all the nation should learn it. The words, “I will call heaven and earth as witnesses against you,” refer to the substance of the ode about to be rehearsed, which begins with an appeal to the heaven and the earth (Deu 32:1). The reason assigned for this in Deu 31:29 is a brief summary of what the Lord had said to Moses in Deu 31:16-21, and Moses thought it necessary to communicate to the representatives of the nation. “The work of your hands” refers to the idols (vid., Deu 4:28).
Deu 31:30 forms the introduction to the rehearsal of the ode.
Chap. 32
Verse 1
The Song of Moses. - In accordance with the object announced in Deu 31:19, this song contrasts the unchangeable fidelity of the Lord with the perversity of His faithless people. After a solemn introduction pointing out the importance of the instruction about to be given (Deu 32:1-3), this thought is placed in the foreground as the theme of the whole: the Lord is blameless and righteous in His doings, but Israel acts corruptly and perversely; and this is carried out in the first place by showing the folly of the Israelites in rebelling against the Lord (Deu 32:6-18); secondly, by unfolding the purpose of God to reject and punish the rebellious generation (Deu 32:19-23); and lastly, by announcing and depicting the fulfilment of this purpose, and the judgment in which the Lord would have mercy upon His servants and annihilate His foes (Deu 32:34-43).
The song embraces the whole of the future history of Israel, and bears all the marks of a prophetic testimony from the mouth of Moses, in the perfectly ideal picture which it draws, on the one hand, of the benefits and blessings conferred by the Lord upon His people; and on the other hand, of the ingratitude with which Israel repaid its God for them all. “This song, soaring as it does to the loftiest heights, moving amidst the richest abundance of pictures of both present and future, with its concise, compressed, and pictorial style, rough, penetrating, and sharp, but full of the holiest solemnity, a witness against the disobedient nation, a celebration of the covenant God, sets before us in miniature a picture of the whole life and conduct of the great man of God, whose office it pre-eminently was to preach condemnation” (O. v. Gerlach). - It is true that the persons addressed in this ode are not the contemporaries of
