On Deuteronomy 33

I can at last say something about the word yamin, though it is still only a bare reference. Have a look at the use of the word מימינו meaning “from his right arm” in Deuteronomy XXXIII: 2. Remember the right arm or just the arm are used by Scripture to speak of startling direct saving action by God, though there can be a human agent, notably Moses.

Some more information relating to the earlier message.

(a) The word בא in v. 2 if on its own could equally naturally and easily be read as the past tense or as a participle. A participle refers to the present or future or both. (Jesus alludes to this possibility of both a present and future reference when he says in John Iv “the hour is coming and indeed is already here”. What he refers to is that the World to Come העולם הבא is literally “the World Coming”, which if you think about it means the world that will come and the world currently in the process of coming). The rest of the verbs in v. 2 are tenseless or without time distinction between present and future, but they would not naturally refer to the past. Don’t worry if you can’t see this. A proper grammatical explanation would be long and for the moment I’m too tired to formulate and type one. Let me just say it partly has to do with the opening participle בא. On the other hand, the verb forms וזרח and ואתה are not in the consecutive past tense, but in a form the same as the consecutive future tense. But the verb וזרח can’t be a consecutive future because if בא has a future reference it must be a participle, whereas a consecutive future can’t follow a participle. So the verb וזרח is ambiguously either the present result of a past event, or a future event. In case of such ambiguity, both meanings are always intended unless something to the contrary is specified. In short, the verb fuses the past, present, and future. (This is not quite exact but will do for now). This makes הופיע equally ambiguous, in spite of its form. Then ואתה has the same form and function as וזרח. Then the last clause has no verb. The verse is not naturally a statement about the past, but about the eternal present and the future. Something similar could be said about the following verse. I used the argument before that a blessing must refer at least in part to the future, but the tenses confirm that. Even if you take בא as a past tense, nothing much changes, because then every other clause in the verse becomes a straight prediction of the future. There is no getting away from a reference to the future in this verse. The only ambiguity is whether or not there is an echo of the past.

(b) The words אף חבב עמים in v. 3 are echoed by the words ולו יקהת עמים in Genesis XLIX: 10, said of Judah. This means Judah is the embodiment of the purpose of God towards the whole of mankind. This is part of what the Samaritan woman in John IV meant when she spoke of “the Saviour of the World”. Judah is also the embodiment of all twelve tribes. This is part of the implication of the words “Thou bringest him to his people” in v. 7. (This needs more work).

(c) The standard Rabbinic interpretation of Deuteronomy XXXIII: 1-3 diverts attention DELIBERATELY from the full meaning by saying that Torah was offered to the whole world, but only Israel accepted the offer. This is in fact a connotation of what is said, but only a tiny part of the whole meaning. It takes attention away from the unavoidable future reference. It SEEMS neutral by taking seriously the word “from” in v. 2, but by ignoring the future reference the full implications of the word “from” are hidden. Even so, there are, as I recall, Rabbinic passages that do speak of the implication of an eternal present of the emanation from Sinai.

(d) Who is addressed in v. 3? Not God. Then it is both Moses and Shilo, with the emphasis on Shilo.

(e) What is the time reference of vv. 27-29? In v. 28, the first verb is unambiguously a consecutive past. But this had not happened when the blessing was uttered. The rest of the verbs in these verses refer to both an eternal present and the future. This means the Israel of v. 29 is equally Israel in the time of Moses and the Israel consisting of the whole world of the future.

(f) Note very carefully that I don’t mean the Church is to replace Israel. I mean the Church is Israel, which many Christian hymns assume as something so obvious as not needing proof. The verse from the Torah stating this is Deuteronomy XXXIII: 29. This is entirely different to the crude misrepresentations of Christianity that speaks of replacement of Jews by Gentiles, or otherwise of Christianity being a religion with easier rules manageable by Gentiles, with Jews keeping up the difficult observance of the whole Mosaic Law. Even on historical grounds this is impossible, since Jews and Samaritans were the overwhelming majority of the Church in the time of Paul, and before that there was hardly anyone at all in the Church not originally a Jew or Samaritan. That is why Paul succeeded in Anatolia and Syria and some parts of Greece, and failed in Athens. Why did he normally speak in synagogues, not in the town square? So when exactly did the Jews get rejected? Besides, what is hard about keeping the mitsvot? What is hard about ordinary traditional Jewish Orthodoxy, best represented where you are by the Conservative movement, and very different from the man-made structure falsely called Orthodoxy where you are, but actually Ultra-Orthodox? You will see that I have proven from the Torah not only that Christian Zionism is a Christian heresy, but also that Jewish Zionism (as opposed to the meritorious decision to live in Palestine so as to have more mitsvot to observe) is a dead end and against the intention of the Torah. A corollary is that it is utterly stupid to even ask which bits of the New Testament are more Jewish than others. (If we leave out the question of whether some parts might contain a deliberate slightly later obscuring of what Christianity is). I have equally well proven that the New Testament is meaningless or even nonsensical without the Torah (I mean the one currently read in synagogues). Obviously the practice of traditional Judaism as seen in synagogues now is valid and leads to salvation, to use traditional Christian terms. (Not the Evangelical salvation, with no connection with the Torah) The verse from the Torah proving this is Deuteronomy XXXIII: 29. Note the word נושע.The distinction between what is called Judaism and what is called Christianity, though real, is not great, and mainly due to deliberate obscuring of the nature of both, some time I think near the end of the first c. A.D. I think you will see why I am not kosher in the eyes of the Lubavitch faction or the Evangelicals or those that want to convert the Jews. Mind you, this is no loss, since all three of these are unbearable.

(g) See if you can work out the code by which שילה becomes מרקה. There is a clue in the fact that the last letter of each s the same, so MRQH must have the letters of Shilo in reverse order.

(h) I was not entirely clear when I said the dropping of the yod in Shilo had as its purpose the obscuring of the equivalence to Moshe, and mentioned the resemblance to the symbolism of the life-span of Joshua being ten less than the life-span of Moses. The two sets of symbolism are connected, since we know that the favourite bit of polemic against the concept of a second Moses was to assert that the prophet like Moses was Joshua. This is best known from recorded disputes against the Dositheans, but you can see it less prominently in modern Samaritanism. In a disguised form it has produced the misrepresentation of Christianity seen so commonly, in which the Torah becomes just another book of the Old Testament. It was not Marcion that did this, it was his opponents. They bear heavy guilt for this misrepresentation of the words of Scripture itself at the end of Deuteronomy, in Numbers XII, and elsewhere.

(i) The saving role of Judah is first seen when he saves Joseph, who later saves all the others including Judah. Without Judah the tribes would have been incomplete in number or non-existent. This is why Judah has the right to represent the twelve or all Israel in this chapter. I am convinced Jesus is meant to be presented as re-enacting the roles and functions of both Judah and Moses though on another level , but for the life of me I can’t find the appropriate verses for the link with Judah, except for the statements of his belonging to the tribe of Judah, which are not compelling for this purpose.