Day 60 Deuteronomy 8-10

            Moses likens the last forty years of wandering through the desert to a father punishing his son.  God didn’t do it because He hated the Israelites, just the opposite.  In fact, it really could have been worse in hindsight.  They were punished when they were disobedient, but God didn’t wipe them out, they were fed and cared for.  And now, in the same way that God punished them because He cares, He is going to hand over this great land to them.  It’s important to remember that neither of those things happen by the power of men.  Moses tells the younger generation that when they’re sitting in their nice homes overlooking their good lands after a big meal with pomegranates and honey and stuff, they’re going to be tempted to think of all this as their own success, brought about by the strength and goodness of their own families and tribes.  That kind of thinking is poison though, everyone has to always remember that it’s not because of their righteousness that they’re getting all these blessings, but because of the evilness of the nations that are there now.

            The rest of this section is basically just Moses reading Exodus for us.  He talks about the stone tablets and the golden calf and building the ark of the covenant, but this time the perspective is different.  In exodus, it feels like the narrator is down with the people, talking about Moses disappearing up into the mountain and then things happen in camp and them Moses comes back and is super-pissed.  This time the perspective is personal to Moses.  He talks about going up the mountain, talking to God, then coming down and seeing the idol and what he does to it.  He never mentions anything that happened that he didn’t actually see though.  I think I remember reading that Exodus and Deuteronomy were both written by Moses, but it sounds a lot like they’re coming from different perspectives.  I suppose Deuteronomy wasn’t written entirely by Moses because (spoiler alert) Moses dies at the end, but since the entire book seems to be one long speech by Moses, I guess it doesn’t really matter whether he wrote it himself or merely dictated it does it.