Unscrolled: The Inner Law

The Book of Deuteronomy plays games with our sense of duration. Examining it from the outside, one notes that it has just as many pages as any other book of the Torah. Reading it week to week, it takes just as long. To cross from its beginning to its end is just as much of a journey, filled with as many surprises and challenges. But while Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers cover centuries, or decades, or months of narrative time, Deuteronomy is the story of a single moment.

Granted, it is a long moment. The book takes the form of an address given by Moses to the Israelites before his death. If we trace the dates, we find that a month and a week have passed between start and finish. And yet, we don’t see the sun rise or set. We don’t see the Israelites depart and return. We don’t see Moses lie down to sleep or take breaks to dine. In this tableaux vivant, nothing moves save for the words themselves.

Most of Deuteronomy is Moses’ retelling of stories and laws that we have already heard. A close reader will notice, however, many discrepancies between the events as they played out and the way in which Moses reconstructs them now.

In Parashat Devarim, for instance, we see Moses’ recounting of the incident of spies, the twelve individuals who went into the land of Israel to scout it out, returning with an evil report of what they saw there. This is a pivotal story—it was, after all, on account of the sin of the spies that God condemned the Israelites to forty years of wandering in the wilderness.

But pivotal or not, Moses revises the story, now claiming that the impetus for sending spies into the land of Israel came from the Israelites themselves, and not from God.

A critical/historical explanation for these discrepancies would be that these are different texts written by different Biblical authors and therefore they contain slightly different versions of the same stories. A psychological explanation would be that the discrepancies can be explained by Moses’ emotional state at the time of this retelling. A religious explanation, however, understands the discrepancies as intentional. Moses is doing what all great rabbis do. He is interpreting the Torah.

This theory is explored in the book “Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith” by Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman. The version of laws and events in Deuteronomy is different than elsewhere in the Torah because Moses is speaking Torah Shebe’al Peh—the Oral Law, which along with the Written Law (the five books of Moses) constitute the Torah as a whole.

By the time of the Talmud—the great masterpiece of the Oral Law— the importance of interpretation will be well established. In one incident recorded in its pages, two students approach Rabbi Yehoshua in Peqi’in in the Galilee, who asks them, “What novel interpretation was taught in the study hall today?” They respond humbly, saying “We are your students, and we drink from your waters.” Rabbi Yehoshua responds, “There can be no house of study without novel interpretations” (Chagigah 3a).

Each of Moses’ novel interpretations is the work of his rabbinic mind. They are riddles to be decoded, midrashim that will add another layer of meaning to the text.

Each of Moses’ novel interpretations is the work of his rabbinic mind. They are riddles to be decoded, midrashim that will add another layer of meaning to the text.

What is gained, for instance, by Moses’ reimagining of the stories of the spies?

Well, for one thing, Moses’ version might prompt us to realize that while it was God’s command to send the spies, the need for the mission arose from the people’s lack of faith and unreadiness. A people secure in their faith would have no need for this reconnaissance mission. They would enter the land sight unseen for they would know that God was in their midst, and it just so happens that this is exactly what the new generation of Israelites will do.

Deuteronomy, then, should not be seen as a repetition. It is utterly new, and not just on account of the specific discrepancies we have mentioned. It is new because the Oral Law, what Ahad Ha’am called “the inner law, the law of the moral sense,” had not yet been given to the Israelites until this moment when it was demonstrated—not revealed—by our teacher Moses to the Israelites, his students, and to us as well.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.