You Forgot the God Who Gave You Birth

Plains of Moab

Plains of Moab

What to Watch For

Moses composes this Song before Israel has done anything that requires it. God tells him to write the Song down and teach it to the people so that it will testify against them, and Moses adds his own forecast a few verses later: after his death the people will act corruptly and turn aside from the way he commanded. The Song is therefore testimony drafted for a trial whose crime has not yet been committed, by an author who expects to be absent when it is read.

The scroll announces the change of mode before the first word is read. Prose fills a Torah scroll in continuous columns, and the Song is set in verse form, each line divided into two blocks with a gap between them, so that a reader can see at a glance that the text has become song. The poem runs on parallelism, compressed imagery, and wordplay, and the images it chooses carry theology that a prose summary would flatten: the Rock, the eagle, a people growing fat, fire, arrows, the sword, and finally healing. Moses builds it to be recited and remembered, because the danger the Song anticipates is forgetting.

The command that organizes the poem arrives in its seventh verse: “Remember the days of old, consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you; your elders, and they will tell you.” (Deut 32:7) The Hebrew verb is zekhor, and English “remember” names an event inside a mind while the Hebrew names an act with consequences. When the text says God remembered Noah, the waters begin to recede, and when it says God remembered the covenant, rescue begins. The Song’s command asks Israel to act on what it knows, and the verse names the means: living fathers and elders who pass the story on by speaking it.

The one Israel is told to remember carries a title that English has worn smooth. Tzur, “Rock,” names the cliff face where a fugitive shelters, and the Song deploys it in the vocabulary of refuge; in English the word has hardened into an image of solidity and lost the sense of running toward something for safety. The title also organizes the Song’s central contest, because the nations have rocks of their own and the poem insists that their rock cannot compare with Israel’s. The image extends into the womb: “You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.” (Deut 32:18) The verb in the second line is the Hebrew verb for the pains of labor, a detail the English “gave you birth” smooths into a single event, and Isaiah joins the same two images when it tells its hearers to look to the rock from which they were hewn and to Sarah who bore them. The Song fuses refuge and travail, two pictures English readers keep apart, and charges Israel with forgetting both at once.

The Song opens its case with two claims about the Rock: his work is perfect, and all his ways are just. The word behind “just” is mishpat, which names right order, the structure by which a world holds together, and reaches beyond the verdict a court delivers. To say that all God’s ways are mishpat is to say that provision, correction, and judgment operate inside one order, and the violence in the Song’s later verses has to be read inside that claim. Against the Rock’s wholeness the poem sets a verb, shiḥet, “acted corruptly.” It is the root the flood story applies to a world filled with violence, and English versions that translate the verse with “dealt falsely” lose the link to the flood. The verse is difficult in Hebrew, and the flood root nonetheless carries the Song’s account of moral evil: corruption begins with the creatures, who receive a whole work and spoil it, and no defect enters through the Rock’s hand. The Song limits itself to that one claim about evil, and the claim governs everything the poem says about guilt.

Moses then lays out the road a people takes to corruption, and no step on it is dramatic. God finds Israel in a howling wilderness and carries it as an eagle carries its young, sets it on the heights, and feeds it honey from the crags and oil from flinty rock, where the word for rock is the Song’s word for God. Abundance follows, and with it the poem’s turning point: Jeshurun grew fat and kicked. Jeshurun is a poetic name for Israel built on the Hebrew word for “upright,” an honorific whose irony the verse exploits, since the upright one has become a well-fed animal kicking against its keeper. Fullness produces self-sufficiency, self-sufficiency produces forgetting, and forgetting leaves the ground open for the next arrival.

That arrival is described with a deliberate contrast. Israel has been told to consult the days of old, and it sacrifices instead to gods that are brand new: “They sacrificed to demons, not God, to deities they had never known, to new ones recently arrived, whom your ancestors had not feared.” (Deut 32:17) Rabbinic readers pressed the word “new” hard: these gods are so recent that even the surrounding nations do not know them, and a foreigner who saw one would call it a Jewish idol. The word rendered “demons” is shedim, and the English carries a later Greek category of malevolent spirit that the Hebrew does not. Shedim appears only here and once in the Psalms, and Jeffrey Tigay connects it to the Akkadian šēdu, a guardian spirit of house and palace. Israel is sacrificing to the protective powers of its neighbors, and the verdict of “not God” leaves the loyalty behind those sacrifices fully real.

The judgment that follows can sound like the reaction of an injured deity: Israel worships another god, God is jealous, and offended honor demands punishment. Deuteronomy supplies its own answer to that reading, and the answer concerns what worship makes of the worshiper. Israel is warned against asking how the nations serve their gods, because their service includes burning sons and daughters in the fire. One psalm tells the story in retrospect: Israel mingled with the nations, learned their practices, served their idols, and sacrificed its sons and daughters to the shedim, shedding innocent blood until the land was polluted. The psalm uses the Song’s own rare word for the recipients, and its retelling shows the Song’s concern with formation. A people takes on the moral shape of what it worships, and the jealousy the Song attributes to God answers the ruin of that people, with the injury to divine honor the smaller matter. The question Deuteronomy poses to idolaters concerns what their worship is making of them.

The warrior imagery of the Song’s last movement is terrifying by design, with a sword whetted and arrows made drunk with blood, and the poem shows no interest in softening it. Poetry states moral reality in compressed pictures meant to be felt and repeated, and the poem that draws the sword also gives the reader a fattened animal kicking at its keeper and a parent in labor. The judgment reaches past Israel as well. God holds back from erasing Israel because the enemy would credit its own strength and announce that its hand had triumphed, and the Song closes by promising vengeance on the adversaries who shed the blood of God’s children. The nations that oppress Israel and take the credit for it are answerable too, so the poem pictures a world in which bloodshed does not go unanswered indefinitely.

At the center of the terror stands the claim that unsettles any reading of the Song that finds only wrath: “See now that I, even I, am he; there is no god besides me. I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand.” (Deut 32:39) The verbs come in pairs, and in each pair the second reverses the first. The warrior and the healer are one speaker, and the wound is a stage on the way to restoration, the direction the Song’s final verse takes when it ends with the land cleansed for its people.

The reading closes with a detail that turns the Song back on its teacher. Moses speaks all of its words to the people with Joshua beside him and tells them the words are their very life, and on that same day God commands him to climb Mount Nebo, look across the Jordan at the land, and die there, because he and Aaron broke faith at the waters of Meribath-kadesh. The man who taught Israel to remember stands under the same mishpat the Song proclaims, and the reading offers its author no exemption.

What to Watch For

The woman of chapter 12 flees into the wilderness from a dragon, and the text gives her the wings of the great eagle so that she can reach the place prepared for her, where she is fed for a time, and times, and half a time. Wilderness and eagle belong to the Song of Moses, in which God finds Israel in a howling wilderness and bears it on eagle’s pinions, and John lets them return at the moment his figure of Israel’s future needs the same protection. The woman carries several identities at once: she wears a crown of twelve stars, the number of Israel’s tribes; she is in labor with a child destined to rule the nations in the words of a psalm; and she stands opposite the serpent in a pairing Genesis had already drawn. None of these readings excludes the others.

The dragon has seven heads and ten horns, and the seven heads belong to a creature older than the book. In the Baal Cycle from Ugarit the storm god defeats the sea and a seven-headed serpent named Lotan, and John Day has shown how Israel took that pattern into its own poetry and gave the victory to the Lord: one psalm has God crush the heads of the sea monsters and of Leviathan, and Isaiah promises that the Lord will punish Leviathan, the twisting serpent, and slay the dragon of the sea. Revelation then joins the sea monster to the garden by naming the dragon the ancient serpent. Adela Yarbro Collins demonstrated that the sequence of woman, dragon, and child belongs to a combat myth told across the ancient Mediterranean, and John’s telling gives it an Israelite cast: Michael leads the fight, and the accuser of the people is thrown down.

How the dragon is defeated separates Revelation from the war literature closest to it in time. In Geza Vermes’s translation, the War Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, drills the sons of light for battle against the sons of darkness with trumpets, banners, priests, and weapons, and looks for angelic help. In Revelation the people win by another instrument: “But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death.” (Rev 12:11) The conquerors prevail by what they say and what they endure. The Song of Moses was commissioned to testify against a betrayal that had not yet occurred, and in Revelation testimony becomes the instrument of victory.

Chapter 13 supplies the dragon with two agents. The first rises from the sea with seven heads and ten horns, in the manner of the beasts of Daniel’s vision, and receives authority over every tribe, people, language, and nation. The Song of Moses has a view of how the nations are organized: in the form the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve, the Most High fixes their boundaries according to the number of the gods, so that other powers govern the peoples while Israel belongs to the Lord. John’s beast claims authority over all the peoples, which the Song keeps in the hand of the Most High, and the crowds ask a question that reverses Israel’s own: Israel asked who is like the Lord among the gods, and the crowds now ask who is like the beast.

For the congregations John addresses in Ephesus and the other cities of Asia, the loyalty the beast demands took concrete forms. Steven Friesen’s study of the Flavian imperial cult at Ephesus shows the emperors’ worship woven into the festivals and civic offices of Asia’s cities, and trade associations held banquets that opened with offerings to the gods. Against that background the beast’s mark on the right hand or the forehead, without which no one can buy or sell, names an economic exclusion that members of a small movement could recognize from their own streets. Readers who know the Torah hear a second layer, since Deuteronomy commands Israel to bind the words of its central commandment on the hand and fix them on the forehead, and Revelation sets the beast’s mark on those same two places while the followers of the Lamb carry a name on the forehead. The body becomes the place where allegiance is displayed, and the Song of Moses had already asked what worship makes of a people.

Chapter 14 answers the marked with 144,000 who stand with the Lamb on Mount Zion, and its second half turns to a harvest of grapes. The earth’s vine is gathered and thrown into the great winepress of God’s wrath, and blood flows from the press to the height of a horse’s bridle. The image has a source in the Song: Moses traces the enemy’s vine to the vineyards of Sodom, where the grapes turn poisonous and the clusters bitter, and the verses that follow store up vengeance for the time when the enemy’s foot slips. John gathers that vine and presses it.

The hinge sits in chapter 15. Those who have conquered the beast stand beside a sea of glass mixed with fire and sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb. John does not say which song of Moses he means. The sea and the victors on its shore recall the Song at the Sea that Israel sang after crossing the Red Sea, and the plagues about to fall on the beast’s realm complete an Exodus frame. The hymn’s own words draw on the Song of Deuteronomy as well, since it declares God’s ways just and true, an echo of the Rock whose ways are all just. A text can hold both, and the double reference joins the two songs that open and close Moses’ career: the song of rescue at the sea and the song of testimony at the edge of the land.

The hymn ends by predicting that all nations will come and worship, and Richard Bauckham finds in that line the goal of the judgments that follow. The traditional Hebrew text of the Song’s last verse ends with a summons to the nations to rejoice with God’s people, a line Paul quotes, so the Song’s last verse and Revelation’s hymn point toward the same gathering.

The bowls that follow take their plagues from Exodus: sores, water turned to blood, darkness, frogs, and hail. Twice the text reports that people refuse to repent, which recalls Pharaoh’s hardened heart. When the water turns to blood, the angel of the waters answers in the language of the Song: you are just, for those who shed the blood of saints and prophets have been given blood to drink. The reply follows the logic of the Song’s last verse, where God avenges the blood of his children.

Chapter 16 then gathers the kings of the whole world at a place the text says is called Armageddon in Hebrew, a name that means the mountain of Megiddo. Megiddo overlooks the plain where Israel’s earlier wars were fought and sung: Deborah’s victory song places the kings of Canaan at the waters of Megiddo, and King Josiah died there in battle. Israel’s history of war and lament is stored in the name. The battle itself does not take place in chapter 16, where the seventh bowl brings a voice announcing that it is done and the fighting waits for a later chapter.

Faced with an empire that formed its subjects through coin, festival, and image, John reaches backward for the oldest words available: wilderness and eagle, serpent and sea, plagues, and a song at the edge of a land. Moses is told that the Song will remain in the mouths of Israel’s descendants, and chapter 15 pictures it sung by people standing at a sea of glass with an empire behind them. In both texts the defense against being formed by the newest power that demands allegiance is the same: to keep the oldest words in the mouth.