The Song: Jeshurun Grew Fat
15 But Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked. You have grown fat. You have grown thick. You have become sleek. Then he abandoned God who made him, and rejected the Rock of his salvation. 16 They moved him to jealousy with strange gods. They provoked him to anger with abominations. 17 They sacrificed to demons, not God, to gods that they didn’t know, to new gods that came up recently, which your fathers didn’t dread. 18 Of the Rock who became your father, you are unmindful, and have forgotten God who gave you birth. 19 Yahweh saw and abhorred, because of the provocation of his sons and his daughters. 20 He said, “I will hide my face from them. I will see what their end will be; for they are a very perverse generation, children in whom is no faithfulness. 21 They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God. They have provoked me to anger with their vanities. I will move them to jealousy with those who are not a people. I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation. 22 For a fire is kindled in my anger, that burns to the lowest Sheol, devours the earth with its increase, and sets the foundations of the mountains on fire. 23 “I will heap evils on them. I will spend my arrows on them. 24 They shall be wasted with hunger, and devoured with burning heat and bitter destruction. I will send the teeth of animals on them, with the venom of vipers that glide in the dust. 25 Outside the sword will bereave, and in the rooms, terror on both young man and virgin, the nursing infant with the gray-haired man. 26 I said that I would scatter them afar. I would make their memory to cease from among men; 27 were it not that I feared the provocation of the enemy, lest their adversaries should judge wrongly, lest they should say, ‘Our hand is exalted; Yahweh has not done all this.’”
Prosperity is named as the cause of the apostasy, and the judgment is limited by what the enemy would conclude from it.
The turn comes in a single line, and the name used is affectionate. Jeshurun means something like the upright one, and it is a pet name for Israel.
But Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked. You have grown fat. You have grown thick. You have become sleek. Then he abandoned God who made him, and rejected the Rock of his salvation.
The image is a well-fed animal that will no longer take direction. Three clauses describe the feeding and one describes the result, and the sequence is the one the book has warned about since chapter 6 — not persecution but plenty Deuteronomy 8:12–14.
What they turned to is described with a phrase worth pausing on: new gods that came up recently, which your fathers didn't dread Deuteronomy 32:17. The attraction is novelty. A god nobody has heard of has no record of disappointing anyone, and that is precisely its appeal.
Against it the song sets the oldest thing available: the Rock who became your father Deuteronomy 32:18, and the charge is forgetting.
The judgment announced is a withdrawal rather than an attack: I will hide my face from them. I will see what their end will be Deuteronomy 32:20. God steps back and lets the situation develop.
Then a piece of exact reciprocity: they have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God... I will move them to jealousy with those who are not a people Deuteronomy 32:21.
They preferred a non-god; they will watch God take up a non-people. Paul quotes that verse as an explanation of the Gentiles being brought in Romans 10:19, which is where the reciprocity finally lands.
The disasters listed are severe Deuteronomy 32:23–25, and then the song does something unexpected. It stops, and says why it stops.
26 I said that I would scatter them afar. I would make their memory to cease from among men; 27 were it not that I feared the provocation of the enemy, lest their adversaries should judge wrongly, lest they should say, ‘Our hand is exalted; Yahweh has not done all this.’”
The judgment is limited, and the limit is set by what onlookers would conclude. If Israel were erased, the nations would credit their own strength, and a lie about God would be established by the evidence.
So the survival of a people who deserved to be scattered rests on God's concern for how he is understood. That is the same argument Moses made when he prayed on the mountain Deuteronomy 9:28 — and here God makes it himself.
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