He Will Circumcise Your Heart
1 It shall happen, when all these things have come on you, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before you, and you shall call them to mind among all the nations where Yahweh your God has driven you, 2 and return to Yahweh your God and obey his voice according to all that I command you today, you and your children, with all your heart and with all your soul, 3 that then Yahweh your God will release you from captivity, have compassion on you, and will return and gather you from all the peoples where Yahweh your God has scattered you. 4 If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of the heavens, from there Yahweh your God will gather you, and from there he will bring you back. 5 Yahweh your God will bring you into the land which your fathers possessed, and you will possess it. He will do you good, and increase your numbers more than your fathers. 6 Yahweh your God will circumcise your heart, and the heart of your offspring, to love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live. 7 Yahweh your God will put all these curses on your enemies and on those who hate you, who persecuted you. 8 You shall return and obey Yahweh’s voice, and do all his commandments which I command you today. 9 Yahweh your God will make you prosperous in all the work of your hand, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your ground, for good; for Yahweh will again rejoice over you for good, as he rejoiced over your fathers, 10 if you will obey Yahweh your God’s voice, to keep his commandments and his statutes which are written in this book of the law, if you turn to Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
Restoration is promised on the far side of the curse, and the thing God asked for at the start he now undertakes to do himself.
The chapter begins after the disaster. When all these things have come on you, the blessing and the curse Deuteronomy 30:1 — not if. The scattering described at such length in the previous chapter is treated as something that will happen, and this chapter is about what comes next.
The turn begins in the mind. They shall call them to mind among all the nations where Yahweh your God has driven you, and then return Deuteronomy 30:1–2. Remembering comes first, in exile, and the same sequence was promised in the first address: from there you shall seek Yahweh your God Deuteronomy 4:29.
What God does in response is stated in a run of verbs. Release, have compassion, return, gather Deuteronomy 30:3. And the reach of the gathering is pushed to the limit of language: if your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of the heavens, from there Yahweh your God will gather you Deuteronomy 30:4.
No distance is offered as an obstacle. The one thing that could keep a scattered people scattered is named and dismissed.
Then verse 6, which is the most important sentence in the book after the Shema.
Yahweh your God will circumcise your heart, and the heart of your offspring, to love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.
Twenty chapters earlier the people were told to do this themselves: circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart Deuteronomy 10:16. Here God says he will do it.
That is the answer to the problem the book has been unable to solve. He wished for such a heart at the mountain and would not compel it Deuteronomy 5:29. He observed that they had not been given a heart to know Deuteronomy 29:4. Now he undertakes the operation, on them and on their children, and the stated purpose is love — the very thing that cannot be produced by command.
So the book asks for something, watches it fail, and promises to supply it. The prophets take up the same undertaking in the same terms, with a new heart and a new spirit given rather than demanded Jeremiah 31:33 Ezekiel 36:26.
What follows is prosperity again — work, children, livestock, ground — with a phrase about God's own reaction: Yahweh will again rejoice over you for good, as he rejoiced over your fathers Deuteronomy 30:9.
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