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The first volume of this book closed where the constitution of the land was finished. The single place of worship had been fixed, the calendar of the three appearing feasts set, the tithe and the firstlings ordered, the judges and officers appointed in every gate, the king bound to a copy of the law written out by his own hand, and the prophet like unto Moses promised to the brethren. The government of the covenant people stood whole upon the record, and what remained was its working in the gates: the cases the benches would hear, the wars the host would fight, the household and the field, the pledge, the wage, the weight, and the witness. This volume takes up the second law at that point. It runs from the nineteenth chapter of Deuteronomy through the thirty-fourth, and its argument is the administration of the grant rather than the making of it.
Upon the bench and behind the gate stand three statutes of procedure: the cities of refuge, with the way prepared so that the man who slays his neighbour unwittingly may flee and live and the avenger of blood may not overtake him while his heart is hot; the landmark, which no hand may remove; and the rule of the mouth of two witnesses or three, by which alone a matter is established. Around them stand the ordinances of war, peace offered to a city before it is besieged, the trees of the field spared, and the heifer whose neck is broken in the valley for the death that no man can charge to any hand; the domestic statutes and the camp's holiness line; the family and labour statutes, the instrument of divorce, the millstone not taken in pledge, the wage paid before the sun goes down, and the gleaning left for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow; the stripes bounded at forty and the just weight. The basket of firstfruits is carried to the altar with the recitation of the Syrian ready to perish, and the tithe of the third year is laid up for the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. At the two mountains the law is engrossed upon plastered stones and the twelve curses are answered by the Amen of all the people, and the blessings and curses of the covenant follow in full as the terms of the grant's condition. The covenant is renewed in Moab, the choice is laid before the people, life and death, and the law is written in a book and delivered to the priests, to be laid in the side of the ark for a witness against the people. The song of Moses is taught to the congregation as the testimony that would not be forgotten, the tribes are blessed seat by seat, and Moses goes up to Nebo, sees the whole land with his own eyes, dies there in the valley, and is buried where no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.
The division this volume keeps is the division the record itself keeps, for the second law appoints the officers before it hands them the cases. A bench constituted and given no procedure is not yet a bench, and what this volume supplies is the procedure: the refuge, the boundary, the evidence, the scale, the wage, the weight. Read the two volumes as one argument and the order is exact, first the offices and the terms, then the administration of them in the gates of the land. Genesis ended with a coffin in Egypt and a charge about bones, and Deuteronomy ends with a grave that no man knows and a successor full of the spirit of wisdom, so that the record of the five books opens upon a burial and closes upon one, and in both the promise outruns the man who carried it.
The doctrine carried through these chapters is the doctrine of the deposited word and the transferred office. The covenant is not left to the memory of a generation that will die, but is put in writing and committed to the officers who bear the ark, outside the reach of the very party it witnesses against. The witness is lodged in a song, taught to the whole congregation and given to the mouths of children who had not yet crossed, so that the testimony cannot be lost by a change of administration. And the succession is not the replacement of a man but the transfer of an office: the servant of the LORD is buried, the book stays beside the ark, the hands are laid upon Joshua, and the administration continues though the administrator is gone.
What makes this volume worth a book of its own is that here the law becomes procedure. The command has been given already, and what is set down in these chapters is how it is applied when a life is lost by mischance, a boundary is moved, a witness lies, a wage is withheld, a weight is short, a stranger has no field of his own. The judgment of the covenant is thereby brought to the weakest party in the land.
Take this book of the law, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee.
Deuteronomy 31:26
Nothing in this volume asks to be taken on trust. The scripture is quoted whole, the doctrine is named as doctrine wherever it goes beyond the text, and the weighing belongs to whoever holds the book.