These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red sea, between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab (Deut. 1:1).
The Hebrew words that begin this book of the Bible, 'eleh dabarim or devarim, mean simply "these words." But this is not the name which has come down through time to Jews and gentiles. Deuteronomy is the book's commonly accepted title. Deuteronomy is an Anglicized derivative from the Greek: second (deutero) law (nomos). It comes from the Septuagint's(1) rendering in Greek of the words mishneh torah,(2) or copy of the law. "And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites" (Deut. 17:18).(3)What were the words of Moses? A recapitulation of God's law. This is why the laws of Deuteronomy repeat so many of the laws of Leviticus, e.g., Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. This recapitulation of the law was preparatory to national covenant renewal at Gilgal (Josh. 5). The generation born in the wilderness had not visibly covenanted with God: no circumcision. Most -- probably all -- of the members of the exodus generation except Moses were dead by now.(4) Aaron died (Num. 20:28) just prior to the wars against King Arad, King Og, and King Sihon (Num. 21). It was time for national covenant renewal, which had to precede national covenantal inheritance. Deuteronomy presents the judicial basis and promise of this inheritance.
This presentation of the law was made "on this side of Jordan in the wilderness." This is an inaccurate translation. The Hebrew word translated "this side" should be translated "opposite side," i.e., east of the Jordan or across the Jordan. The King James translators sometimes translated ayber as "other side."(5)
Moses died on the wilderness side of the Jordan. Yet the context of this passage indicates that the word should be translated "other side." If Moses wrote these words, he must have been writing from the perspective of the nation after it had crossed the Jordan. He was on the other side of Jordan when he wrote of the other side as the other side. That is, he wrote Deuteronomy as if he were writing to people settled in Canaan. He was writing in the confidence that Israel would be successful in the conquest of the land. He was writing to those who had already inherited. The future-orientation of the Book of Deuteronomy begins in its first sentence.
Higher Critics and Their Baptized Agents Higher critics of the Bible argue that Moses did not write these words. These words were supposedly written centuries later by some ecclesiastical official inside the land. That is to say, higher critics implicitly argue that the Book of Deuteronomy is a pack of lies written by one or more forgers.(6) But, being mild-mannered academics as well as wolves in sheep's clothing, they do not use such words as lies, forgers, and deception. They prefer such sophisticated terms as myths, redactors, and weltanschauung.
One argument against the higher critics is the integration of the five books of Moses. The Pentateuch is a remarkable structure. How did hordes of redactors re-write the Pentateuch, line by line, without undermining the integration of the five books? How was it that this structure, which generations of higher critics failed to perceive, was understood by each of the redactors? How was it that generations of tiny revisions maintained this structure, which was invisible to academic specialists -- even Germans! -- until the work of George Mendenhall in the mid-1950's?
The Pentateuch is structured in terms of a covenant. The five books of Moses parallel the five-point biblical covenant model.(7) This model defines covenant theology.(8) This five-point structure is clearest in the Book of Deuteronomy: transcendence (1:1-5); hierarchy (1:6-4:49); ethics (5-26); sanctions (27-30); and continuity (31-34).(9) Jordan divides the book into five parts: 1) steward as vice-gerent, 2) new cosmos,(10) 3) Moses' sermon on the Ten Commandments, 4) implementation, and 5) succession.(11) This five-point model also governs the structure of Exodus(12) and Leviticus,(13) as well as the Ten Commandments(14) and the five sacrifices of Leviticus.(15)
This covenantal structure was common to Hittite treaties in the second millennium, B.C. This was Mendenhall's point and Kline's. If the Book of Deuteronomy was put into its final form in, say, the seventh century B.C., how was it that it was structured in terms of a treaty structure in wide use almost a thousand years earlier?
Despite this obvious problem, professedly conservative Bible commentaries still promote some version of higher criticism. The New Bible Dictionary, co-published by InterVarsity Press in England and Tyndale House in the United States, asserts: "But none of these statements permits the conclusion that Deuteronomy as we have it today came completely, or even in large measure, from Moses himself. One has to allow for editorial activity and adaptations of original Mosaic material to a later age."(16) Let us translate this into non-Ph.D. English: "One has to allow for post-Mosaic forgeries by non-inspired charlatans who adapted the original Mosaic material to the interests, information, and perspectives of their age, fooling the likes of you, my academically uncertified Christian reader, generation after generation." The author says as much: "However, it became necessary in new situations to represent the words of Moses and to show their relevance for a new day."(17) Then he escalates his rhetoric: "While there seems little reason to deny that a substantial part [which part?] of Deuteronomy was in existence some centuries [how many?] before the seventh century BC, it is not possible [for humanist-certified Christian scholars] to say how much of it comprises the ipsissima verba of Moses himself."(18) How impressive: ipsissima verba. I would call his language struttissima verba. "Hey, all you untrained bumpkins out there who still believe in the inspired word of God, who still believe in the words of Jesus, which identified the author of the law as Moses. You don't have a Ph.D. issued by some secular university. You poor, pathetic people are struggling to earn a living, while we Christian academics live off of your tithes, your offerings, or maybe even your taxes through a tax-funded university faculty. Personally, I live off of public tax money. See what we can do! We can undermine your faith at your expense. We can toss around Latin phrases. I guess that shows you what we are." Yes, it does. And also what they believe: "Hath God said?"
Those thoughtful people who, in a century or a millennium from now, may reflect on why the twentieth century was almost devoid of Bible commentaries that were confident in the cultural relevance of the Bible, or in principles drawn from the Bible, or in the probable success of the gospel in transforming culture, need only consider the emasculating effects of such prevarications as we find in The New Bible Commentary, written for educated laymen by humanist-trained and humanist-certified academic evangelicals. Cautious Christian authors refuse to use words that reflect what they are really saying. Forgers in retrospect become "editors." Revisions made centuries later by these clever and unscrupulous forgers become "relevance for a new day." The verbal, plenary inspiration of the Bible becomes a mish-mash of "fragments." The Bible as delivered to the saints becomes a grab-bag of updates, revisions, and improvements on the revealed word of God. The timeless authority of the Bible is jettisoned for the timely authority of academic relevance. The word of man triumphs in history, revision by revision, leaving saints in every age without an inspired anchor linking heaven and earth, eternity and time. Man is thereby unchained covenantally, which is what covenant-breaking man since Adam has wanted to be. Twentieth-century evangelical churches are deeply compromised with modern pagan culture, rarely more visibly or more dangerously than in the Christian college and seminary classroom.
Sanctions and Inheritance/Disinheritance The promised negative sanction against the generation of the exodus had been imposed by God: they would not enter the Promised Land (Num. 14:23). This exclusion was a secondary form of disinheritance. The primary form was genocide. This is what God had initially threatened. "I will smite them with the pestilence, and disinherit them, and will make of thee a greater nation and mightier than they" (Num. 14:12). Moses countered this with the ultimate prayer: an appeal to God's reputation.
And Moses said unto the LORD, Then the Egyptians shall hear it, (for thou broughtest up this people in thy might from among them;) And they will tell it to the inhabitants of this land: for they have heard that thou LORD art among this people, that thou LORD art seen face to face, and that thy cloud standeth over them, and that thou goest before them, by daytime in a pillar of a cloud, and in a pillar of fire by night. Now if thou shalt kill all this people as one man, then the nations which have heard the fame of thee will speak, saying, Because the LORD was not able to bring this people into the land which he sware unto them, therefore he hath slain them in the wilderness (Num. 14:13-16).
Inheritance can be secured in one of two ways: disinheritance or adoption. Either God displaces the present owners and transfers ownership to His people, or else He incorporates them into His people through adoption, which then secures the inheritance. There is no third way. Inheritance and disinheritance are two sides of the same coin. They are an aspect of God's sanctions, positive and negative, in eternity but also in history.Sihon's resistance to Israel was part of this preliminary process of inheritance/disinheritance. "But Sihon king of Heshbon would not let us pass by him: for the LORD thy God hardened his spirit, and made his heart obstinate, that he might deliver him into thy hand, as appeareth this day. And the LORD said unto me, Behold, I have begun to give Sihon and his land before thee: begin to possess, that thou mayest inherit his land. Then Sihon came out against us, he and all his people, to fight at Jahaz. And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain: Only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves, and the spoil of the cities which we took" (Deut. 2:30-35). This was a system of dispossession: "And because he loved thy fathers, therefore he chose their seed after them, and brought thee out in his sight with his mighty power out of Egypt; To drive out nations from before thee greater and mightier than thou art, to bring thee in, to give thee their land for an inheritance, as it is this day. Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the LORD he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else. Thou shalt keep therefore his statutes, and his commandments, which I command thee this day, that it may go well with thee, and with thy children after thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth, which the LORD thy God giveth thee, for ever" (Deut. 4:37-40). This dispossession was supposed to be total: "But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee" (Deut. 20:16-17).
The Book of Deuteronomy is the Pentateuch's book of inheritance. It follows the Pentateuch's book of sanctions, Numbers. The account of the preliminary dispossession on the wilderness side of the Jordan is found in Numbers 21. The significance of this initial warfare was announced by Moses to the generation of the conquest. Moses framed his discussion of the events of Numbers 21 in terms of God's program of inheritance/disinheritance.
Social Theory and Eschatology The fifth point of the biblical covenant model is succession.(19) The fifth point is judicially connected to the fourth: sanctions.(20) Corporate sanctions are applied by God in history in terms of point three: law.(21) Any discussion of biblical law that ignores corporate sanctions and succession is incomplete. Any discussion that self-consciously separates them is incorrect.
Succession is an aspect of eschatology. The eschatological question regarding history is this: Who shall inherit the earth? The Bible is clear: covenant-keepers.
His soul shall dwell at ease; and his seed shall inherit the earth (Ps. 25:13).
For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth (Ps. 37:9).
But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace (Ps. 37:11).
For such as be blessed of him shall inherit the earth; and they that be cursed of him shall be cut off (Ps. 37:22).
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5).
This eschatological outlook is denied by premillennialists and amillennialists. This is why they have a major problem with the Book of Deuteronomy, the premier book of inheritance in the Old Testament. To deal with this book, they have to argue that the corrosive effects of sin always lead men to break the covenant and lose the inheritance. This is why covenant-keepers supposedly will not inherit the earth. The problem with this argument is two-fold: 1) it necessarily makes covenant-breakers the inheritors, thereby denying the plain teaching of Scripture; 2) it relegates the New Testament doctrines of the bodily resurrection and ascension of Christ to the realm of eschatological adiaphora -- things indifferent to the faith.
Dispensationalism It should come as no surprise that C. I. Scofield offered fewer notes to the Book of Deuteronomy than to any other book in the Pentateuch: a grand total of three. Not until we reach Deuteronomy 16 do we find a Scofield note, and this is a brief one on the feasts of Israel.(22) The next one appears in chapter 28, a one-sentence note describing chapters 28-29 as part of chapter 30's "Palestinian Covenant."(23) The third note is attached to Deuteronomy 30:3, a description of the seven-part "Palestinian Covenant." Scofield said that Israel "has never as yet taken the land under the unconditional Abrahamic Covenant, nor has it ever possessed the whole land. . . ."(24) This note implies the necessity of a future restoration of the nation of Israel to the land of Palestine.
I have dealt with the supposed unconditionality of the Abrahamic promise of the land.(25) The relevant point here is Scofield's silence on the ethical terms of the Mosaic covenant and their judicial connection to the New Testament, including corporate sanctions and inheritance. He moved from the Palestinian Covenant's conditions back to the Abrahamic covenant's supposed lack of conditions, ignoring both the issue of circumcision as a condition of inheritance and the question of predictable covenantal sanctions in New Covenant history. He also removed the question of eschatological inheritance from the realm of law and historical sanctions. His theology moves the question of inheritance from conditionality to unconditionality, i.e., from corporate covenantal obedience as the basis of inheritance in history to corporate covenantal disinheritance: the church's removal from history by the pre-tribulation Rapture and its replacement as God's heir in history by a Jewish millennial church.
The New Scofield Reference Bible (1967) did add a few more notes to Deuteronomy, but all but one of them avoided any discussion of God's law, His corporate sanctions in history, and inheritance/disinheritance. This exception supports my point. It added material to Scofield's note to Deuteronomy 30:3 on the Palestinian Covenant. "No passage of Scripture has found fuller confirmation in the events of history than Dt.28-30. In A.D. 70 the Jewish nation was scattered throughout the world because of disobedience and rejection of Christ. In world-wide dispersion they have experienced exactly the punishments foretold by Moses." Here the editors implicitly admitted that the Mosaic covenant is still in effect in New Testament times: its negative sanction of dispersion has been applied in New Testament history. This was a remarkable admission theologically: the assertion of covenantal continuity from Moses down to the modern state of Israel. But this Mosaic sanction is said to apply to Jews; there was no mention of Christians in the note. This aspect of covenantal continuity is not much emphasized by dispensational theologians, for obvious reasons: the camel's nose of covenantal continuity is now inside the tent of New Testament history. Dispensational theology's "Great Parenthesis," known as the Church Age, is apparently not completely parenthetical, covenantally speaking. If this covenantal continuity is still in effect today, then there will presumably be a restoration of the Mosaic law during the Millennial Age. The editors hint obliquely at this possibility: "In the twentieth century initial steps toward a restoration of the exiled people to their homeland have been seen."(26)
If this negative corporate sanction is still being applied to the Jews in a predictable fashion -- indeed, the most predictable corporate sanction in history -- then there is no reason to believe that the Mosaic covenant governing the Jewish Millennial Church will be revoked at that late date. For some unstated reason, God is still enforcing His negative corporate sanction on lo-ami (not His people) during the period of their not being His people, while refusing to bring positive corporate sanctions to His people in the Church Age. God's predictable negative corporate sanction curses the Jews, but His corporate sanctions are inoperable one way or the other for Christians. This peculiar system of Church Age sanctions -- "heads, Jews lose, but Christians don't win; tails, covenant-breakers win" -- leaves covenant-breakers as the heirs during the Church Age. This necessarily relegates both Jews and Christians to the fringes of social discourse. According to dispensational theology, Jews and Christians have nothing covenantally relevant to say about God's law and corporate sanctions during the Church Age. Covenant-breakers heartily agree, and then enthusiastically seek to disinherit Jews and Christians culturally whenever the latter seek to act in the name of God's revealed law.
Dispensational theology is self-consciously based on an eschatology: the disinheritance of Christians and Jews during the Church Age. That is to say, dispensationalism is a Church Age eschatology of inheritance by covenant-breakers. Dispensationalism denies the existence of covenant sanctions in the Church Age, except insofar as such sanctions are exclusively negative and condemn Jews. Because dispensationalism is a theology of corporate inheritance and disinheritance apart from predictable covenantal sanctions, its advocates have no way to construct an explicitly biblical social theory during the Church Age. They deny the existence of any connection between the church's covenantal obedience and its prophesied inheritance in history. They in fact deny that the New Testament church has any connection with the Mosaic covenant's conditionality and Old Testament prophecies regarding inheritance in history. In this regard, dispensationalism, historic premillennialism, and amillennialism, are all agreed, which is why none of them has been able to develop an explicitly biblical social theory.(27) This has been the theological foundation of what I have called the pietist-humanist alliance.(28)
Dispensational theology can be traced back to 1830. Since 1830, there has not been a single published dispensational book on Christian social theory. The dispensational movement has been systematically silent on Christianity's social and political responsibilities in the New Testament era. Also, there have been no books describing any judicial continuity between the gentile church's covenantal responsibilities and the millennial Jewish church's covenantal responsibilities. There has been no book-length discussion regarding any judicial continuity between the Church Age and the Millennial Age. In short, dispensationalism has been silent in the area of social theory. This is not an accident or an oversight on the part of dispensationalists. This is the inevitable result of the radical judicial discontinuities that are basic to dispensational theology: Mosaic law, New Testament law, and millennial law. This is why, in the words of dispensational defender Tommy Ice, "Premillennialists have always been involved in the present world. And basically, they have picked up on the ethical positions of their contemporaries."(29)
Conclusion Deuteronomy recapitulated God's law in preparation for Israel's national covenant renewal through circumcision (Josh. 5). Moses looked forward to Israel's conquest of Canaan. The law would provide the judicial basis for Israel's maintaining the kingdom grant.
The Pentateuch is structured in terms of the five points of the covenant. This fact testifies against higher critics who would deny the Mosaic authorship. The Pentateuch's structure compares with the treaties of kings of the second millennium B.C. It was written in that era.
The fifth point of the covenant in inheritance/disinheritance. This is the primary theme of Deuteronomy. The book is inherently postmillennial. Dispensationalism denies this, of course. But by acknowledging that Jews after A.D. 70 have been under the covenant's negative sanctions, the editors of the New Scofield Reference Bible thereby acknowledged covenantal continuity, Old Testament to New Testament. But by ignoring the continuity of the covenant with respect to the church, they placed Christians under the rule of covenant-breakers. Neither the Jews nor the Christians are the recipients of corporate covenant blessings this side of the millennium. The cultural pessimism of dispensationalism is inescapable. It offers no cultural hope for the Church Age, so it places no value on the development of biblical social theory. In contrast, theonomic postmillennialism offers both hope for the church and incentives for those Christians who would develop an explicitly biblical social theory. Deuteronomy, more than any other book in the Bible, offers the judicial content of such a reconstruction.
Footnotes:
1. The Septuagint translation of the Old Testament into Greek: second century B.C.
2. The title of Maimonides' twelfth-century commentary on the law, written from 1177 to 1187. It fills 14 volumes in the Yale University Press edition, The Code of Maimonides.
3. New Bible Dictionary (2nd ed.; Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 1982), p. 280.
4. Exceptions: Joshua and Caleb.
5. "And they came to the threshingfloor of Atad, which is beyond Jordan, and there they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation: and he made a mourning for his father seven days" (Gen. 50:10). "From thence they removed, and pitched on the other side of Arnon, which is in the wilderness that cometh out of the coasts of the Amorites: for Arnon is the border of Moab, between Moab and the Amorites" (Num. 21:13). Yet in one case the word is translated both ways in one verse: "For we will not inherit with them on yonder side Jordan, or forward; because our inheritance is fallen to us on this side Jordan eastward" (Num. 32:19).
6. Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer edition; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Appendix J: "Conspiracy, Forgery, and Higher Criticism."
7. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), General Introduction; Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Preface.
8. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 72-75.
9. This is Sutton's version of Meredith Kline's proposed structure. Meredith G. Kline, Treaty of the Great King: The Covenant Structure of Deuteronomy: Studies and Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1963), pp. 48-49; Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), pp. 21, 41, 59, 77, 96.
10. Two sets of five points each (1:6-46; 2:1-4:40).
11. James B. Jordan, Covenant Sequence in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 4.
12. Sovereign God (1-17), judicial appeals courts (18), laws (21-23:13), oath (23-24), and inheritance (25-40). North, Tools of Dominion, p. 93.
13. Sacrifices (1-7), priestly cleansing (8-16), laws of separation (17-22), covenant-renewal festivals and covenant-breaking acts (23-24), and inheritance (25-27). North, Leviticus, pp. 44-45.
14. Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), pp. xiv-xxii.
15. North, Leviticus, pp. xlix-liv.
16. New Bible Commentary, p. 283.
17. Idem.
18. Ibid., p. 284.
19. Sutton, That You May Prosper, ch. 5.
20. Ibid., ch. 4.
21. Ibid., ch. 3.
22. Scofield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1909), p. 234n.
23. Ibid., p. 245n.
24. Ibid., p. 250.
25. Preface, above, and Chapter 17, below.
26. The New Scofield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 251n.
27. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).
28. For a detailed study of this alliance, see Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1995), Part 3.
29. Tommy Ice, response in a 1988 debate: Ice and Dave Hunt vs. Gary North and Gary DeMar. Cited in Gary DeMar, The Debate Over Christian Reconstruction (Atlanta, Georgia: American Vision Press, 1988), p. 185.
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