Jahaz Hands!

Had enough of Bob Fosse and Ben Vereen?  Learn to do it yourself!

Old Testament

Book Five:  Deuteronomy

Primary Charge of Moses to the People

Chapter 1:  A review of Israel’s journey

Chapter 2:  A review of Israel’s journey (cont’d)

I’m afraid this book is going to be painful.  If you don’t know it already, “Deuteronomy” is Greek for “second law.”  It doesn’t mean new laws, it means we’re just going to tell you what we’ve already told you again.  If you thought it was boring the first time, wait till you get a load of this.

First let’s find out why this book’s name is in Greek.  It’s not in the Jewish bible, of course, but it is here.  In Hebrew, the name of the book is Devarim.  That comes from the first words of the book, “Eleh ha-devarim,” which means “These are the words,” the first words of Deuteronomy.  So what is Deuteronomy?  I love the mistranslations in the bible.  Remember the Horned Moses?  Here’s another one.  Later on in this book, 17.18, it says, “When he has ascended the throne of the kingdom, he shall make a copy of this law in a book at the dictation of the levitical priests.”  The phrase in Hebrew is “mishneh haTorah hazoth” is “a copy of this law.”  (I’m not sure of the Hebrew spelling, or if there is a standard transliteration from Hebrew to English.  The spelling here is from the venerable Wikipedia.)  This phrase was mistranslated into Greek as “to deuteronomion touto,” “this second law.”  Hence “Deuteronomy.”  That still doesn’t actually explain why the book’s name is IN Greek.  Ah, it just occurred to me, ALL the books of the Torah are Greek:  Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus.  All those words are Greek.  Exodus and Leviticus are actually Latin, but they come from Greek originally.  (“Exo-” means “out of”; “hodos” means “way.”)  “Numbers” is actually the odd book out.  The Hebrew name is much better, “In the Wilderness.”

Anyway, after Genesis the bible becomes astonishingly boring.  Deuteronomy is what it says it is, a COPY of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers!  Moses here in these chapters is giving a speech to the Israelites before they move down into Canaan, so it all amounts to an episode of the Chris Farley Show.  “You remember, you remember when we went to the Red Sea?  And, and then God parted the waters? . . .  That was awesome.”  These chapters are really LONG too.  I read the first two, and I don’t want to go all the way to four today, so I’ll read them another time.  Very little happens here, as I said, Moses just recounts what we just went through.

The only exciting thing about the first two chapters is that the Giants come back again!  All these years later they are still insisting on the giants.  And then they went through Jahaz.  I forgot about Jahaz.

Something just occurred to me.  The writing in these last few books is literally God-awful.  It might be that this is what passed for “tension” 5000 years ago.  They’re on the verge of attacking Canaan . . . not yet!  Let me talk to you a few more minutes.  Unfortunately, he (God) must have skipped school the day that they explained that there’s no tension if the reader already knows what’s going to happen.  If sometimes Israel was annihilated that would be cool.  But that never happens.  Presumably they do lose some battles here and there, but that is just part of God’s plan, right?  Oh, yeah, the reason for Moses’ speech is that the real authors of the book (not God) need to retell things to make it fit with God’s latest failed promise.  He promised forty years, so now the story looks like it took forty years.  One interesting and amazing thing always is what liars and bullshitters both God and the Israelites are.  At one point it took them a lot longer than it should have to get through some place (I’m not going to bother looking it up again).  So Moses says it was all their fault, they didn’t believe God.  If they had just listened to him, everything would have been fine.  This is, again, the point of all these books, which I find quite interesting.  The lesson is that God always pulls through eventually, and you should just listen; bad things happen when you don’t listen.  I just love that all of them, God and the Israelites, are so obnoxious; there is something really great about it.

--bibletoenail