The fifth book of the Bible, the completion of the Torah, the last of the Pentateuch is Deuteronomy.

I'm almost sad to see this part of the Bible go.

There is so much to look at here.

There is such a setting up of the rest of the biblical texts.

And really, of course, this is the foundation to the Israelite nation.

If you haven't watched my first four episodes, I'd encourage you to do so, as what happens here in this book is a summation of many things that have been set up previously.

So let's just jump right in today with point one, which is book overview.

Now, Deuteronomy means in Greek, second law.

If you can believe it, even after everything that has happened in Exodus and Leviticus in terms of law, we get more.

We get a redoing, a second contract, or maybe third now, Abraham, Moses, Moses again.

We get a relisting of the 10 commandments, plus some add-ons.

We cover what went wrong with all of the Levitical laws, but we didn't take any away.

We're just gonna add some more.

We're gonna give some clarification.

We're gonna double down.

A lot of times, I think people like to think of it as Old and New Testament.

And that they're so congruent, which is already problematic.

But this is another restart.

We had the Garden of Eden, but that didn't work out.

We had the fall.

And we had a whole system set up post-fall, but even that didn't work out.

So we had the flood, a mass murder of almost every single thing on this planet.

But yet, man started again.

And when we were too good at working with each other and collaborating, and when we had just one language, which would have made understanding God's word so simple, God said, nope, Tower of Babel.

Let's start this thing over again.

Spread you guys out and confuse your languages.

That should help with my overall purpose and message.

But that led to most of his chosen people being in captivity for 400 or 430 years in Egypt.

Oh, and by the way, somewhere in here was a covenant with Abraham, but he sets the people free and they get a new covenant with Moses as they wander around in the wilderness.

And now in Deuteronomy, they are getting a second law, a renewal covenant for the children of the generation whose promises didn't come true.

How many iterations and times do we have to completely start over here if you are an all good and all knowing and all powerful God?

But I digress, not the point.

The point of these is to give you a pretty objective view of what is happening in these stories and what we can know about them historically and factually, along, of course, with some of my commentary on the issues presented for the religion that stands today.

So, second law.

And this book is really broken into three parts and all three parts are kind of sermons or monologues from Moses.

In the first 10 to 12 verses, we get Moses kind of telling the story.

Hey, here's what happened.

Here's what God did for us.

And he's chastising this newer generation because remember the curse that happened in Numbers was that the original Exodus generation would not get to enter the promised land.

Well, all those soldiers have somehow miraculously died, every single one of them, even though Moses was older than most of them and he's still kicking.

So within this 38 year period, everyone that needed to die died.

And now we have this fresh new generation and Moses is addressing them, the new children of Israel, telling them of the horrible things their parents did and the wrath of God that they brought on themselves, reminding them of all of the blessings and grace of God and all of the wickedness and wrongdoings of Israel.

I'm surprised he could say it with a straight face.

But during this time, we get some pretty important prayers to the Jewish people as well as some new promises and an idea that this generation will indeed inherit the promised land.

So this is the training section and we'll cover some of those important prayers like the Shema when we get into the main themes.

And the second part of the book is that renewal of law and the add-ons.

And we get all kinds of add-ons.

We get more dietary restrictions, we get more family and business restrictions, but it seems that we're getting a lot more about other gods.

Now this I think is where things get interesting.

We've seen all throughout these first five books, you should have no other gods before me.

And we see them building a false idol, a graven image, the calf at Sinai.

And the way that these words are broken down in Hebrew and these different terms that are thrown about, about no other gods, no false gods, and no false idols are three different things.

Now I don't want to open a can of worms, especially if you're a believer, but there is good reason to believe that the original Yahweh traditions and believers would have seen him as one of a pantheon of gods.

Yahweh's origins as El or the son of El and his previous marriage to Asherah and all of this other more ancient traditions of this same storm god Yahweh show him just like all the other gods of mythology that we think of.

Battles with his father, fallouts with his wife, proving his potency as a god by the worship he gets from his believers and the victories that he has through them in their conquering of other people that serve other gods.

So again, especially in this book, as they get ready, as Moses is training these people that are going into a land, the Canaanite land, with many different gods, it seems he's wanting to show them there is no other god above our god.

Not that there's no other god, but hey, we've got the best one.

And a lot of ways that Christians have explained this other concept or this other category of other gods is that the other gods are other supernatural beings like fallen angels or demons or devils or the devil himself.

And that's fine.

I guess we don't need to have this clarification, but it seems to me, and to many who have studied this much more than I, that there's good reason to believe that the concept was there were many gods and it was about choosing which god you were going to worship and which god was most powerful.

And this is backed up in the Old Testament immensely.

And then the third part of the book is Moses's final speech and death and handing the reins over to Joshua.

We also get, as an interesting point, the longest prayer in the entire Bible comes in the third part here, Deuteronomy 32, I believe.

It's known as the Song of Moses or Moses's Poem or Moses's Song of Witness.

And it is about the grace of God even amidst Israel's rebellion.

But just a little side note, what I think is really interesting here about this final speech, this is Moses getting everyone geared up before he dies.

Like you're going, you made it, 40 years, here we go.

Slavery in Egypt, parting the Red Sea, your parents' rebellion, you're going to get it.

Don't mess it up.

Here's the rules, here's the laws.

But he says, on the other hand, you're probably gonna screw this up.

He is so filled with doubt at this point in his life.

Imagine, I mean, he dies at 120 years old.

So he's well over 100 at this point and he's seen it all.

And he is just so fed up with the cycle of rebellion and consequence and screwing it up all over again that he says, listen, you're gonna screw it up.

Here's the good news.

When you do, not if, when you do, anytime you find yourself in captivity or under God's justice, meaning God's wrath, if you turn to him, he will deliver you.

Which then like, what is the point of the promised land?

Right, like, isn't the whole idea, if you're just zooming out, God has this people, they're his chosen people.

It's the covenant of which he's going to bless the entire earth.

He's going to use them and set them apart.

This is going to be a people group of priests, is what we are told in Exodus and Leviticus.

That they're going to be held to such a higher standard of morality via the law in comparison to all of those other tribes and practices around them.

That it will be like a nation of priests.

They will go through this, what should have been a very small wandering, but turned into this horrendous 40 years because of their disobedience.

Even though they had this law that would make them so much more moral than everybody else.

And even though they haven't gotten better at following that law.

Moses is like, yep, 40 years is up.

You paid your penalty.

It doesn't matter if you learned or not.

In fact, you're definitely going to screw this up.

Let's go over there and murder everyone.

Take the promised land anyways, and you're probably going to screw it up so bad that God's going to just take it away from you and give it to your enemies again, which he does, which we see.

How bad is God at making all of these plans?

But anyways, that's the setup.

That's the book overview.

That's what we're working with.

Let's move on to point two, which is authorship and date.

I don't have anything too new to say about this.

Again, see the last four videos and see specifically when I cover in Genesis to get the full measure of the difference between the traditional sense that Moses wrote the Torah, which of course is problematic, especially in this book as he describes his own death, or the documentary hypothesis, which mixes really four ancient sources together that the best belief is they were compiled during their exile in Babylon because of one of their times of disobedience.

This would have been late 5th or 6th century, and they were putting all of this together as they were preparing for their release because if they're obedient, they get their act together, God's going to deliver them, which he does.

And so this period of compiling their law, their history, all of their oral traditions together, all of their different sources would have been very helpful.

Now specifically, and that's been true for the last four books, but specifically for Deuteronomy, we get an idea of an alternate way of getting this book, something else that rises up to significance within the scholarly aspect of the authorship for this.

It's a process of redaction, but it ends with a 7th century period of time that is associated with the kingdom of Judah.

For instance, in 2 Kings, we learn more about this period where we have King Josiah within the kingdom of Judah implementing significant religious reform, which looks a lot like the second law given in Deuteronomy.

And so there's this hypothesis that really this is a retelling or a looking back to get inspiration from for the Israelites now under King Josiah.

Could be either or, could be neither.

We don't really know.

What we do know is it started with a lot of oral tradition.

People started to collect this.

We had the priests collecting it.

We had two different views of God, the Yahwehist view and the Elohist view or Elohim view, along with the Deuteronomical sources.

We combine all four of those together and we get the first five books.

I'm glad to finally be done explaining this book after book after book.

So let's move on to point three, which is historical context or background and accuracy.

So this, like the last few books, is going to be rather short because there's just not that much evidence for this kind of a people group at this kind of scale for this many years in this place of the world.

There are some things that we do see accurately.

For instance, Moses is reminding his people about these new laws and why it's so important to keep them in contrast to the other tribes around them, the Canaanites, the Moabites, et cetera.

And we know that these were real people groups.

In fact, all of these sermons that Moses is giving is done in the plains of Moab.

We know this to be a real place.

The Moabites, once again, had a portion of land that we know archaeologically speaking, we can see their pottery, we can see their inscriptions, though none of it describes Israel at all.

And it's a spot that is east of Canaan separated by the Jordan River.

So there is some historical accuracy here in terms of landscape and people groups.

Was there a portion of Jews that crossed through this place at one time?

Probably.

Is it this story directly?

Probably not, but we can't say one way or another for sure.

Again, especially this book, like this happened a little bit in Leviticus with so much being around the camp at Sinai that it's just in this one spot for a very short period of time.

And there's just not that much information, but we do get a look into the insight of these people groups, of the other gods that people worshiped into the tribal nature and hierarchies and rules within those groups.

And again, some of the landscape and cities and rivers and landmarks, et cetera.

We really don't get archaeological evidence until the Tel Dan Stili, which we see an inscription of the House of David, which is gonna come much later.

So what we're working off are these oral traditions put down into collections of books is really the best that we can do.

So moving on to point four, literary analysis.

This has been really interesting.

And again, we get a unique perspective here.

We've had something different in almost every single book so far.

And yes, in general, the genre is that of ancient near Eastern literature and the narrative forms that have been happening with techniques like chaostic structure, et cetera, and repetition have definitely been seen across everything.

But again, each book gives us a little bit of a unique taste.

And this one is going to be treaty.

We've seen legal code, we've seen moral code.

And even though we've had covenants in some of the previous books, this is our first like hard line in the sand example of treaty.

And specifically at this time, we'd be referring to two words, suzerain and vassal.

Suzerain is going to be the owner of the contract, so to speak, the superior party.

Vassal is going to be the weaker or the subordinate party.

And this is important and it's interesting because this is how God is setting up via Moses, where all these other tribes are recognizing that their king is some kind of supreme power.

Moses is saying, as we have leaders like myself and what's to come with Joshua, et cetera, they are still under the vassal portion of this.

They may be higher than you, but they are not suzerain.

They are not the supreme power.

That in our case, for our rules, is always going to be God.

We're not gonna put that right onto a man or a leader with some divine nature or affinity.