4: 10-14 - Remember the day1 you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, when he said to me, "Assemble the people before me to hear my words so that they may learn to revere me as long as they live in the land and may teach them to their children." You came near and stood at the foot of the mountain while it blazed with fire to the very heavens, with black clouds and deep darkness. Then the Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice. He declared to you his covenant, the Ten Commandments, which he commanded you to follow and then wrote them on two stone tablets. And the Lord directed me at that time to teach you the decrees and laws you are to follow in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess.

Recounting Israel's encounter with God at Horeb, Moses now highlights three important facts of that encounter.

1) First, he recalls the fact that here Israel stood as a summoned people ("[Yahweh] said to me, 'Assemble the people before me,'" v.10). This encounter was an act of gracious divine initiative, not the result of Israel's earnest after God. While the Old Testament is not incognizant of individuals whose hearts long for God, it is its invariant refrain that Israel, as a people, is habitually apathetic towards Yahweh.

However, Israel was not summoned to give an accounting, nor did Yahweh sit as judge, though there will be a day for that. At Horeb she stood as a people addressed by Yahweh, and formally declared as Yahweh's people. While such a gathering would only be referred to by the specific noun qahal Yahweh ("the assembly of Yahweh") later in Moses' address, such a perception of Israel is already nascent in the use of the verbal form of the word in Yahweh's command to "assemble before me," haqhel-li (v.11). Those gathered at Horeb were, of course, GenA; nonetheless, Moses addresses GenB as if they were there—"You came near . . ." This mode of address, like the expression "all Israel," assumes a unity of the qahal Yahweh that transcends all generational boundaries, and by it Moses calls Israel "to an act of corporate, imaginative remembrance as the insights of the past are brought to bear on the decisions of the present and future."2

2) Next, Moses highlights Yahweh's twin purpose in that assembly. The first was that Israel may "hear my words and so learn to fear me" (v.10). Theologians often find it necessary to distinguish between "fear" and "reverence," with the emphasis that the proper response to God is "reverence," in the sense of "regard with respectful awe." Whether such a distinction is theologically valid or not, it is not one that can be sustained on semantic grounds, at least not in the book of Deuteronomy. As Tigay rightly notes, this fear "consists of both respect and awe at His grandeur and dread of His power."3 Also, contrary to popular conceptions, fear is not life-debilitating. Again and again in the book of Deuteronomy, Israel is reminded to fear Yahweh, and in that fear find life. Fourteen of the sixteen occurrences of the verb in Deuteronomy have Yahweh as its object and Israel as its subject. The conjoining of fear of Yahweh with life, though implied in many of the passages, is explicit in a cause-effect relationship in 5:29; 6:2, 24; & 8:6. Interestingly, by equating Israel's obedience with wisdom in the eyes of the world and making the fear of God the basis of life, Deuteronomy already anticipates Proverbs' insistence that "the fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge" (Prov.1:7).

Yahweh's second purpose was to "declare his covenant" that Israel was to observe. While the scope of that covenant would be clarified as Moses continues his exposition, here it is simply equated with the Ten Commandments (v.13). That Yahweh should inscribe these terms of the covenant on stones attests to their enduring significance. Though only raised here in anticipation of their elucidation later in Moses' address, the Decalogue serves as the thematic core of this warning (click here for a reminder). George Mendenhall observes how there is nothing in the Decalogue that constitutes any new or profound philosophical insight into ethics or law. "It is not in the content," he says, "but in functional relationships that the Decalogue constitutes a revolutionary movement in human history."4 Here in Deuteronomy, the accent is certainly on the unique relationship that it serves to seal between Israel and Yahweh.

3) Lastly, Moses stresses what the encounter reveals about Yahweh, whose nature is disclosed in the paradoxical apposition of the verb "saw" with "no form," which is paralleled by the equally paradoxical realities—"fire that blazed to the heavens" with "darkness and deep gloom"—that attend his presence (v.11). Now, Israel may be an Eastern people, but we should not suppose that this description of Yahweh's theophanic glory resembles anything like the ineffable auto-negating notions so prevalent in eastern mysticism. "To find the most Perfect Tao," Lao Tzu urges upon Confucius, for example, "you must cleanse your mind with emptiness . . . and strongly repress your knowledge . . . Life is just the name for a brief moment of time, insufficient to determine what is right and what is wrong . . . the Tao can't be heard with the ears; better to shut the ears than strain to hear it."5 For Israel, cleansing the mind requires filling it with the words of Yahweh, not vacating it with emptiness. Life is not only long enough to know what is right and wrong; it is also long enough for her to forget them. These words Israel heard out of the fire at Horeb (v.12), these are Yahweh's words, words that Moses was commanded to teach (v.13), words that Israel was ordered to give her utmost attention in the land she would be crossing over to possess (v.14).

Having highlighted these three facts of their encounter with Yahweh at Sinai/Horeb, Moses will now move on in the following two paragraphs to spell out two implications of having seen no form of Yahweh in the fire.

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