Deuteronomy 33:26

FINAL HYMN OF PRAISE (Deuteronomy 33:26-29)

"There is none like unto God, O Jeshurun,

Who rideth upon the heavens for thy help,

And in his excellency on the skies.

The eternal God is thy dwelling place,

And underneath are the everlasting arms,

And he thrust out the enemy from before thee,

And said, Destroy.

And Israel dwelleth in safety,

The fountain of Jacob alone,

In a land of grain and new wine;

Yes, his heavens drop down dew.

Happy art thou, O Israel:

Who is like unto thee, a people saved by Jehovah,

The shield of thy help,

And the sword of thy excellency!

And thy enemies shall submit themselves unto thee;

And thou shalt tread upon their high places."

The generality of the language continues here to the very end of the chapter. Scholars who think they find a historical situation depicted here, namely, a secure Israel dwelling in the land of CANAAN, and all the enemies already driven out, are simply "finding" what is NOT in the passage at all! Blair, of course, postulated his theory of a later date for Deuteronomy on "such facts" suggested here, giving as one of his principal reasons WHY this will and testament came later than Moses, "this allusion to the conquest of Palestine as already past (Deuteronomy 33:27-28)."[21] No! The situation here is "ideal" in every way; and Moses was here thanking God for an ideal state of affairs which never, in actually, came to pass at all. Jacob never dwelt alone in Canaan. The enemy was never driven out completely. Israel never, at any period of her history, really "dwelt safely." Moses was here thanking God for the "potential achievement" of such a blessed state in Canaan, which God indeed had given to Israel, but which, due to their sins and failures, they never realized at all!

That the above practical interpretations of what is written here is correct is strongly indicated by the fact that Unger and many other scholars take all this as prophetic of the times of the millennium![22] We take these intimations of ideal conditions to be neither an indication of what happened to Israel, nor what is scheduled for some distant millennium, but as a prophecy of what was intended to happen in Canaan upon Israel's entry, and further on in history, a prophecy of the ideal state of affairs in the New Israel of God (the church), and, although the church's partial fulfillment of this may indeed be understood as exceeding any achievements of the old Israel, even in the case of the church it is still unrealized in any complete sense.

These special blessings upon the Twelve Tribes were spoken by Moses, "on the same day as the song in the preceding chapter,"[23] and to the same assembly upon the same occasion. This happened just before Moses ascended mount Nebo, where he would survey the land of Canaan and then die. The blessings recorded in this chapter are in several ways a counterpart of the song in the preceding chapter. The song dealt largely, almost exclusively, with the curses and calamities that would befall Israel in their disobedience, but here in the blessings, all that is ignored. There is a presumption of their perfect obedience and a heartfelt hymn of praise to God for what a wonderful privilege he has brought to Israel. Here in contrast we have the two sides of Israel's fortunes, the bright side, and the dark side. The tone of the song is somber, dismal, and threatening; the tone of these blessings is "serene and cheerful."[24]

Before concluding our comment on this chapter, there is one more quotation which we feel compelled to notice. Von Rad declared that the blessing of Moses is more religious than that of Jacob in Genesis 49, and, despite the fact that we do not understand upon what grounds Von Rad made a deduction like that, we are still reluctant to find any fault with it. However, he added, regarding the blessing of Jacob, that, "In the sayings in the Blessing of Jacob the name Yahweh did not occur at all."[25] Nevertheless, the name Jehovah (Yahweh) occurs in Genesis 49:18, and in Genesis 49:24-25 one finds no less than five names of God! These are The Mighty One of Jacob, The Shepherd, The Stone of Israel, The God of Thy Father, and The Almighty.