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The wilderness ledger of Numbers closed with its last entry written and a host of inheritors standing at the door of the land, and Deuteronomy opens in the plains of Moab with one man speaking the whole record back to the people who would have to live under it. The books before this one gave the trust, the sovereignty, the code, and the ledger. This one gives the terms of tenure. A law delivered at the mount in the hearing of a people in transit is delivered again on the far side of Jordan in the hearing of the generation that inherits, and every clause now rests upon a history already recorded: the bringing out of Egypt, the bread in the wilderness, the water out of the rock, the wars on the way.
Volume I of Deuteronomy runs from the first chapter through the eleventh, and its argument is the review. Moses speaks on this side Jordan, and he sets the place, the day and the parties upon the record before he says anything else. Then he rehearses the ground the people have covered: the long encampment at Horeb and the command to turn and go, the rulers of thousands and hundreds and fifties and tens given to the people when the burden grew past one man's strength, the men sent to search the land and the report they brought back, the refusal at Kadesh-barnea with the years spent in the waste until the generation of war was consumed, and the passage through Edom, Moab and Ammon bought with money and with bread and water where the record requires it. The wars of Sihon and Og follow, with the land east of Jordan granted to Reuben, to Gad and to the half tribe of Manasseh, and the request of Moses to cross over is answered with the sight of the land from the top of Pisgah and a charge laid upon Joshua. The fourth chapter then states the jurisdiction of the whole book: hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and unto the judgments, a law whose nearness is its distinction among the nations and whose first prohibition is the graven image. The Ten Words are afterward spoken again in the hearing of the inheriting generation, whole and in order, followed by the great commandment and the words bound upon the heart, the hand and the doorposts. The nations to be driven out and the provision of the land are set out, the second giving of the tables after the breach at Horeb is told, the ark and the separated ministry are named, and the summary of the whole duty is stated. The land that is not watered by the foot as Egypt was, the rain in its season, and the blessing and the curse set before the congregation complete the movement.
The volume ends there, immediately before the words These are the statutes and judgments, which open the twelfth chapter for the land the people are given to possess. That seam is the turn of the book. Chapter eleven closes with the blessing and the curse placed before the congregation and the two mountains named to carry them, and with the charge to observe all that is set before them in the land they are about to enter. What precedes that line is rehearsal, spoken to the party who must keep it. What follows is the statute book proper, given for conduct inside the possession. Volume I carries the rehearsal. A people taking up an inheritance is first shown the road by which they came to it, because the tenure rests upon the record of the One who gave it.
The doctrine carried through these chapters is the law of the second law itself, and the text keeps insisting upon it. A covenant renewed in the hearing of the party who must keep it can never afterward be answered with ignorance, and the review is the instrument that turns a narrative into terms. Every statute of the restatement stands upon a fact already recorded: the deliverance from Egypt, the manna, the water from the rock, the wars on the way, the calf at Horeb, the intercession of Moses, the tables cut a second time. That rehearsal of the record is the instrument of tenure, the showing of the ground on which the possession is held, and the warning against forgetting is a warning about the evidence. Love of the One who brought them out is then named as the first commandment, and the statutes follow as the shape that love takes in a land of fields, houses, gates and judges.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
Deuteronomy 6:4-5
The record is set down in the order the record gives, the words of Moses in the plains rendered whole, and the doctrine named as doctrine wherever it reaches past the text. The restatement is thus heard as the generation at the threshold heard it, before the statutes of the land begin.