Thoughts on Deuteronomy 1 & Jude

Today’s reading: Deuteronomy 1; Jude

Question on Deuteronomy 1

I don’t really have thoughts on Deuteronomy 1 this morning so much as I have a question that I’m trying to figure out.

Numbers 13 opens with the Lord telling Moses to send men in to spy out the land of Canaan ahead of them, but then when Moses is recounting that event in our chapter this morning, the Lord is completely absent. In Deuteronomy 1 Moses says it was the people’s request that they send spies into the land and it sounded good to him so he agreed to it. Moses fully leaves the Lord out of the story as he is recounting it here, which is odd to me if it was actually done at God’s initiation.

With things like this there are a lot of reasons for seeming discrepancies between the accounts. One is told as part of the narrative and explains how they ended up wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, while the other is Moses summarizing to Israel how they got to where they are that day. The account in Numbers is written narrative while the account in Deuteronomy is a speech. So just in terms of content and style, these are different types of literature and seeking to accomplish different things, so including or excluding something in one or the other account completely makes sense.

It also is not uncommon for one account of an event to include God as an actor while another account leaves Him absent, and this does not make either account necessary wrong. For example, while it’s too long of a story to tell here, my wife and I ended up moving to the town we now live in, partially to help lead a Youth for Christ group in the town. There are a bunch of small things that played into bringing us here, but we both feel very strongly that God has placed us where He has, doing what He has us doing, and that means we see Him having worked through those other circumstances to bring us to this place and ministry. So if I tell you that longer story, I will very likely include God as an actor in it, and talk about what He did (presumably) to bring us here. So I could tell the story with or without including what we perceive as God’s role in it, and both ways of telling the story would be accurate and truthful accountings.

The problem I am having with these two passages though is that they don’t seem to fit these scenarios. For example, if Moses, initially, took the people asking for the spies to be sent as a word from God (e.g. how he opens Numbers 13), when I would think he would reassess that sentiment when he sees the result of the mission. Or, as another way to think about it, if the people came to Moses, it seemed good to him, so he asked God and got the instruction from God we see at the beginning of Numbers 13, this would fully explain the two accounts together, but the exclusion of God in Deuteronomy seems like an odd exclusion.

So it’s not that I can’t find a way to reconcile the passages, but it’s that the ways I can find to reconcile them don’t seem to really explain how the story is presented in either passage.

This is one I’m going to have to dig into later today if I can make the time, and I’ll try to remember to come back and update this if I find something worth an update, but I would also love thoughts or ideas on this from anybody else. So if you have any ideas for me, or any leads for me to try running down as I look into this more, comment on here or on the Facebook post I link to this from, and let me know your ideas!

Update:

I did some digging into this this afternoon and I didn’t find nearly as much on it as I had hoped that I would. A number of commentators simply ignore the discrepancy between the passages and talk about whichever of the two passages they are writing about as though the other passage doesn’t exist. Beyond that, a lot of scholars hold to the documentary hypothesis (JEDP theory) that claims the Pentateuch is a compilation of primarily four disparate sources, so they see no reason or need to try to reconcile the accounts.

Of the remaining few that do comment on the difference, they seem to pretty unanimously land on the scenario I mentioned above as one possibility, in that the people asked to send spies, Moses thought that sounded fine so he went and asked the Lord, and then God agreed and gave the instructions we see in Numbers 13 for who they were to send.

This is fully satisfactory to me in terms of just reconciling the accounts, but I still struggle to understand why Numbers would present it as purely an instruction from God rather than an idea of the people. Especially as we see the response of the people to the spies’ report in Numbers 14, it seems like it would further show Israel’s faithlessness if it is their idea and their reaction rather than making it seem like they were ready to go into the land on faith alone, but then God had them send spies which scared them off. So what I’m having trouble with now is not so much the story, but why it is presented in Numbers as God’s idea when the themes of Numbers seem honestly like calling it the peoples’ idea makes more sense.

Thoughts on Jude

It’s really interesting how similar Jude is to other things we’ve been reading lately. On the one hand, Jude tells us that the people he is railing against are relying on their dreams for the false doctrines they are spreading that are leading people astray, and this takes us back to the notion of testing the spirits in 1 John 4. That might seem odd to some of us, given that we don’t tend to put too much stock in dreams these days (at least not as a culture), but in the ancient world dreams were a common way for divine beings to interact with humanity. In fact, we even see Yahweh Himself, multiple times throughout the Old Testament, speaking to people in dreams or revealing the future through dreams. So the problem is not that God or His messengers will never reveal something to someone in a dream, the problem is that these people were failing to test the spirits to see whether they were from God. In blindly accepting and propagating whatever it was they received in their dreams, they were spreading teaching that expressly contradicted the gospel of salvation by faith alone in Jesus.

That tie-in to 1 John 4 was one thing I noticed, but the other was the almost plagiarism-level of similarity between Jude and 2 Peter. I’m not sure how I never noticed it before, because it is so blatant, but Jude and 2 Peter 2 share a ridiculous amount of content. Both passages are talking about the false teachers/prophets, but they use so many of the same examples, like the descent of the Watchers from 1 Enoch (non-canonical book, but highly regarded by Jews at the time), the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fighting over the body of Moses (also from 1 Enoch). Beyond using the same examples, they describe these people using the same descriptions, like that they aren’t afraid to blaspheme the glorious ones, that they act on instinct like unreasoning animals, etc.

In my head, I just imagine Jude and Peter sitting next to each other, writing their letters, and Peter glances over like a kid trying to cheat in high school, and thinks, “Ohh, that’s good, I’m gonna use that!” and just starts copying. In reality though, I am betting Peter and Jude were well acquainted and potentially even working and teaching alongside each other, at least for a time, and so picked up from one another the examples and language used to teach against this destructive heresy that had cropped up. The main reason I say that is that Jude and 2 Peter were either written at the same time, or Jude was written later. Since Jude is pretty much just the extended edition of 2 Peter 2, if the letter of 2 Peter was already in circulation, why would Jude copy one chapter out of the middle of it and start circulating that, rather than simply pushing/broadening the circulation of this other letter that is already addressing what he wants to address? Especially because that other letter also include extra content and is directly from the apostle Peter?

So I think it is most likely the case that these two were either working together at the time, or had recently worked together, when they wrote these letters, and that is why they make the same arguments, using the same examples, and the same verbiage, to address the same group of false teachers. 

I think next time through I will talk more about the actual content of Jude in my post (though that won’t be until early December), but this morning I’m still just confused as to how I have never noticed how incredibly similar Jude and 2 Peter 2 are, and I need to spend some time mulling over the implications of it.