Farewell Song of Moses
Deuteronomy 31:22-30
Moses therefore wrote this song the same day, and taught it the children of Israel.…


A most noticeable and outstanding feature of this great song is its series of pictures for the popular imagination, and its long array of vivid figures, to school and chasten a stiff-necked people. There is nothing hero of abstract reasoning or cold analysis. Everything is presented in concrete form as to a nation still in its spiritual childhood. This is the educative song of Israel. In tone it is both tender and terrifying. Its imagery, sometimes winning, sometimes startling, lends itself to warmest expostulations and appeals. How graphic and memorable are its emblems! The Divine words are at the outset likened to the gentle rain and dew; God Himself is the Rock, for stability and faithfulness; His training of Israel, like the eagle with its fledglings; the people, an intractable and stubborn ox resentful of the yoke; their apostate conduct, that of a faithless wife; the Divine love glowing and gleaming about them like the fire of spousal jealousy, and His indignation like an armed host — these, and other figures follow in quick succession, many of them derived from Israel's wilderness experiences. For it is the poetry of the desert that dominates the song. But while the imagery is derived from the past, the song itself reaches out to the future. It is, in fact, a prophetic outline of Jewish history, designed to lodge in the nation's heart the solemn truth thatSorrow tracketh wrong, As echo follows song.This is the primitive or moral prophecy, the type and canon of all future prophetic work. as Moses first song was the type of all that was to be spiritually poetic.

(A. H. Drysdale, M. A.)



Parallel Verses
KJV: Moses therefore wrote this song the same day, and taught it the children of Israel.

WEB: So Moses wrote this song the same day, and taught it the children of Israel.




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