Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
A Land That Drinks the Rain
Deuteronomy 11:1-32
1 Therefore you shall love Yahweh your God, and keep his instructions, his statutes, his ordinances, and his commandments, always. · WEB
The country ahead depends on weather rather than a river, and the choice between blessing and curse is set on two facing mountains.
The chapter opens by addressing the audience precisely: I don't speak with your children who have not known, and who have not seen Deuteronomy 11:2.
This is the generation that did see — the plagues, the sea closing over the chariots, and the ground opening under Dathan and Abiram Deuteronomy 11:4–6. They are being told to act on evidence they possess personally, and the next generation will have to be taught. That is why the teaching instructions are repeated here almost verbatim from chapter 6 Deuteronomy 11:18–20.
Then the description of the land, and it is the hinge of the book's theology of dependence.
Egypt was a country where you sowed your seed and watered it with your foot, as a garden of herbs Deuteronomy 11:10 — irrigation worked by hand or by pedal from a river that arrived on schedule whether anyone prayed or not.
The land ahead is different: a land of hills and valleys which drinks water from the rain of the sky, a land which Yahweh your God cares for. Yahweh your God's eyes are always on it, from the beginning of the year even to the end of the year Deuteronomy 11:11–12.
Water there is weather, and weather cannot be engineered. A farmer in that country looks up rather than upstream, twice a year, and has no fallback. The dependence the whole book is asking for is built into the terrain, and the promise attached is exactly that: I will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the latter rain Deuteronomy 11:14.
So the country itself is part of the arrangement. They are being moved from a place where the water was reliable and the God was not theirs, to a place where the water depends on the God who is.
The promises that follow are territorial and generous — every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours Deuteronomy 11:24 — and the same phrase is given to Joshua when the crossing finally comes Joshua 1:3.
The chapter ends by making the whole thing a choice, and putting it somewhere visible.
Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse Deuteronomy 11:26 — the blessing for listening, the curse for turning away. And then the instruction that turns a sermon into a ceremony: you shall set the blessing on Mount Gerizim, and the curse on Mount Ebal Deuteronomy 11:29.
Two real mountains facing each other across a valley, in the middle of the country they are about to enter. The choice is not left as an idea. It is assigned to geography, and the ceremony is carried out later exactly as described Joshua 8:33.
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