One Chosen Place, Many Ordinary Tables

The law code of chapters 12 to 26 opens with the place of worship, as the other two codes of the Torah do: the Book of the Covenant starts with the altar (Exodus 20:24) and the Holiness Code with where animals may be slaughtered (Leviticus 17). “Upon the earth” is adamah, the ground of the land itself.

“Under every green tree” means any leafy, shady tree. The phrase becomes a refrain of the prophets and of Kings (1 Kings 14:23, Jeremiah 2:20), and Hosea explains the appeal: under oaks and poplars and elms, “because the shadow thereof is good” (Hosea 4:13).

Places carried their gods in their names: Baal-meon, Beth-shemesh, house of the sun, Baal-peor. Destroying the names meant renaming, and Numbers 32:38 records it happening east of the Jordan: “Nebo, and Baal-meon, (their names being changed,)”.

Six words that have been read two ways. The plain sense: do not worship the LORD at many sites in the nations’ manner. The rabbis also read it against 12:3, do not destroy the LORD’s name as you destroy theirs, and from it came the rule never to erase a written divine name.

The place is chosen, not named. Jeremiah 7:12 names the first: “my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first”. 2 Kings 21:4 names the last: “In Jerusalem will I put my name.” “Habitation” is shikno, his dwelling, the root of mishkan, tabernacle.

Seven kinds of gift. Burnt offerings, olah, go up whole in smoke; sacrifices, zevach, are shared and eaten. Heave offerings are terumah, a portion lifted off and set apart. Vows are promised in advance, freewill offerings given unprompted, firstlings owed by birth.

Commanded rejoicing before the LORD is Deuteronomy’s own note. Elsewhere in the Torah it is commanded once, for the feast of booths (Leviticus 23:40); Deuteronomy says it again and again (12:12, 12:18, 14:26, 16:11, 16:14, 26:11). The meal, not only the altar, is the worship.

Moses says “we”, including himself. The wilderness had its tabernacle, but he admits practice there was irregular, and Amos 5:25 asks whether Israel offered sacrifices at all in those forty years. The phrase “right in his own eyes” will describe the age of the Judges.

Rest, menuchah, and inheritance, nachalah, are a pair. The rabbis read them as two sanctuaries, rest as Shiloh and inheritance as Jerusalem. Psalm 95:11 turns “rest” into God’s oath against the wilderness generation, “they should not enter into my rest”, and Hebrews 3-4 builds on it.

The words are echoed at the start of the temple’s history. 2 Samuel 7:1 says “the LORD had given him rest round about from all his enemies”, and David at once proposes to build a house for the ark. “In safety” is betach, secure, without watching the borders.

“To cause his name to dwell” uses shakan, the verb of dwelling from which later Judaism formed Shekhinah, the presence. 12:5 used a plainer verb, to put. “Choice vows” is mivchar nidreikhem, the best of your vows, the pick of what was promised.

The household list names sons, daughters and servants but not a wife, here or in 12:18, 16:11 and 16:14. Most commentators take “ye” as the married couple addressed together. Levites lived “within your gates” because their forty-eight towns were scattered among the tribes (Numbers 35:7).

The patriarchs built altars wherever God appeared to them (Genesis 12:7, 26:25, 35:7). This law ends that freedom for the settled nation. Later exceptions are few and pointed: Elijah repairs a broken altar of the LORD on Carmel to answer the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:30).

“In one of thy tribes” can mean one chosen place, or any one in turn; some scholars read it as allowing a succession of sanctuaries. Jerusalem stood on the line between Judah and Benjamin, and Joshua 18:28 lists Jebusi among Benjamin’s towns.

In 1611 “lust” meant desire of any kind, without the later sense. The Hebrew is the verb of wanting, avah. Roebuck is tsvi, the gazelle, and hart is ayyal, the deer: clean animals that were hunted and never sacrificed, so no ritual rules applied to eating them.

Noah’s descendants were already forbidden flesh with its life-blood (Genesis 9:4), before Israel existed. The ban on blood was one of the four rules the council at Jerusalem kept for Gentile believers (Acts 15:20). Poured like water, blood is given back to the ground.

In Deuteronomy the tithe of grain, wine and oil is eaten by the farmer’s own household at the sanctuary. Numbers 18:21 gives the tithe to the Levites. The rabbis reconciled the two by counting two tithes, the second, ma’aser sheni, being the one eaten at Jerusalem.

Elkanah’s yearly trip to Shiloh shows this in practice: he sacrifices, then hands out portions to Peninnah, her sons and daughters, and a double portion to Hannah (1 Samuel 1:3-5). Rejoicing “in all that thou puttest thine hands unto” means in all you have worked at.

Neglect had consequences. Judges shows a Levite from Bethlehem wandering to find anywhere to live and hiring himself to Micah’s household shrine (Judges 17:7-10). Nehemiah 13:10 finds the Levites gone back to their fields because their portions had not been paid.

“Thy soul longeth to eat flesh” uses avah again, the root of Kibroth-hattaavah, the graves of craving (9:22), where the demand “who shall give us flesh to eat?” ended in plague (Numbers 11:4, 33-34). The same appetite is now simply allowed, in the right place.

Leviticus 17:3-4 had required every ox, lamb or goat to be killed at the tabernacle door. This verse lifts that rule for those far away. “As I have commanded thee” refers to a method of slaughter the text never describes, and the Talmud (Chullin 28a) took it as evidence of teaching given orally.

Someone ritually unclean, from contact with a corpse, say (Numbers 19), was barred from eating sacrificial meat on pain of being cut off (Leviticus 7:20). For household meat slaughtered away from the altar, that barrier does not apply.

“Be sure” is literally be strong: only be strong not to eat the blood. Rashi drew the inference that the practice was a real temptation, needing resolve. “The blood is the life” is spelled out in Leviticus 17:11: “the life of the flesh is in the blood”.

“Thou shalt not eat it” three verses running. Saul’s troops, famished after the battle at Michmash, fell on the spoil and “did eat them with the blood”, and Saul had a great stone rolled up to slaughter on properly (1 Samuel 14:32-34).

A promise of well-being attached to a food rule. The Mishnah (Makkot 3:15) argues from it: if abstaining from blood, which a person naturally shrinks from, earns reward, how much more abstaining from theft and forbidden unions, which people crave.

The rabbis called holy things qodashim and ordinary food chullin, and a whole tractate of the Talmud, Chullin, deals with slaughter for the ordinary table. This verse draws the line between them: whatever has been set apart must still make the journey.

Two kinds of offering, two outcomes. A burnt offering goes wholly on the altar, flesh and blood together (Leviticus 1). With other sacrifices the blood goes on the altar and the worshipper eats the meat (Leviticus 3, 7:15). The altar receives the life either way.

The pair of 6:18, “right and good”, returns reversed: good and right. “Observe and hear” also puts keeping before hearing. “For ever” is ad olam, while 12:25 had spoken only of children; the promise lengthens as the paragraph closes.

“Succeedest them” is yarash, in the 1611 sense of succeed: to come after and take the place of. “Cut off” is karat, the verb of cutting a covenant, used here of cutting nations away from before Israel.

The reverse case is recorded in 2 Kings 17:26-33. Settlers brought to Samaria asked to learn “the manner of the God of the land”, were taught it by a priest, and went on serving their own gods alongside. “Enquire” is darash, to seek out, the verb of seeking God in 4:29.

Kings of Judah did this: Ahaz “made his son to pass through the fire” (2 Kings 16:3) and so did Manasseh (21:6), at Topheth in the valley of Hinnom. Jeremiah 7:31 says God “commanded them not, neither came it into my heart”. Mesha of Moab burned his heir on his wall (2 Kings 3:27).

In Hebrew Bibles this verse is numbered 13:1, heading the next chapter’s laws on false prophets. The rule repeats 4:2, so a warning against adding or subtracting brackets the whole run from the start of the exhortation to the start of the law code.