Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Deuteronomy 34:12
And in all that mighty hand, and in all the great terror which Moses showed in the sight of all Israel.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES
WE have now passed through the Pentateuch, and have endeavoured carefully to mark its important contents. Its antiquity sets it at the head of all the writings in the world; and the various subjects it embraces make it of the utmost consequence to every civilized part of the earth. Its philosophy, jurisprudence, history, geography, and chronology, entitle it to the respect of the whole human race; while its system of theology and religion demonstrably prove it to be a revelation from GOD. But on these topics, as many observations have already been made as the nature of a commentary professing to study brevity can possibly admit.
Of MOSES, the writer of the Pentateuch, considered as a historian and philosopher, a great deal has been said in the course of the notes on the book of GENESIS; and especially at the conclusion of the fiftieth chapter; to which the reader is particularly referred. See Clarke on Ge 50:26.
Of Moses as a legislator, volumes might be written, and the subject not be exhausted. What is called the Law of Moses, is more properly the Law of God; and Torath Yehovah, the Law of Jehovah, is the grand title of the Pentateuch. Such a definition of this term as comports with the nature, structure, and design of the Pentateuch, has already been given in the note, See Clarke on Ex 12:40, to which the reader is requested to refer. Could we conceive Moses to have been the author of this system, we must consider him more than mortal: no wisdom of man has ever yet been able to invent such a code of laws.
This merit however has been disputed, and his laws severely criticised by certain persons whose interest it was to prove religion to be a cheat, because they had none themselves; and whose case must be hopeless could it be proved to be true. To some whose mental taste and feeling are strangely perverted, every thing in heathenism wears not only the most fascinating aspect, but appears to lay claim to and possess every excellence. These have called up Confucius, Menu, Zoroaster, and Mohammed himself, to dispute the palm of excellence with Moses! To examine the claims of such competitors, and to decide on their respective merits would require a large treatise, and my limits confine me to a sketch. To any godly, impartial mind, properly acquainted with the subject, little needs to be said; to those who are prejudiced, all reasoning is thrown away. A few words on the merit of each of these competitors must suffice.
1. To Con fu tsee, the great Chinese lawgiver, corruptly called Confucius, are attributed, in the records of his country, a number of ordinances and institutions which do honour to his times and to his people; but alas! how much of the darkness, erroneousness, and infirmity of the human mind do they exhibit! And however profitable they may be, as prudential maxims and social regulations to a certain extent, how little are they calculated to elevate or ennoble the human mind, or inspire men with a just notion of vice and virtue! Their author had no correct notion of the Divine nature; his laws had no sanction but that of convenience or necessity, and, notwithstanding their boasted excellence, have left, from the time of their promulgation to the present day, the sum total of that immense nation which profess to be governed by them, in the thickest darkness of the most degrading idolatry, closely verging upon atheism itself! Not so the Mosaic code; it was the light that lightened the universe, and the glory of the people who were governed by its dictates. We have the firmest ground and the most ample authority to assert, that the greatest kings, the wisest statesmen, the most accomplished poets and rhetoricians, the most magnanimous heroes, and the most holy and useful people that ever existed, were formed on the model, and brought up in the bosom and under the influence, of the Mosaic institutions. While the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes of SOLOMON, the history and poetic compositions of DAVID, the inimitable discourses of ISAIAH, JEREMIAH, JOEL, HABAKKUK, and others of the Jewish prophets remain, every intelligent reader will have the fullest proofs of the truth of the above assertion, which shrinks not under the pretence of being hazarded; but which must spring up in every ingenuous mind, from the fullest conviction of its own truth, after a serious perusal of the sacred code in question. All those eminent personages were brought up in the Mosaic school and were prepared by the Pentateuch for the prophetic influence.
2. The Institutes of MENU, lately clothed in an English dress by the elegant hand of Sir William Jones, have been thought to stand in fair competition with the laws of Moses. I have read them carefully, with strong prejudice in their favour; and have endeavoured, to the best of my judgment, duly to appreciate their worth. I have sought for resemblances to the Mosaic institutions, because I thought it possible that the same God who was so fully known in Jewry, might have made at least a partial revelation of himself in Hindostan; but while I alternately admired and regretted, I was ultimately disappointed, as I plainly saw that the system in its essential parts lacked the seal of the living God. My readers may justly question my competency to form a correct opinion of the work under consideration – I shall not therefore obtrude it, but substitute that of the translator, who was better qualified than perhaps any other man in Europe or Asia, to form a correct judgment of its merits. “The work,” says he, “now presented to the European world, contains abundance of curious matter, extremely interesting both to speculative lawyers and antiquaries; with many beauties which need not be pointed out, and with many blemishes which cannot be justified or palliated. It is a system of despotism and priestcraft, both indeed limited by law, but artfully conspiring to give mutual support though with mutual checks. It is filled with strange conceits in metaphysics and natural philosophy; with idle superstitions, and with a scheme of theology most obscurely figurative, and consequently liable to dangerous misconception. It abounds with minute and childish formalities, with ceremonies generally absurd and often ridiculous; the punishments are partial and fanciful; for some crimes dreadfully cruel, and for others reprehensibly slight; and the very morals, though rigid enough on the whole, are in one or two instances, as in the case of light oaths and pious perjury, unaccountably relaxed.” – PREFACE to the Institutes of Menu.
We may defy its enemies to prove any of these things against the Pentateuch. Priestcraft and despotism cannot appear under its sanction: GOD is KING alone, and the priest his servant; and he who was prevented, by the very law under which he ministered, from having any earthly property, could consequently have no secular power. The king, who was afterwards chosen, was ever considered as God’s deputy or vice-gerent; he was obliged to rule according to the laws that were given by God through Moses, and was never permitted either to change them, or add a single precept or rite to the civil or sacred code of his country. Thus despotism and priestcraft were equally precluded. As to its rites and ceremonies, they are at once dignified and expressive; they point out the holiness of their author, the sinfulness of man, the necessity of an atonement, and the state of moral excellence to which the grace and mercy of the Creator have promised to raise the human soul. As to its punishments, they are ever such as the nature and circumstances of the crime render just and necessary – and its rewards are not such as flow merely from a principle of retribution or remunerative justice, but from an enlightened and fatherly tenderness, which makes obedience to the laws the highest interest of the subject.
At the same time that love to God and obedience to his commandments are strongly inculcated, love and benevolence to man are equally enforced, together with piety, which is the soul of obedience, patriotism, the life of society; hospitality to strangers, and humanity to the whole brute creation. To all this might be added that it includes in it, as well as points out, the Gospel of the Son of God, from which it receives its consummation and perfection. Such, reader, is the law of God given through Moses to the people of Israel.
3. Of the laws of Zerdust or Zeratusht, commonly called Zoroaster, It is unnecessary to speak at large; they are incapable of comparison with the Mosaic code. As delivered in the Zend Avesta, they cannot so properly be called a system as a congeries of puerility, superstition, and absurdity; with scarcely a precept or a rite that has any tendency to elevate the mind, or raise man from his state of moral degradation to a proper rank in civilized society, or to any worthy apprehension of the Maker and Governor of the universe. Harmlessness is the sum of the morality they seem to inculcate, with a certain superstitious reverence for fire, probably as the emblem of purity; and for animal life, principally in reference to the doctrine of the Metempsychosis or transmigration of souls, on which it seems to have been originally built.
4. The KORAN of MOHAMMED is the only remaining competitor that can be supposed to be at all qualified to dispute the palm with the Pentateuch of Moses; but the pretensions of this production will be soon settled, when it is known that it possesses not one excellence, the purity and elegance of its language excepted, which it has not borrowed from the writings of Moses and the prophets, or the sayings of Christ and his apostles. This is a fact which none can successfully dispute, and of which the Koran itself bears the most unequivocal evidences. What can be fairly claimed as the peculium of the Arab lawgiver makes a motley mixture with what he has stolen from the book of God, and is in general as absurd and weak as it is on the whole false and wicked. As to the boasted morality of the Koran, it will have as little to exult in of this kind when the law and the Gospel have taken from it that of which they have been plundered, as the daw in the fable had when the different fowls had plucked away their own feathers, with which the vain bird had decorated herself. Mohammed, it is true, destroyed idolatry wherever he came; and he did the same by true religion; for Judaism and Christianity met with no more quarter from him than the grossest errors of pagan idolatry. To compare him with the pure, holy, disinterested, humane, and heavenly-minded Jewish legislator, would be as gross political as it would be palpable religious blasphemy. When we allow that he was a man of a deep and penetrating mind, well acquainted with the superstitious turn of his countrymen; austere, cunning, and hypocritical; a great general and a brutal conqueror, who seemed to sacrifice at no other shrine than that of his lust and ambition, we do him no injustice: the whole of his system bears the most evident proofs of imposition and forgery; nor is there a character to which imposture can lay claim that does not appear prominently in the Koran, and in every part of the Mohammedan system. The chief of these distinctive marks have already been examined in reference to the Pentateuch, in the concluding note on Exod. xviii. These are all found in the Koran, but not one of them in the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch therefore is of God; the Koran came from another quarter.
5. The different systems of the Grecian ethic philosophers cannot come into this inquiry. They were in general incongruous and contradictory, and none of them was ever capable of forming a sect that could be said to have any moral perpetuity.
6. The laws of Lycurgus and Solon could not preserve those states, at the basis of which they were laid; which the laws of Moses have been the means of preserving the people who held them, amidst the most terrible reverses of what are called fortune and fate, for nearly the space of 4,000 years! This is one of the most extraordinary and astonishing facts in the whole history of mankind.
7. The republic of Plato, of which it is fashionable to boast, is, when stripped of what it has borrowed from Moses, like the Utopia of Sir T. More, the aerial figment of a philosophic mind, en delire; both systems are inapplicable and impracticable in the present state of man. To persons under the influence of various and discordant passions, strongly actuated by self-interest, they can never apply. They have no tendency to change the moral state of society from vice to virtue: a nation of saints might agree to regulate their lives and conduct by them, but where is such to be found? Though Plato has borrowed much from Moses, yet he has destroyed the effect of the whole by not referring the precepts and maxims to God, by whom alone strength to fulfil them could be furnished. It is the province of the revelation of God to make the knave an honest man; the unholy and profane, pure and pious; and to cause all who act by its dictates to love one another with pure hearts fervently, and to feel the finest and fullest impressions of
“The generous mind that’s not confined at home,
But spreads itself abroad through all the public,
And feels for every member of the land.”
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
And in all that mighty hand,…. In all done by his hand, which he stretched out over the sea and divided, to make a passage through it for the Israelites, and with his rod in it smote the rocks, and waters gushed out for them:
and in all that great terror which Moses showed in the sight of all Israel; meaning either the terror the Egyptians were struck with by him, in the sight of all Israel, when he publicly and before them wrought the wonders he did in the land of Ham, which often threw them into a panic, especially the thunders and lightning, the three days darkness, and the slaying of their firstborn; see Ps 78:49; or the terror the Israelites were in at the giving and receiving of the law, Ex 19:16.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
Ver. 12. In all the great terror In all the great miracles, Houbigant very properly translates it, after the Samaritan; for terror, as he well observes, does not suit with the miracles in the wilderness.
We have here the praise of the living governor, and a just encomium on the deceased. 1. Joshua was admirably qualified to succeed Moses in his arduous charge, being full of the spirit of wisdom, and skilled alike in the arts of government and of war; God had commanded Moses to lay his hands on him, and while he designed him his successor, communicated to him abilities for the task; and the people acknowledged the appointment, and paid a ready obedience to his orders. Note; (1.) Whom God calls to any charge, he qualifies for the employment. (2.) God will never leave his Israel destitute; but as one faithful minister is taken away, another shall be raised up in his stead. (3.) We must not, through prejudice to the living, exalt too much those who went before them, but submit with the same cheerfulness and love to the younger pastors, as to the more aged ones which are departed. (4.) Joshua is appointed for what Moses could not do. Thus the law of Moses leaves us in the wilderness of conviction; Christ Jesus, the true Joshua, alone can bring us to the true rest of peace of conscience on earth, or eternal bliss in heaven. 2. The encomium on Moses is great, and most deserved. He was, above all other prophets, distinguished by the free and frequent communion he enjoyed with God; others heard from him in dreams and visions, but Moses spake with him face to face, as a man talketh with his friend. None performed the like stupendous miracles, nor did any prophet ever arise in Israel like him. One prophet, however, was predicted to arise, and he has since arisen, more superior to Moses, than he was above his brethren: his gospel surpassing the law in glory, which was a ministration of condemnation; and his covenant established on better promises. Moses was a servant in the house, Christ a son over his own house; one lying buried in the plains of Moab, the other living for ever to bless his people, seated on the throne of eternal glory, and ruling for them, and in them, till all their enemies be put under their feet, and death itself at last be swallowed up in victory.
THOUGHTS ON THE CHARACTER OF MOSES.
PROVIDENCE raised up Moses in a time of oppression, to become an example to the whole world of those virtues which oppression only can cause to shine out. By a series of miracles, he escaped the fatal effects of a bloody edict, which condemned every male of the Hebrews to die as soon as born. What is still more remarkable, and shews how Providence mocks the designs of evil men, he owed, in some measure, his preservation to those very persons who sought his destruction; and they themselves formed that genius, and cultivated those great talents, which qualified him to be the deliverer of that nation which they were labouring to extirpate.
At length he found himself called to a choice on which the ardency of his passions seemed not likely to suffer him to deliberate, no, not for a moment. Pressed to choose between his religion and his fortune, he rose superior to his passions, nay in some sort to human nature itself, and sacrificed his fortune to his religion; resolved to share the miseries of an oppressed people, in order to serve that God who watched over his children, even while he seemed to have forsaken them and abandoned them to oppression. He knew nothing equal to the favour of God: he considered it as infinitely preferable to that of his king; nay, even to the hopes of inheriting the throne and crown; and, according to the expression of St. Paul, he esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasure of Egypt.
He was not, however, contented merely to share the fate of an unhappy people; he resolved also to stop the course of their unhappiness: he could not prevail with himself to be a simple spectator of the tyranny exercised upon his brethren; he became their avenger, and thus, by an act of anticipation, commenced the deliverer of his nation.
Prudence obliged him to fly the punishment prepared for him: he fled into the country of Midian, where he experienced the effects of that wonderful providence which accompanied him through the whole course of his life. Unable here to perform the functions of a hero, he exercised those of a philosopher, employing the tranquillity of retirement in meditation on the greatness of God; or rather, Here he enjoyed intimate communications with the Deity, who had inspired him to lay the foundations of revealed religion; and Here, probably, he wrote that book of Genesis, which furnishes mankind with powerful arms against idolatry, combats two of the most extravagant errors ever imbibed (namely, that which affirmed the plurality of gods, and that which ascribed imperfections to the Deity), and opposes thereto the doctrine of the unity of a perfect being.
That God whose existence and attributes he asserted, appeared to him in a manner absolutely miraculous upon mount Horeb: he gave him the glorious but formidable commission, to make head against Pharaoh, to stop the torrent of his tyrannical persecutions, to endeavour to mollify him, and to compel, if he could not persuade him; to support his arguments by prodigies, and to enforce from the whole kingdom of Egypt, a compensation for their barbarities against a people whom God had chosen for the objects of his tenderest love and most alarming miracles.
Moses, rather from humility than obstinacy, declined to accept this commission. He could not persuade himself, having never been able to express his sentiments but with difficulty, that he was a proper person to speak to a king, or to subvert his kingdom. God pressed him; he resisted; at length he yielded, and, full of the spirit which animated him, entered the career of glory now opened before him. The first victory he obtained was over himself; he forced himself away from the calm pleasures which the country of Midian had afforded him, forsook the house of an affectionate father, and immerged into a world of enemies and persecutors.
He arrived in Egypt, presented himself to Pharaoh, prayed and entreated him, then used threatenings, and at length, in sad completion of those threatenings, brought down upon Egypt the most dreadful plagues. He marched out of that kingdom at the head of the people which had there undergone so many vexations: he was pursued by the tyrant, who followed close in the rear; he found himself surrounded by an invincible army, by a chain of impassable mountains, and by the Red Sea. He struck the waters of that sea, which presently obeyed the orders of a man whom God had made as it were the trustee of his power, and became a wall unto the children of Israel, on the right hand and on the left. And then, by another miracle, he saw the same waters which divided to make him a passage, close again to swallow up Pharaoh, his army, and his court.
Thus delivered, to all appearance, from his most dangerous enemies, he found himself engaged with others yet more dangerous; his own people: a people of mean and servile education, of mistaken and absurd minds, of hearts most corrupt; cowardly, ungrateful, perfidious. At the very time that he bore the brunt of their rage and madness, he interceded with God to spare them: at one time he found himself under a necessity of defending the cause of God before them; at another, of pleading their cause before the offended Deity, who declared that he would no longer regard a society of men ever prone to affront him, and ever contaminating his worship with that of the most infamous idols among the Gentiles.
Sometimes Moses prevailed so far as to avert the wrath of God, and quell the extravagancies of the stiff-necked multitude: but more frequently it was impossible to restrain their fury by the bounds of reason, or the anger of God by prayer or supplication. Divine justice would assume its rights; it smote the Israelites with the severest strokes, and caused 23,000 of them to perish by one single plague.
But neither could the most terrible punishments, nor the most tender admonitions, reclaim them to their duty: nay, as if Moses were responsible for the evils incurred by their repeated crimes, they threatened to stone him, and proposed to choose another general, who might lead them back to that Egypt from which God had brought them with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm: basely preferring a shameful slavery, to the miraculous direction which guided them through the wilderness, and to the kingdoms which God had promised them.
In these cruel exercises of his patience, Moses spent forty whole years, and at length brought the remainder of the people even to the borders of the Land of Promise. Did ever any man lead so singular a life? Was ever hero signalized by so many achievements?
If we enter into a detail of his conduct, we shall see all the graces and virtues shine forth in him. Magnanimity, in his command of armies, and his contempt of a crown when it interfered with the good of religion: constancy, in those repeated summonses and ready replies which he addressed to the despotic Pharaoh: Thus said the Lord, Let my people gowe will go with our youngour oldour sons and daughters, flocks and herdsthere shall not an hoof be left behind.Thou hast spoken well; I will see thy face no more. His zeal and fervency appear in his unremitted supplications to heaven, when Israel fought with Amalek, and in his ardent and reiterated prayers in behalf of a sinful nation. Exo 32:11-12; Exo 32:35. What love and charity animates those noble expressions,Oh, this people have sinnedyet now if thou wilt forgive their sin:and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book! His gentleness and sweetness of temper were unparalleled; witness what is said of him in the book of Numbers; The man
Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth. How desirous was he to seek for grace and truth at the fountain-head! If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence,I beseech thee shew me thy glory. How zealous for God’s glory! witness the broken tables of the law, and his rigorous order to the Levites, Put every man his sword by his side,and slay his brother,companion, and neighbour; and that self-denying answer of his to Joshua, when afraid that Eldad and Medad should eclipse the glory of his master, Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them! And what greater instance of perseverance can be given, than that song with which he ended both his ministry and his life?
Where can we find a ministry so arduous, a life so long, and diversified with so many circumstances, attended with so few faults? Nay, his very faults seem in some sort virtues, whose darkness would not strike so much, had not the rest of his life been bright and luminous. His backwardness for a while to go to Egypt at God’s command; his unwillingness to administer the sacrament of circumcision to his child, out of humane considerations; his persuasion, that it consisted not with divine justice, for God to cause water miraculously to issue from a rock, to gratify a murmuring people; and his striking that rock with several blows, rather, as it should seem, out of indignation at the rebels, than distrust of a merciful God; these are faults, it is true, and faults deserving death, should God rigorously exact his rights.
Should there be thought any thing hyperbolical or extravagant in this encomium on Moses, we can still add to all the glorious features that we have been pourtraying, one, which is infinitely more glorious than the rest; it is represented by him who is the true distributor of glory; it is a character drawn up by God himself; and which, upon that account, has elevated Moses above all the praise we are able to bestow upon him. There arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto MOSES, whom the Lord knew face to face: in all the signs and wonders which the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land, and in all that mighty hand, and in all the great terror which Moses shewed in the sight of all Israel.
It is true, the law which Moses published was not perfect; but it prepared the way for grace; for that GOSPEL which is the law of perfection; for a new covenant which was to be concluded between God and man, by that prophet like unto himself, the Conductor, the Christ; and this Christ is our Jesus; a man approved of by God by miracles, and wonders, and signs, which God did by him amidst the Jews, as they themselves know: Jesus, in whom God was, reconciling the world unto himself; Jesus, whom he hath fully declared his Son, with power by the resurrection from the dead, and to whom all the prophets give this witness, that, through his name, whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins. This is he of whom Isaiah, or rather the Lord by his mouth, spake, saying, Behold my servant shall prosper, he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high: even the ancient Jews agreed, that this prediction related to that Christ. “It is the king Messiah,” they declared in one of their celebrated works, intitled In Tanchuma, “who shall be exalted above Abraham, extolled above Moses, and be made higher than the angels.” We conclude this commentary with the words of a divine writer: “Let the Jews tell us who He is that can be exalted above the angels? What other can that character specify, than the WORD, who was in the beginning with God, who was God, by whom all things were made, and without whom was not any thing made that was made; namely, the Lord, the God of angels; to whom, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be all honour and glory for ever? Amen.”
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
REFLECTIONS
FAREWELL, Moses! thou faithful servant of the most high GOD! thou highly favoured, highly honored herald of my ever adored Redeemer! Thy memory shall be ever dear to me: for under the sweet and precious influences of the HOLY GHOST, thou hast informed me of things which I knew not, and brought to my knowledge such truths as are past finding out. But chiefly do I desire to honour thy memory, in acting as a schoolmaster to bring me to JESUS. Here I value thee as more precious than gold; for whatever tends to reveal to my soul the person and righteousness of GOD my Saviour, would I esteem more than my necessary food.
The very thought of JESUS fires my soul. And when I trace in the eventful history of Moses, and in his writings, that he pointed only to JESUS, I long to have my soul brought yet more and more under the HOLY GHOST, in his teaching to discover JESUS.
And do I not see in Moses himself, and in all his ministry, somewhat, which by faint figures, or more pointed similitudes, testifies of JESUS! If Moses acted as the messenger of JEHOVAH; became, as occasions required, the prophet, the priest, the king of Jeshurun: if Moses stood between JEHOVAH, and the people as the Mediator: if this man led out the LORD’S people, delivered them from Pharaoh, wrought miracles, subdued kingdoms, appointed statutes, established ordinances, gave a law to Israel, and taught precepts to Jacob; what were all these and as many more, but so many representations of the LORD JESUS?
Didst not thou, blessed JESUS, act as the messenger of JEHOVAH, when thou camest to our spiritual Egypt, to deliver thy people out of captivity? In all thy ministry, righteousness, and salvation, wast not thou the sent, the sealed, the anointed of thy FATHER? And wast not thou the great prophet, priest, and king of thy people? If Moses stood between JEHOVAH and Israel, as a Mediator, how much more thou? for Moses never could have stood, but as thy representative, none but thyself could turn away divine wrath, or make atonement but in thy blood. If Moses, acting as the minister of JEHOVAH, opened a way through the Red Sea, what was this, but as typical of that new and living way, which thou hast opened in thy blood and righteousness, for thy ransomed ones to pass over, when mountains of sin on every side, and the enemy, like Pharaoh, is behind, hastening on to destroy thy chosen? And if Moses’ meekness forsook him not, amidst all the contumacy, ingratitude, and rebellion of Israel, what was Moses meekness compared to thine, Oh, thou patient LAMB of GOD, who, when thou wast reviled, reviledst not again; but in all the backslidings, coldness, and departures of thy people, never leavest nor forsakest them, but having loved thine own, which are in the world, thou lovest them unto the end! Hail! thou first, and best, and chiefest among ten thousand! thou holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens! If I forget thee, dearest JESUS, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth: yea, if I prefer thee not above my chief joy! And Reader! may you, and every ransomed soul, publish his name, declare his doings among the people, ascribe ye greatness unto our CHRIST; let everyone, the fathers unto the children, declare his truth!
And now, Reader, having taken leave of Moses, and his sacred writings, I would desire grace to set up my Ebenezer, that hitherto the LORD hath helped me. May a gracious GOD accept everything that hath been here humbly offered, by way of Commentary upon those Five Books of Moses, and which the LORD hath made, or shall hereafter make profitable to his people; for that is the LORD’S, and of his own, do I with all humility of soul offer him. And may he as graciously pardon and blot out everything that is amiss; for that is wholly mine; and I desire to take shame and confusion of face, in the recollection. And finally, I beg once more to recommend all that is here offered, to the Reader, with myself, and poor services to his prayers, that a covenant GOD in CHRIST, through the influences of the eternal SPIRIT, may abundantly bless and own this feeble attempt to promote the LORD’S glory in the heart of the Reader, both while the unworthy writer is spared, a monument of sovereign mercy upon earth, and a long time after the hand that now writes, shall have returned to its original dust. To the sacred Three in One be endless, undivided praises. Amen.
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Deu 34:12 And in all that mighty hand, and in all the great terror which Moses shewed in the sight of all Israel.
Ver. 12. See Trapp on “ Deu 34:11 “
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Reciprocal: Deu 4:34 – and by great
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
34:12 And in all that mighty {g} hand, and in all the great terror which Moses shewed in the sight of all Israel.
(g) Meaning, the power of God working by Moses in the wilderness.