Deuteronomy - Lesson 3

All right. We have been talking about Deuteronomy as prophetic preaching at its best. We've been talking about Deuteronomy as a covenant document. Well, now let's talk about Deuteronomy as scripture, our scripture.  

Now, technically, scripture refers to a written text, something that has been produced by a literate scribe who knew how to read and write; something inscribed is a scripture. But we tend to interpret it as an authoritative scripture for life and often divinely produced.  

In Hebrew, the Hebrew word for Scripture, something written, is a miktāb, a written document. God “wrote on the tablets in the same script/text as before, the ten words that the Lord had spoken to you on the mountain out of the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly.” So, there you have reference to a scripture, an inscribed text. That's the first one.  

Biblical Hebrew has two words for text, this miktāb, which we have here, but also seper. It's almost always translated as a book. This is the book of the Torah. Usually, it is this is the seper of the Torah, it means a written document. It always a written account.  

But there are other things that are also written. In Deuteronomy 24:1 there's a reference to a certificate of divorce, saper kērîtūt. Does that make it scripture? No, it makes it a legal written document.  

So, the word scripture in Hebrew means simply a written text. But what makes scripture, Scripture with a capital s, uppercase s? I define scripture in that sense as an authoritative text deemed by the community to be canonical (that is in force for all) presumably because it somehow originated with God. That makes it scripture. This is how Paul uses the word, the Greek word in second, Timothy 3:16, “From childhood you've been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture,” pasa graphē “is breathed out by God, and that's what makes it useful, effective for teaching, reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.” And it transforms us into people who do every good work. It is the living word of God that brings us alive.  

By this definition, we can view the Decalogue as Israel's first scripture, an authoritative canonical text, not because the tablets of stone were breathed out by God, but the words on the tablets were spoken by God. First, they heard this at Mount Sinai and then He committed them to writing. So that the Decalogue – you call it Ten Commandments, I call it Decalogue. Here the Greeks got it right; decalogus means ten words. Now, of course, that doesn't mean ten little lexemes. It means ten statements, ten principles, in this case, ten statements concerning the covenant relationship. But the Decalogue was Israel's first scripture, as far as we know. And it was a short document.  

Deuteronomy 4:13. Moses refers to the original copies: [At Horeb He] declared to you His covenant, that is, He commanded you to put into practice the ten words, and He wrote them on two stone tablets. Now, this is this is not God merely inspiring a human author to write; God writes. And several times you have, He writes with his own finger. Now, does God have fingers? But of course, it's a metaphor, isn't it? But it is a divinely produced text.  

Now, in the book of Deuteronomy, we have to ask ourselves, apart from these tablets of stone written by the finger of God, what other sorts of scripture do we have? There is one other place where we have a reference to something like this, and that's 1 Chronicles 28, “David gave Solomon his son the plan of the vestibule of the temple, and of its houses, its treasuries, its upper rooms, its inner chambers… All this, [David said] all this He made clear to me in writing from the hand of Yahweh, all the work to be done according to the plan.” Did you know this was in the Bible? David got a written plan written by God's own finger for the temple. You thought it was David’s temple. No, it's not. It's God's temple. It's God's temple. And David received a written copy of how that thing was supposed to be built. That's the only other place where you have this notion. 

In Deuteronomy 10:4, Moses recognized the duplicate copies of the scripture in the same sense, He “wrote on the tablets,” you know, after Moses smashed them. Now we got to get new tablets. What are we going to do? “He wrote on the two tablets that Moses has brought up the mountain in the same text/script as before, the ten words that the Lord had spoken on the mountain.” So now we've got a duplicate copy of the original scripture. New copies and they're put into the ark of the Covenant. And “then I turned, came down the mountain and put the tablets in the ark. And there they are, just as the Lord commanded me.”  

When Moses recited the Decalogue in Deuteronomy 5, we'll hear this tomorrow, when he recited the Decalogue in front of the whole population, he wasn't reading off the stone tablets. No one has access to them. They're in the holy of holies in the ark of the Covenant, stuck there only for God to see. We'll talk about that some more later. He must have been reciting, and the differences between the Exodus version and the Deuteronomy version would reaffirm this. 

Well, God breathed. In the Decalogue He breathed by speaking. And then in a sense, He transcribed His own breath onto tablets of stone, and that produced these scriptures.  

Then in what sense is Deuteronomy scripture? Well, here we have to distinguish between the book as we have it, and the evidence we find in the book. Deuteronomy actually gives us more clues to how it was composed than any other book in the First Testament. It tells us more about how we got this Deuteronomy 31:9-13, and 24 is critical. We already read this. “Moses wrote this Torah and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who carried the ark of the Covenant and to the elders... At the end of every seven years, you are to read it in front of the people in their hearing, assemble them.” And then later on verse 24 and 27, “When Moses had finished writing the words of this Torah in a scroll to the very end, Moses commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant, ‘Take this scroll of the Torah, put it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord, your God, that it may be therefore a witness against you. Indeed, I know how rebellious and stubborn you are. Look, even today, while I am still alive with you, you've been rebellious against the Lord. How much more will this happen after I'm gone?’”  

And that's the thing that's hanging over his head. He said this is an iffy business here. So long as Moses has been there, he's been a restrainer on how people are behaving. And he's worried that as soon as I'm going to be gone, they'll go off the rails. Well, he gives them the Torah scroll to keep them on track so that his voice can continue to go with them wherever they go. 

Notice this Torah scroll is not put into the ark. It's beside the ark, which means it's in God's presence in a very real sense, so God is the guarantor of the document, and the Levites are the custodians of the document, but it has a different status than the Decalogue itself, because the Decalogue is inside the box and nobody ever opens that.  

But three details are clear. Moses transcribed the Torah he has been proclaiming. You know, it's different from some of us these days where you can't control what people are going to do with your words. When I am preaching, I write out my whole sermon in manuscript before I preach it, so I don't say something stupid that somebody else is going to.... They interpret the words I'm using in their own way, and then you lose control over what you've said and you say all kinds of offensive things. Well, Moses transcribed the Torah that he'd been proclaiming. He preached it first and then he wrote it. Rather than the reverse.  

Second, Moses recognized the Levitical priests as the custodians of the written document. He handed them to the priests and he tells them every seven years at the Festival of Booths, read this to the people. They are custodians and guardians.  

And three, the written document was recognized as canonical and authoritative from the beginning, Moses knew he was writing scripture. Did you get that? Paul is very conscious. Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, writing to the saints. He knows he is writing as the vassal, as the agent of God, the spokesperson for God. He is writing God's message to the churches. He is very conscious of his own inspiration. Moses is equally so. He knows he's writing. 

Moses prescribed it to be read regularly every seven years at the Festival of Sukkoth – Booths – in the assembly. That is scripture; it’s authoritative for everybody, so that within a person's own lifetime you would hear the whole Torah read at least seven times, as you come for covenant renewal worship.  

Second, Moses had the Levites place the Torah scroll next to the ark of the covenant, recognizing the One enthroned there to be a witness to the covenant to which the Israelites had bound themselves. Moses appealed to the heavens and the earth as witnesses. They heard what the people signed on to, and they also actually saw Moses writing this document, they’re witnesses. Moses declared the document itself to be a witness to the people's future performance.  

Other evidence of its canonical status. Moses invoked a curse on any who would add to the text or subtract from it. Here's chapter 4:2. He says, you know, he's still talking about what he's talking, not the written text, but he says to the people, You shall not add to the word that I command you nor take from it that you may keep the commands that Yahweh Your God I command you. That which I command you is the command of God. You do not have the right to add to it or subtract - everything. He says the same thing in 12:32. Every word that I command you., you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or subtract from it.  

Well, you've heard that before. Somewhere in the Bible. Of course, you have Revelation 22:18. I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them, God will add to them the plagues described. That is what we call the covenant curses. You don't tinker with God's text, with scripture.  

This is a very common ancient near Eastern practice where people will invoke oaths, curses on people who will tamper with their texts, plagiarize. And you know, what would happen is a king would encounter an inscription of his predecessor’s accomplishments. What he would do is chip away, cut out that guy's name, and insert his own. It's what they do.  

Here, Esarhaddon “Whoever changes, disregards, transgresses or erases the oaths of this tablet or disregards the treaty and transgresses its oath, may the guardians of this treaty tablet, Aššur, the king of the gods, and the great gods, and then after that, there's a whole bunch of curses. Damn you if you tinker with the text.  

Or the ending to the Erra Epic, a fascinating literary text. Kabti-ilani-Marduk, an eighth century BC scribe who takes credit for transcribing the Babylonian poem, at the end, he adds, “[some God] revealed it to him in the middle of the night, and when he recited it upon waking, he did not leave anything missing, nor add a single word to it.”  

You thought that inspiration was a uniquely biblical concept? It ain't. Other peoples had the notion of inspiration by which gods talked to people and told them what to say and write. So, inspiration is not uniquely biblical, the notion. But this text reminds us that this guy who wrote down the text claims to be absolutely true to what had been revealed to him; you don't tinker with it.  

Moses declared that the Torah was the key to life. We saw this before, but we'll come back to it. “The Lord commanded us to put into practice all these ordinances by fearing the Lord for our good always, to sustain our life.” This is the opposite of to kill us. The law kills the spirit makes alive. No. Here, he says, the Lord gave us these stipulations, ordinances that we might live. He's talking about scripture. This is canon, the formula for life. Read that they may hear, that they may learn, that they may fear, that they may obey, that they may live! This is an empowered text.  

But how did the Torah gain this life-giving power? How can he say this? There are a couple of clues. First, he talks about it in his own words. 1:3 The narrator says Moses spoke “to the Israelites, just as Yahweh had commanded him to speak.” So, the author recognizes Moses isn't speaking on his own. Somebody is giving him the words.  

4:5, now Moses is talking, “Look, I have taught you ordinances and stipulations as Yahweh my God commanded me that you may do them in the land that you're entering to possess.” What I am teaching you is what God has told me to teach you.  

A second clue to his sense of status as a prophet whom the Lord had raised up, “The Lord will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers,” this is chapter 18, “You must listen to him. This is what you requested from Yahweh your God at Horeb, on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let's not continue to hear the voice of the Lord our God or see this great fire any longer, or we die.’” This was their response, Stop it! Moses, you be the lightning rod. If we continue this, this direct encounter with God, we're all dead. You go do it. Let God talk to you. And the interesting thing is, in Deuteronomy, Moses, reports that the Lord said, you were right in that response.  

Then in verse 18, “I will raise up a prophet. I will put My words,” this is how prophecy works, “I will put my words in his mouth. He will tell them everything I command him.” That's what our prophet does. As Moses is speaking, it is God putting the words into his mouth. And what he wrote down later was what God told him to say. That makes it scripture.  

Clue number three. The Lord's earlier public installation of Moses as His mediator of revelation. Again, back to that event at Horeb, Sinai. “When you heard the voice from the midst of the darkness, while the mountain was ablaze with fire, all the leaders of your tribes and your elders approached me and you said, Look, Yahweh our God has shown us His glory and His greatness and His voice we have heard from the midst of the fire. Today we've seen that God speaks with human beings. But amazingly, we're still alive.’” How did that happen? We survived, but hey, we can't bank on it. If this continues, we're sure to be dead meat. Moses, you go talk to Him. “Why should we die? The great fire will consume us. If we continue to hear the voice of Yahweh our God, we will die. For who among all physical beings is there who's heard the voice of the living God speaking from the fire as we have and survived? So you go, you hear all the word, you hear everything that God says. Then you tell us everything that the Lord, our God tells you and we will hear and we will act, as you say.” So, they are accepting Moses’ reports of divine speech as God's speech to them, and that makes what He writes as scripture. God says, That's a good idea. And they operate under this new system.  

That was, incidentally, the moment of Moses’ prophetic installation. This is after he'd brought them out of Egypt to the point of getting to Sinai. Moses had not revealed much of what God was thinking to the people. He was the agent holding the staff when they crossed the Red Sea and they crossed right through the waters. He was there as God's agent of redemption, but he was not yet a prophetic spokesman. That happened at this moment.  

Well, but what was the Torah of which Moses spoke? It cannot have been the book of Deuteronomy. Now we're making very important distinctions. I said earlier on an evangelical hermeneutic doesn't let us make the scriptures say more than they do, but it forces us to listen to all that they actually say.  

Well, Moses didn't write the prologue, 1:1-5 He talks about Moses in the third person. Moses didn't write the epilogue, did he? I suppose God could have revealed how he would die to him and then he wrote it here. But that's not a necessary interpretation. In the ancient world, a document as authoritative as the written Torah of Moses, you could in fact attach introductions to it and conclusions to it, and they would be deemed as much part of the original text as the rest. And that's what happens here.  

But there are other instances, statements in the book of Deuteronomy that obviously cannot have been written by Moses. We call these Post-Mosaica; insertions after Moses. Look at 2:10-12. This is your favorite Bible verse, I'm sure. I've never heard a sermon on this text. “The Emites lived there formerly, a people as great, numerous and tall as the Anakites. Like the Anakites, they are also regarded as Rephaim, but the Moabites call them Emites. The Horites formerly lived in Seir, but the sons of Esau dispossessed them and destroyed them from before them and settled in their place.” But look at the last sentence I have italicized: “Just as Israel did to the land of their possession that the Lord gave them.” Really? What's the tense of the verbs? It's past tense. So, there are four or five of these parenthetical comments that somebody else inserted into Moses’ speech. And you can tell they're Post-Mosaica.  

Now, the author of the book is the one who put the book together as we have it. And so, I don't think Moses is the one to put the - my theory is when Joshua crossed the Jordan River, he had a briefcase with all sorts of files. And in this set of files, he had one file with Moses’ first address, another file with Moses’ second address, and Moses’ third and fourth addresses and a file perhaps for the song that you call the song of Moses. The Bible doesn't; it’s not the song of Moses. And then the benedictions, that's probably another file. I have a feeling that Joshua, crossed the river with a whole briefcase full of files. And these weren't the only ones. I think the Levites had been producing files all along. The records perhaps (Duane Garrett talks about this some) of the ancestors, the patriarchs may have been gathered by now. And we got files of those, too. 

But at some point, somebody put all of this together in a coherent book. I have no idea who; I have an idea of it; it's in soft lead pencil. I have a feeling it happened under David's watch when faith in Israel was at its high point and David received the revelation for temple worship. And David was writing all kinds of songs and spiritual hymns and whatever else. David was engaged in this, and I – this is speculation – my thinking is somebody under David during David's time, maybe into Solomon's time, somebody was gathering the scriptural texts that we recognize and making them into coherent documents. No idea. But that's the best we can do. The text doesn't say how the book of Deuteronomy was produced. It tells us how the sermons were committed to writing. But that's a different story. I mean, I've got baskets full of my sermon manuscripts, but they're all separate fragments. But, you know, and so that's as much as we can say about this.  

This was the document the king was to copy in the presence of the Levitical priests, chapter 17. We'll talk about this. “When the king sits on his throne, he shall not multiply horses, women and silver and gold for himself, for himself, for himself. But this is what he shall do for himself. He shall write a copy of this Torah in the presence of the Levitical priests.” Why in the presence of the Levitical priests? They're the custodians of the Torah. And they are the ones who will watch whether he adds or subtracts. So, he cannot decide what is scripture for him. The guardians are there. And so, he writes it. But this time it's for himself. The king does not make a copy of this to read to the people. This is important. The Levites will read it to the people. The individual Israelites will never have their own copies of the Bible. You can't produce scripture like this. They don't have printing presses and whatever else. And people probably aren't literate. But the assumption is the king has access to the Torah scroll, and he is to make himself a copy, and it is to be with him as his companion. All the days of his life he is to read it for himself. Very important because he is to view himself as the embodiment of what the scriptures teach. He doesn't read it to teach the people. He reads it to live it so that the people can say, I want to be like Mike. That's the ideal. That's the paradigm. I want to be exactly. And the king needs to know that his first obligation is to embody the covenant principles that God has established here. Levites read it for others. But the King reads it for himself.  

Now, minimally, this document will have contained the entire third address. But I think it also included the first address, the second address, the third address, and the fourth address. I think all of these were part of what Moses produced and left with Joshua. It's interesting when you get to the Book of Joshua, it opens with Moses, My servant is dead now. Then God has a commission for Joshua, and He says to Joshua, “This book of the Torah shall not depart from you all the days of your life. You shall meditate on it” and whatever else. At that point, Joshua is being cast in the role of the king. Joshua is not to read the Torah scroll for the people. He's to read it for himself so that Joshua, the leader, stays on track. And if Joshua is on track, then there's hope for the nation. So, it's a very personal thing at that point in fulfillment of this.  

And so, when Psalm 1, “Blessed is a man who walks not in the council of the wicked nor sits in the seat of the sinners, nor stands in the way of the scoffers, but his delight is in the Torah of the Lord,” that's not written to every Israelite. That is written to the king as the model Israelite. Bruce Waltke is very right in that the whole Psalter is a very royal document, and you get it right there. This guy is no ordinary citizen. He sits in the assembly and whatever else. It is a way of ensuring that the coming king is prepared spiritually, and he reads the Torah.  

And at this point, the Torah is not the Psalter. This is not instruction on how to read the Psalms. This is instruction on how to read Deuteronomy. This is important. If Deuteronomy is not our scripture, we have no business claiming the Psalter.  

I used to be a Gideon. I taught school for two years and there we could be Gideons. As soon as you're ordained and you're involved in a formal ministry, they take that away from you. But we used to give New Testaments with the Psalms and the Proverbs as appendices. That is so wrong; it is so wrong. If you're going to pick one text from the First Testament to put in there to be sure the people get it, it should be Deuteronomy. It's the only word that is declared to be scripture with instructions on how and when to use it. That's what should be there. We should start there. And this is why Deuteronomy is Jesus favorite book. He quotes more and alludes more often to the book of Deuteronomy than any other book. And so, this is what the kings were to rule by.  

Conclusions. This document of the Torah appears to have been a transcript of Moses’ farewell addresses, probably on separate scrolls. Later, Moses transcribed the “national anthem” of the Lord's people, chapter 32. It's called the Song of Moses. But in what sense is it the Song of Moses? Moses didn't compose Chapter 32. The Lord says to Moses and Joshua, come to the tent of meeting, and then He dictates to them the song. So, if anything, it's the Song of Yahweh because it's about His responses to Israel's future. So that's chapter three. But he commits it to writing, and then he teaches it to the people. And it probably included also the tribal benedictions, which appear at the end that he gives to the 12 tribes as he's (I think) as he's climbing the mountain for his demise. Usually, demise is thought of in terms of going down, but he's going up to Mount Nebo to be to die. God commands him go up to go up the mountain and die there. That's a strange command. But he goes up the mountain and as he's going up, I can imagine he is turning around and he sees the Israelites camped according to the tribal entities which is still in force at this point. And then he has a prayer of blessing for each of the tribes. And I'm assuming that somebody was there to pick that up with a mic and transcribe it into text and they're preserved.  

As a final stage of composition long after the death of Moses and after the Israelites have had considerable succession of prophets. Remember, at the end of the book, it says, “There's not been a prophet like this since Moses.” Well, that assumes that we've had a few prophets. In the Book of Judges, we’ve got some prophets. In the books of Samuel you have Samuel, you have Nathan, Gad, whatever. We've had a few prophets, but there's not been one like Moses. He's exceptional. It seems it's after that time.  

But who was this person? I don't know who put the book of Deuteronomy together. I am convinced that he is the same person who put the stories of the patriarchs together in Genesis. I have an essay on that, actually. And because when I read Genesis 11:26, the beginning of Abraham's story through 35, which is when they're headed for Egypt, there are echoes of Deuteronomy everywhere. And so, I think the author of the Book of Genesis, the patriarchal story, has already been steeped in the Torah of Moses. So that's what I see there.  

And of course, the only thing left in this whole production of Deuteronomy as scripture is its transmission as a complete book. But this is a matter now of copying the text and updating the text. When you look at the Hebrew of Deuteronomy, it's scarcely the Hebrew of 1300 BC. We have text from about that early, fragmentary texts. We have the poems in Deuteronomy, in which everybody recognizes archaic Hebrew language. Poetry is often in archaic speech. Chapter 32 and 33. Exodus 15 is archaic Hebrew language.  

In fact, the question is if Moses and Jeremiah had ever met, would they be able to have a conversation? I'd be surprised. Language changes. While the grammar may remain fairly static, but verbal speech? I mean, we lived for 10 months, well, two months we did German language school in Soest up in Saxony, which is where they speak what's the closest to official high German of the radio, up in Saxony. But then I was at the University of Erlangen in Bavaria, and when those Germans were talking German, I couldn't understand a thing they said. On paper it's the same. But the Bavarian dialect is so weird, so strange. They mispronounce or pronounce all sorts of things differently.  

Could Moses have had a conversation with Esther? Could he have talked to Hosea? They probably could have read his text, but I doubt. But the interesting thing is, when you read the Hebrew of Deuteronomy, the closest other text to the style of the Hebrew is Jeremiah, who is 600 BC. which is 800 years or 700 years after the life of Moses. What's happened? And Ken Kitchen, I think, is quite right when he says, we've been producing NLTs or NIVs all the way along. There's no point in having archaic texts, nobody speaks that way.  

The Bible was written in ordinary English; no, it was written in ordinary Hebrew at the time of its composition. God spoke at Sinai in language that people understood. But over time it changes and what somebody has been doing is tinkering with it. This is not adding or subtracting, it is making it alive, the new living, so that for every generation it rings true.  

Well, the book of Deuteronomy is the heart of the Pentateuch. This was the document David charged Solomon to read. This was the scroll that Josiah's men found in the temple about 622 BC. That was not the whole Pentateuch, that was Deuteronomy. This was a scroll of the Torah of Moses that Ezra read before the returned exiles Nehemiah 8:1. It's interesting in that one it's connected with a Festival of Booths, that event. And he read from 9:00 until noon, 3 hours. That's about how long it takes you to read Deuteronomy. But you can't read the whole Pentateuch in that time. No, I think that's what he was reading.  

At that point these were still separate scrolls. Yes, the text is a continuous narrative. But for the sake of convenience, we've got five scrolls. Interestingly, the Pentateuch, which means five books, one continuous document, so that the book of Leviticus is deliberately constructed at the beginning so that it follows Exodus and Exodus Genesis and all the way through. This is one continuous document, in fact, from Exodus 1 to the end of Deuteronomy, some people call this the biography of Moses. It is one continuous story, but it's on five scrolls because it's too big. You can't carry around a scroll that big.  

But the interesting thing is it consists of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers (Deuteronomy.) But what do they call it? They call it the Torah. Now, we would have expected them to call it Genesis, because in other instances you have collections of books named by the first book in the collection. So that Jesus talks about the Prophets and the Psalms, and the Torah. Psalms? Well, there is a certain canonical tradition where the Psalter is at the front end of that middle section of the Bible they call the writings. Well, there is a place in New Testament where a quotation is ascribed to Jeremiah, but comes from Zachariah. Well, there is a tradition, a canonical tradition, in which Jeremiah, because it's the biggest of the prophetic books in terms of word count probably, Jeremiah or my theory is because it is the most Deuteronomic. But then I'm biased in all of these things. Doug Moo says I see Deuteronomy everywhere, but in any case, I actually do.  

But this whole thing should be called Genesis. But it's not, it’s called Torah, but I think it's from the perspective of the guy. The most recent revelation from God, formal revelation, is in the form of the Torah, and this provides us the lens through which then we read everything as backstory to the Torah. So that's how I interpret it. The Pentateuch is the Torah.  

Now, when you get to the New Testament, you always have to ask yourself, what does nomos mean? Does nomos mean the Pentateuch? Does it mean Deuteronomy? Does it mean the actual speeches of Moses in Deuteronomy? Does it mean law in general? Does it mean a particular law? You always have to ask those questions. And this may help us.  

In short, this book provides the theological base for virtually the entire First and New Testament and the paradigm for much of its literary style. And we talk about the Deuteronomistic historiography in the Bible. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings. If you haven't read Deuteronomy, you don't get it. Because this is history written and interpreted through the lens of Moses. The author has been to seminary, where the textbook was Deuteronomy. And the prophets are that way; Jeremiah is so Deuteronomic. Hosea is so Deuteronomic. 

Well, may we in our day rediscover in the book of Deuteronomy, the divinely breathed, hence, living, and transforming scripture, of which the New Testament Moses, the Apostle Paul, spoke in 2 Timothy 3:16. May we find it to be a sure and effective instrument for teaching, reproof, correction, training in righteousness, equipping for every good work. 

And I think it's at this point, I should have put that slide of Jesus passing the scroll to Paul, because to Jesus, the scroll of Deuteronomy was the most important apparently. It's the base, it is the lens through which all of biblical revelation passes. All right. That's it for me.  

Student: Okay. I have a question. You made a comment as almost an aside, but I can hear people wincing. Let's say Psalm 1 is a royal psalm. Can we use it at a personal level as well? Not just for the king? 

Dr. Block: I am glad you asked that because the short answer to that is yes, because – and we'll talk about this when we get to chapter 17 in our discussion – the king is to be viewed as the ideal Israelite and the Levites are to be teaching the Torah to the people regularly. I think that's what the Levitical cities are about. It's to do the seminars for teaching them Torah so that just as the king is a model covenantly righteous person; the people are to find their inspiration in him.  

But the assumption cannot be that they had their own copies of the Torah. How would they know the Torah? They know the Torah by watching their King act, but they know the Torah also through the work of the Levites, whom God commissions as their teachers of Torah, chapter 33. That's very clear. So, yes, the King is to be the one in whose steps all the subjects should be walking. And so, it does apply to all of us, not because it is addressed to us, but the message that applies to the king applies to all of the king’s citizens. Yeah, good question.