a literal world is created. In the Hebrew mind, words and things are the same. So you could also translate במדבר to mean “in the midst of things,” which is a fairly evocative and mystical understanding of “the wilderness,” especially since it could make the whole manifest world into a kind of wilderness. And so, finally, you could translate דברים, the title of this final book we are about to begin, as both “Words” and “Things.” Hopefully, you see how much that translation leaves deUterONoMY in the dust.
So, these are the word-things that Mosheh addressed to all Yisra’el on the far side of the Jordan. The address is held on the first day of the 11th month of the fortieth year of their wanderings, but the text seems to suggest — as if to rub it in their faces — that the direct route back to Mount Sinai would only be an 11-day journey. Remember, the reason it took so long was as a punishment for not having their act together, and Mosheh’s being forbidden to enter the promised land at all was an extension of that. So the shortness of the direct route is kind of a painful thing for the text to point out.
Nevertheless, major victories had been struck. God was still with the people. And here, before the fateful crossing of the river, Mosheh undertakes to expound “אֶת־הַתּוֹרָ֥ה הַזֹּ֖את,” this Torah. This Teaching.
The retelling begins with the departure from the mountain where God’s Presence revealed itself to all the people at once. God tells the people to leave the mountain and spread out through a fairly huge area and take possession of it, fulfilling God’s promises to their ancestors, Avraham, Yitzhaq, and Ya’akov.
Mosheh then tells of his decision to instruct the people to appoint chieftains over their tribes because the job of directly managing this mass of people had become impractical and burdensome. He leaves out the part where this was the advice of his father-in-law, Yitro, high priest of Midyan. Perhaps that’s because Midyan had since become the Bad Guys. He goes into some depth about how he instructed these chieftains to adjudicate, deferring to him only in the most difficult matters. It’s interesting that this retelling of the law puts so much emphasis up front on Israelites themselves rendering justice, acting upon God’s laws. It sets the stage for an actual nation with an actual civic life carried out by actual human beings, instead of the directly God-mediated spiritual training version the people have practiced in the wilderness over the past few decades.
The next chapter retold is the story of the spies sent ahead to scout out the land. Mosheh focuses mostly on the way the people cowered in fear hearing their reports of terrifying giants and whatnot. Mosheh recounts his lectures about their lack of faith, given all that God had done for them so far, and he also recounts God’s curse upon that generation not to reach the land, as by now the people listening to Mosheh here by the Jordan are the generation who succeeded them, and they weren’t there to learn this critical lesson. Kalev and Yehoshu’a, the ones who were faithful, are singled out again here, as they are the ones designated to survive and succeed Mosheh in the land. Here, in an apparent revision that comes as a relief, the children who were there and did not yet know good from bad are also permitted to enter.
In Mosheh’s retelling, the people accepted responsibility for their faithlessness and vowed to wage war against the land’s inhabitants to make up for it. Mosheh warned them that God was not yet with them, but they did not listen, and they were routed. This led to a long diversion by another route.
After God felt that this diversion had gone on long enough, God redirected the people through the land of their distant kin in Se’ir, the children of ’Esav, brother of Ya’akov, whose split over their birthright caused much ancestral trauma. The truce that followed was uneasy at best, and it has been, to say the least, a long time. Their passage through Se’ir was delicate, and no calamity came of it. The people continued moving through lands inhabited by other peoples, and here Mosheh tells strange and terrible stories of them, reminding the people of the dangers they faced — and also arguably creating pretexts for dispossessing them, as they had done to other peoples in turn. This is just the way of things, apparently.
Wars were fought, and victories were hard-won. Some peoples were exterminated, others God insisted must be left alone, such as those descended from Avraham’s hapless nephew, Lot. The rest of this parashah is a retelling of the war stories and a designation of the lands conquered. It concludes with Mosheh’s charge to Yehoshu’a that he will be the one to lead the people across the river and into the land for which this whole saga has been a premise.
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