Deuteronomy 11 Study Notes

11:1-2 The people had seen and experienced the Lord’s discipline and were therefore without excuse for their waywardness. Their children, on the other hand, were not so culpable for they had not seen these things for themselves.

11:3-4 The signs and works are the plagues the Lord inflicted on Pharaoh and Egypt and the miracle of drowning their armies in the Red Sea. Seeing these proofs of God’s power and glory should have instilled such a sense of awe in his people that they could not help but love and serve him unreservedly, but that was not the case (9:7-24).

11:5-6 Dathan and Abiram, along with Korah the Levite, led a rebellion against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness (Nm 16:1-3). Their sin was more against the Lord than against human authority because they questioned his selection of leaders (Nm 16:8-11). Their rebellion resulted in their destruction and that of their families and properties.

11:7 This verse expresses one of Moses’s themes in this address. See 3:21; 4:3,9,34; 6:22; 9:17; 10:21; 29:2-3.

11:8-12 The description of Canaan is especially meaningful in comparison to Egypt, where rain was scarce and agriculture depended on the annual overflow of the Nile River and irrigation by hand. The fact that Canaan was watered by rain from the sky insinuates that the rain came from God himself so that it was he who did the backbreaking work for them. For “hand” (v. 10) the Hebrew has “foot,” which may refer to a primitive foot-operated irrigation pump called shaduf in Arabic.

11:13-15 The rainy season in Israel, or early rains, begins in the autumn, while spring is the time of the late rains. This provision of the Lord for the land indicated his care in “watching over it from the beginning to the end of the year” (v. 12). So important was this agricultural cycle that the Israelites celebrated the new year in the fall.

11:16 The warning not to turn aside, serve, and bow in worship to other gods must be understood in the context of the agricultural motifs just described. Baal, Asherah, Astarte, and other gods and goddesses were thought to generate and sustain life in soil, livestock, and even humans by their own sexual activity, and they became objects of worship, often through various fertility rites. Moses and the prophets constantly condemned such incursions into paganism (2Kg 17:7-15).

11:17 The Lord’s shutting of the sky would prove that the gods of the heathen did not exist and that he was the one who created and sustained life.

11:18-20 God’s command is a repetition of the instruction given when introducing the Shema (6:4-9; see note at 6:4-5), here clearly showing that all of God’s instruction is to be learned and passed along, not just the Shema. Hearts is a metaphor for the intellect, and minds represents the person as a whole being. Together, they are the internalizing of the word of God.

11:21 The phrase as long as the heavens are above the earth is a biblical way of expressing the idea of forever. The Lord promised this land to the patriarchs on the condition of their obedience and the obedience of their descendants (28:36-37; Gn 17:9-14; Lv 26:14-33).

11:22-23 Success in conquering the land would depend on faith and obedience. Ceremony, ritual, and other professions of religion would count for nothing if Israel’s personal relationship with the Lord was missing.

11:24-25 Every place the sole of your foot treads is a way of describing conquest and occupation of a territory, usually (but not always) by military might. The image occurs in Gn 13:17 where Abraham was told to “walk around the land, through its length and width,” a sign that it would become his as a gift from the Lord. God also told Joshua on the eve of the conquest of Canaan, “I have given you every place where the sole of your foot treads” (Jos 1:3). The area described here is essentially the territory controlled by David (2Sm 8:1-3) and promised in ancient times to Abraham (Gn 15:18-19).

11:26-28 Blessing and curse were essential elements in ancient Near Eastern covenant or treaty texts. Moses, as covenant mediator, set before the people a blessing and a curse, the full texts of which he elaborates later (27:15-28:58). The disobedience mentioned was covenant disloyalty, defined as following other gods.

11:29 Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal were twin peaks overshadowing a wide valley in which ancient Shechem (and modern Nablus) was located. This is where Jacob bought property and dug a well (Gn 33:19-20; Jn 4:6), the very well where Jesus encountered the Samaritan woman and from which she directed his attention to Mount Gerizim, the site of the Samaritan temple (Jn 4:20).

11:30-32 The sites mentioned in v. 30 echo the patriarchal journeys and covenant. Verses 31-32 prepare for the laws to follow.