Prophecy in Deuteronomy

“Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone! Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.”

Reading

Strictly this is a commandment, not a prophecy, and it stands first on this page because Jesus puts it first. Asked which commandment is greatest, he answers with these words, to love God “with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30), and joins to it love of neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). The Catechism opens its teaching on the First Commandment the same way (CCC 2083). Deuteronomy itself turns the command into a promise: in 30:6 God says he will circumcise the heart “so that you will love the LORD, your God, with your whole heart and your whole being.”

Fulfilled

Jesus is the one who loved the Father with his whole heart, being and strength, to the Cross.

Unfolding

What the Law could only command, the Spirit gives: the love of God poured into our hearts (Romans 5:5).

God fed Israel with manna in the wilderness to teach them “it is not by bread alone that people live, but by all that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD.”

Reading

Israel was tested forty years in the desert and fed by God. Jesus, led into the desert for forty days, relives that testing and passes it where Israel failed. To the first temptation he answers with this verse: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). His other two answers also come from Deuteronomy (6:16; 6:13).

Fulfilled

The manna points beyond itself. Jesus says “it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven” (John 6:32), and gives himself as the bread of life in the Eucharist.

“A prophet like me will the LORD, your God, raise up for you from among your own kindred; that is the one to whom you shall listen.”

Reading

God promises to “put my words into the mouth of the prophet” (18:18). The book's last chapter adds that “no prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face” (34:10), so Israel kept waiting. By Jesus' time “the Prophet” was an expected figure: the priests ask John the Baptist, “Are you the Prophet?” (John 1:21), and after the loaves the crowd says of Jesus, “This is truly the Prophet, the one who is to come into the world” (John 6:14).

Fulfilled

St. Peter, preaching in the Temple, applies the promise to Jesus: “to him you shall listen in all that he may say to you” (Acts 3:22–23; see also Acts 7:37). At the Transfiguration the Father's voice echoes Moses' words: “listen to him” (Matthew 17:5). Jesus himself says of Moses, “he wrote about me” (John 5:46). He is the prophet like Moses and more: not only the one who speaks God's word, but the Word.

The body of an executed man hanged on a tree must be buried the same day, for “anyone who is hanged is a curse of God.”

Reading

A law about the dead, not a prediction. But the apostles preached Christ as the one put to death “hanging him on a tree” (Acts 5:30; 10:39), and St. Paul sees the deepest meaning of this verse in the Cross: “Christ ransomed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree’” (Galatians 3:13). Paul quotes the verse freely, close to the Greek Old Testament, which is why the wording differs from the NABRE of Deuteronomy.

Fulfilled

The one who bore the curse takes it away. Jesus was taken down and buried before the Sabbath, the same day, as this law required (John 19:31, 38–42), and Revelation sees the end of all curse: “Nothing accursed will be found there anymore” (Revelation 22:3).

Blessing for obedience, curse for unfaithfulness; at the last, “The LORD will scatter you among all the peoples.”

Reading

The chapter sets out the covenant's two outcomes. Its longest section warns of siege, defeat and dispersion among the nations (28:15–68). Israel's later history bears it out: the fall of the northern kingdom to Assyria and the exile of Judah to Babylon (2 Kings 17; 25).

Fulfilled

Scholars differ on how much of the chapter was written before the exile and how much was shaped by it. Either way, the Church reads it as God's word to his people: a warning given in love, like the prophets' warnings, so that they would turn back. And the curse is not the last word. Two chapters later, after exile, comes return (30:1–6).

“The LORD, your God, will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you will love the LORD, your God, with your whole heart and your whole being, in order that you may live.” (30:6)

Reading

When the scattered people return to God, “the LORD, your God, will restore your fortunes” and gather them again (30:3). Then God himself will do what the Law could not: change the heart. Jeremiah carries the same promise into the new covenant: “I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33), and Ezekiel promises a new heart and a new spirit (Ezekiel 36:26).

Fulfilled

The return from Babylon fulfilled the first part. St. Paul sees the second fulfilled in Christ: “circumcision is of the heart, in the spirit, not the letter” (Romans 2:29); in Baptism we receive a circumcision “not administered by hand” (Colossians 2:11–12).

Unfolding

God is still gathering his people from every nation and still writing his law on hearts, one life at a time.

“No, it is something very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.” (30:14)

Reading

Moses tells Israel that God's command is “not too wondrous or remote” (30:11): no one need go up to the heavens or cross the sea to fetch it. God has brought his word close.

Fulfilled

St. Paul reads these verses of Christ (Romans 10:6–8). No one needs to climb to heaven to bring Christ down, or descend to the abyss to bring him up from the dead: he has come and he is risen. “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart,” Paul says, “that is, the word of faith that we preach.” The nearness Moses promised is the Word made flesh.

“The Rock—how faultless are his deeds, how right all his ways!” (32:4) … “Exult with him, you heavens, bow to him, all you divine beings!” (32:43)

Reading

Moses' song tells the whole story of the covenant: God's faithfulness, Israel's unfaithfulness, judgment, and in the end God's vindication of his people. The New Testament draws on it often. St. Paul hears in 32:21, “with a foolish nation I will provoke them,” the call of the Gentiles (Romans 10:19), and quotes “Vengeance is mine” (32:35) to teach Christians to leave judgment to God (Romans 12:19; Hebrews 10:30).

Fulfilled

Hebrews 1:6 says that when God brings the first-born into the world, “Let all the angels of God worship him.” The words come from the longer Greek text of 32:43 (a Hebrew manuscript from Qumran has a similar line). The NABRE follows a shorter Hebrew text, so the line is not in its translation of Deuteronomy, though its “divine beings” are the same heavenly host. Hebrews reads the song's call to worship as fulfilled in the Son.

Future

Those who have conquered the beast stand by the sea of glass and sing “the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb” (Revelation 15:3). As Israel sang after crossing the sea (Exodus 15), the redeemed sing at the end, and the song is now one song with the Lamb's.

“I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross over.” (34:4)

Reading

From Mount Nebo God shows Moses the whole land promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Moses dies there, outside it. It is not Moses but Joshua who leads the people across the Jordan. Joshua's name in Hebrew is the same as Jesus' name, and the Fathers, Origen in his Homilies on Joshua above all, saw in this a figure: the Law brings us to the edge of the promise, and Jesus brings us in.

Fulfilled

Moses does enter the land at last. On the mountain of the Transfiguration, “Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him” (Matthew 17:3), and they spoke “of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31). The Catechism notes that Moses and Elijah had seen God's glory on the mountain, and that the Law and the Prophets had announced the Messiah's sufferings (CCC 555). The man who saw the land from afar now sees the face of the One it promised.