Deuteronomy 31 Footnotes

31:2 Those who question Moses’s life span of 120 years do so on the grounds that such an age is virtually unheard of in modern times. However, one should never gauge the past by the present. God had specially blessed and preserved Moses so that he could accomplish the tasks to which he had been called.

It appears unfair for the Lord to deny Moses access to the promised land for one intemperate outburst (1:37; see Nm 20:12). But Moses, the recipient of special privilege, was also charged with special responsibility. To fail to execute his responsibility completely was to cast both himself and his God in a bad light. For that reason, he could not enter the land with the new generation.

31:9 This verse clearly attests to the Mosaic authorship of at least Deuteronomy, if not the entire Pentateuch. Those who argue that late preexilic or even exilic editors inserted statements like this, in order to give a late composition Mosaic authority, do so only on the base of a previous assumption that Moses could not have written these texts. Such unwarranted assumptions may arise from a desire to divest the Pentateuch, and the Bible as a whole, of any moral credibility.