Wednesday Bible Study- Rehashing the promise

This week we go to Deuteronomy 3:16- where we will gather in an "I told you so" lesson.

Deu 3:16  And to the Reubenites and to the Gadites I gave from Gilead even to the river Arnon, half the valley, and the border even to the river Jabbok, the border of the sons of Ammon...

Background:  So Moses and the Israelites have made it through the desert.  And Moses is spending most of the book of Deuteronomy "rehearsing" (we always called it "rehashing") everything that had gone before, from the point of God telling them to start heading north after 38 years in the desert to where they were.  In a fairly short amount of time, this has happened.

- The Israelites are refused permission by Edom to pass through their territory, and God refuses them permission to fight their way through.  The same thing happens when they reach the borders of Ammon and Moab.  So I thought about going at it from the "is this God not wanting them to fight relatives" angle, since Edom is Esau's kin, and Ammon and Moab are descended from Lot.

- Aaron dies.  Which in the story kind of reminds me of those commercials that ask "wouldn't it be nice to get a warning", and the guy reads in the newspaper that he'll be having a heart attack at 4:28 PM- because God tells Aaron he's about to die, and why he's not allowed to the Promised Land.

- The Israelites get permission to attack the Amorite kingdoms on the east of the Jordan.  Sihon king of Hesbon and Og king of Bashan are forever immortalized as the first conquests as the Hebrews come home- and this passage would seem to have a lot to do with them as the land described as going to Reuben and Gad IS the exact domain of Sihon the Amorite.

Now, you know me, I dug into this angle first.  The Amorites were the very same tribes that would enter Mesopotamia and found the first Babylonian Empire.  They came, apparently, from this area.  According to some sources, Sihon- who the Jews say was the brother of Og, and therefore probably a giant (Og was said to have a bedstead of 13 1/2 by 6 1/2 feet)  - had swept the country of his kingdom away from Moab, taking the capital city of Aroer in a savage battle that required a cursing from Baalam to conquer it.  This being the reason for Rahab telling the spies that all the land was afraid of the Hebrews because of how they handled the Amorites.

And then, of course I tried to find the connection between those stories and those of Reuben and Gad.  Reuben had been Jacob's firstborn, but had lost the birthright because he apparently had sex with Bilhah, one of the four contributors to Jacob's "Cheaper by the dozen" family ( or with less snark, Bilhah was Rachel's maid and the mother of Reuben's half-brothers Dan and Napthali.)  Because of this, both Jacob and Moses cursed his tribe as destined "never to excel", and as the only notables in the line of Reuben were the rebels Dathan and Abihu (who got smushed last week), I'd say we can mark that down as yet another promise kept.  Gad was to be a fierce warrior, and to do well- and some sources claim that Reuben actually dwindled to an enclave within Gad, just like last week we saw Simeon become folded into Judah.

These two tribes, along with half the tribe of Manasseh, would take their inheritance outside of Canaan, in the former lands of Sihon and Og, on the condition that the menfolk join their brethren across the Jordan for Joshua's war of conquest.  So we had a lot of interesting threads that weren't seeming to lead together.  So I prayed for guidance once again, and the thought came to me:

"Moses is rehashing.  WHY is he rehashing?"

And so you leaf through several chapters of the book, until you come to a place where the story splits.  And this is what it says in the split:

Deu 9:5  Not for your righteousness, or for the uprightness of your heart, do you go to possess their land. But for the wickedness of these nations Jehovah your God drives them out from before you, so that He may perform the Word which Jehovah swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 
Deu 9:6  Therefore, understand that Jehovah your God does not give you this good land, to possess it, for your righteousness. For you are a stiff-necked people. 
Deu 9:7  Remember, and do not forget, how you provoked Jehovah your God to wrath in the wilderness. From the day you departed out of the land of Egypt, until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against Jehovah. 
Deu 9:8  Also in Horeb you provoked Jehovah to wrath, so that Jehovah was angry with you to have destroyed you. 
Deu 9:9  When I had gone up into the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant which Jehovah made with you, then I stayed in the mountain forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water. 
Deu 9:10  And Jehovah delivered to me two tablets of stone written with the finger of God, and on them according to all the words which Jehovah spoke with you in the mountain out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly. 


Later on you get the "if-thens":  If they obey, God will bless them, if not God will destroy them.  Moses finally ends the soliloquy in chapter 29:

Deu 29:25  Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of Jehovah, the God of their fathers, which He made with them when He brought them forth out of the land of Egypt. 
Deu 29:26  For they went and served other gods, and worshiped them, gods whom they did not know, and who had not given to them any portion. 
Deu 29:27  And the anger of Jehovah was kindled against this land, to bring on it all the curses that are written in this book. 
Deu 29:28  And Jehovah rooted them out of their land in anger and wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is today. 

And I thought, what does that remind me of? In Acts 7, Stephen has been hauled before the Sanhedrin for preaching Christ.  And his response?  He begins to rehash.  And he rehashes for 50 verses, and then he hits a very similar end:

Act 7:51  O stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so you do. 

Act 7:52  Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you have now been the betrayers and murderers; 

Act 7:53  who received the Law through disposition of angels, and did not keep it. 

Point being:  This was God, through Stephen, telling the Jewish leaders that they had reached that point of no return when they crucified Christ, which Jesus Himself foretold:

Luk 19:41  And as He drew near, He beheld the city and wept over it, 
Luk 19:42  saying, If you had known, even you, even at least in this day of yours, the things for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. 
Luk 19:43  For the days will come on you that your enemies will raise up a rampart to you, and will surround you, and will keep you in on every side. 
Luk 19:44  And they will tear you down, and your children within you, and will not leave a stone on a stone because you did not know the time of your visitation. 

And once again, God keeps His promise- within a generation of the Crucifixion, Jerusalem is destroyed by the Romans, and the Temple is obliterated.  So what might seem a nondescript verse shows us a vast story- a story in which God, sadly for the Jews, kept His promise.