This is a heavy section with two very dangerous pieces of scripture. Chapter 11 relays both a blessing and a curse from God. If we follow God’s commandments, He says we will have food and comfort, health and safety. But if we disobey, then we will have trouble, sickness and war. This seems at a glance to say that your situation in life is determined by how obedient you are to God, by your own righteousness. I can think of half a dozen places across both testiments that clearly state the exact opposite of that though, so I think it’s important to dig a little deeper on this one.
A certain interpretation of this passage is one of the cornerstones of what we like to call health and wealth, or name it and claim it theology. This theology is bullshit.
Once we start going down this road, it starts to seem like all of the good things in our life are coming from our own awesomeness in the eyes of God, which entitles us to have nice things. Likewise, people dying of AIDS and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa are naughty in the eyes of God and deserve what is happening to them. That’s why missionaries who’ve devoted their lives to serving God all live such glamorous lives and why we’re always hearing about the righteous, God-centered lifestyles of the wealthy.
We’ve seen already that the Israelites were unable to follow the Law even with God standing right in front of them the whole time they were in the desert. That entire trip was one long line of plagues and rebukes from the Lord, so it’s possible that this is exactly as it seems, but only vacuously true since no one can ever live up to God’s law. Even Moses managed to piss God off and they were, like, best friends.
It’s also possible, although equally open to abuse, that the ‘you’ in this passage is referring to people at the national scale. This is still dangerous though because then we get to hear obnoxious things like this from our church pedagogues all the time. Which I guess could be true, but I think it’s unlikely. I could rant about this all day, but I’ll wait until I get to some of the other counterpoints for this one, like some of the things in Ecclesiastes, or most the stuff Jesus said about justice and grace.
Or the entire book or Job.
Okay, moving on. Moses also explores the dangers of being led astray to false gods. He says not to allow anyone to even mention worshiping other Gods to you, and he says it three times in slightly different ways, which is how you can tell when Moses is super-serious about something. If someone shows you miracles and then tries to lead you astray, kill them with rocks. If a friend or family member tries to lead you astray, kill them with rocks. If you hear about trouble-makers in another town leading people astray, kill them all with rocks, destroy the city and never rebuild it.
That first one I think is the most interesting because it touches on something more personal to me I think. I mean all of my family and most of my friend either believe the same basic things that I do or are not religious at all, and I’m not really one to get caught up in popular local movements, so I don’t feel very vulnerable to either of those traps. I am pretty impressed by neat things I can’t explain though.
At this time in history also the natural sciences were just starting to get moving. In ancient Greece, some men with a surplus of spare time started analyzing patterns in nature, watching the progression of the stars, weather, rivers and whatever else they saw around them. Many of them very selflessly took all they learned and tried to share it with those around them, but a couple were real jerks about it. One guy in particular comes to mind, the philosopher Heraclitus picked up a couple tricks and some catchy rhetoric and built himself a good-sized cult. All he had to do was predict an eclipse and he convinced everyone around that he had an understanding of the heavens, the realm of the gods, and therefore he must be a god. Maybe he even believed it himself. Now, in 2011, my phone can predict eclipses. Want to be a god? Done.
There are countless examples of this same thing happening all through history, showing off some fancy technology of knowledge about the world and convincing everyone that you’re a god. The Romans did it to the Germans, the Japanese did it to the Koreans, the Spanish did it to the Aztecs. When Lewis and Clark explored the Luisiana Purchase for President Jefferson, they took this goofy looking steampunk air-gun thing that had just been invented with them for the sole purpose of impressing natives along the way.
I guess Deut 13:1-5 is kind of restated by Arthur C. Clark’s third law of prediction: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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