Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
When Your Son Asks
Deuteronomy 6:10-25
10 It shall be, when Yahweh your God brings you into the land which he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you, great and goodly cities which you didn’t build, · WEB
The danger named is prosperity handed over ready-made, and the answer prescribed for a child's question is a story rather than a rule.
The warning is built out of four things they will receive without working for them: great and goodly cities which you didn't build, and houses full of all good things which you didn't fill, and cisterns dug out which you didn't dig, vineyards and olive trees which you didn't plant Deuteronomy 6:10–11.
Each clause names the labor somebody else did. Cisterns are the sharpest of them — years of cutting rock, in a country where water is the difference between a settlement and a ruin — and they will inherit them finished.
Then: you shall eat and be full; then beware lest you forget Deuteronomy 6:11–12.
The hazard is fullness. Not idolatry first, not persecution, not poverty — being satisfied, in property one did not earn, and losing the memory of how it was acquired. Everything the book fears comes through that door, and it says so again two chapters later Deuteronomy 8:12–14.
One prohibition in the middle is worth stopping on: you shall not tempt Yahweh your God, as you tempted him in Massah Deuteronomy 6:16. The reference is to demanding proof — water on demand, with the question whether God was among them or not. It is the verse the Lord quotes in the wilderness when he is invited to throw himself down Matthew 4:7, and its subject is testing God to see whether he will perform.
The last section is a set of instructions for answering a child, and its shape is the point.
The question is technical: what do the testimonies, the statutes, and the ordinances... mean? Deuteronomy 6:20. A child raised in a household that talks about the law all day is going to ask why any of it is there.
And the answer prescribed is not a definition. We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt. Yahweh brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand Deuteronomy 6:21.
The reply to a question about rules is a story about a rescue. It moves through the signs, the exodus, and the purpose — he brought us out from there, that he might bring us in Deuteronomy 6:23 — and only then reaches the commandments, which arrive at the end as the consequence rather than the subject.
The motive given for keeping them is stated twice and both times it is the people's own good: for our good always, that he might preserve us alive Deuteronomy 6:24.
And note who is speaking. The parent says we were Pharaoh's slaves, though the parent was a child in the wilderness and never saw Egypt. The book's method again: the story is told in the first person by whoever is telling it.
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