Song of Moses

Uh, Deuteronomy 32 is one of them.

That's the Song of Moses, uh, a, a song that the people actually had to memorize.

God made them learn it.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So a couple of passages, uh, 1 Thessalonians 4:6.

Paul warns Christians not to wrong their brothers, because if, if you do that, you will find that the Lord is an avenger in such cases.

And, and the other one is Romans 12, where Paul writes, "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' says the Lord," quoting from Deuteronomy 32, the Song of Moses again.

Hmm.

And then it goes on to talk of... show in chapter 15 right after this, this beautiful crystal sea with stringed instruments being played by those who had victory over the beast through dying.

And they sing of the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb.

Song of Moses was a song that was given to Israel when they had left Egypt and crossed the Red Sea, and then they proclaimed God's victory.

The Antichrist or Pharaoh was a picture of Antichrist.

We'll sing, if you persevere in your faith, the song of Moses should we go through that time, and, and, and you'll sing the song of the Lamb.

There'll be another song where we're rejoicing in Christ.

Amen? Amen.

The Bible's full of times where songs or some kind of a music form or some way something was put to music deliberately to be used as teaching and memory tools.

Because in the song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32, God explicitly tells Moses to write a song.

And in verse 4, actually, I'm going to go there.

Let me show you this.

We abandoned him.

And it says in verse 22, so Moses wrote this song the same day and taught it to the people of Israel.

When Moses had finished writing the words of this law in the book at the very end, so he gets all that, and here's the song of Moses.

Then Moses spoke the words of the song until they were finished in the ears of all the assembly of Israel.

Um, but when you get into the sources of this tradition, it's difficult, and I tell you what I mean.

And your listeners have already heard about this before and probably know about this, is in some of the earliest, um, uh, remnants of ancient Israelite religion that we see, uh, in, say, the Song of Moses-

Mm-hmm

... or the Song of the Sea, or something like this, Song of Deborah, uh, th- we see these, uh, remnants of an ancient kind of Canaanite mythology that, where you have El is the high deity, and he apportions the nations, and Yahweh seems to just be one of them in Deuteronomy 32, which is really interesting, um, in its original form.

Or in Deuteronomy, where he says things like, I will surely hide my face in that day.

Or in the Song of Moses, which talks both of Adonai sending arrows and of him hiding his face.

And just saying, and ending with, and Adonai even describes this as... we'll see what their end will be.

The point here is that both an so-called active and a so-called passive language are viable ways to talk about God's activity, are viable ways to talk about the activity of Adonai in bringing curses.

There's not much in the Torah portion.

as far as scripture reading is we're going to start in deuteronomy 32 and then i'm going to insert one thing a tefillin a tehillim a psalm then we're going to go possibly to the haftar portion or maybe just into um i'm just going to let y'all lead on that so now deuteronomy 32 i'll give you a minute to get there this is a song of moses Interesting, it talks about in the end days, in the inner revelation, it talks about those who will get to sing the song of Moses.

And I think that's just a beautiful hope and aspiration that we would live in such a way that we would be entrusted to sing the song of Moses someday.

It's beautiful.

Moses' heart was so humble, so beautiful, so loving.

So as Rabbi Loren said, this week's parashah is entitled Ha'azinu, and that means give ear.

It covers Deuteronomy chapter 32, and it consists primarily of the Song of Moses, which can be seen as both a love song to Adonai and a chastisement of the people of Israel.

Today's parasha falls on the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

As we've heard this morning, it's called Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of return or repentance.