The last verse of this chapter says that the hidden (or secret) things of the LORD belong to Him. (For more on this verse, see my post “What are the 'Secret Things of God'?”) Therefore it is with a slight case of irony that I would like to demonstrate some “hidden” things in this very chapter.
But first, I should issue a warning that we should all be duly suspicious of anyone who claims to have discovered the hidden secret of how to understand the Bible. In almost all cases, it turns out to be a lot of hype and is easily refuted.
One example is the ancient Jewish practice of gematria based on the fact that Hebrew letters can also be used to represent numbers. This concept is more familiar to us through the example of Roman numerals, where the letters I, V, X, C, etc. indicate particular numerals as well. With that in mind, Jewish mystics made it a practice to first add up the numerical value of all the letters in a particular word or longer passage of Scripture. Then they would try to reconstruct another word or phrase which also totaled that same number. This was supposedly the hidden meaning of the text.
In more recent years, another rabbinical method found as early as the Middle Ages was resurrected called ELS. Those letters stand for Equidistant Letter Sequences. In this methodology, an extended text such as the whole Old Testament or a particular book of the Bible, especially Genesis, was reduced to a large string of letters. Then one would choose, for example, every other letter to construct an entirely different list of letters which could be searched to look for completely different words hidden in that text.
This methodology was revived in more recent years with the publishing of The Bible Code. The same method could also be used with every third letter, fourth letter, etc. to generate an almost endless number of long letter strings. Once one found a group of adjacent letters which appeared to be meaningful, such as JFK, one would then search within the same vicinity of the same matrix to see if any pertinent words showed up, such as Dallas, Oswald, kill, etc. Using this method on a number of historical personages and events, proponents were able to find some apparently miraculous examples of fulfilled “prophecies” and even extend the method to predicting yet future events.
There are a number of insurmountable problems with ELS which have been enumerated since the method became popular. Just a few include:
1. The impossibility of starting with a biblical text which is free of possible textual errors. Keep in mind that even one letter out of place can disrupt the whole ELS method.
2. There is the question of deciding whether to only use the original consonantal text or the standard 9th century AD Hebrew text with vowel pointings included.
3. Some proponents even use the KJV in place of the Hebrew text.
4. There is no real standardization as to which Hebrew letters correspond to which English letters, and some letters can be used for more than one sound.
5. There is no prior definition of what constitutes a “close vicinity” for any two related words.
6. Many of the specific examples touted by proponents have been shown to rely on a little fudging to get their results.
7. It relies on the old trick known to professional mind readers and magicians of not revealing in advance what answer you are looking for so that whatever you come up with can be interpreted after the fact as if it were a supernatural event.
8. Statistical experts have demonstrated mathematically that the claimed results of ELS are no greater than one would expect from random occurrences with any other text of about the same size. Thus, critics have obtained similar results using a book such as Moby Dick instead.
9. But to me the overwhelming problem with both gematria and ELS is that the “hidden messages” have absolutely no relationship to the original biblical text. They replace that text in importance rather than bringing out extra nuances in the text to help understand it.
There are one, or possibly two, possible exceptions to the caveat I just stated, and that involves the method of gematria. Thus, one both popular and scholarly view of the puzzling number of the beast in Revelation 13:18 is that 666 is a case of gematria in which the author purposely hid the identity of the beast by reducing it to numbers instead. And note that in this particular case the author gave a large hint that he was using some sort of code when he stated: “This calls for wisdom.” See my post “Book of Revelation: The Language” for various attempts to identify the beast using gematria.
So getting down to the subject at hand, I would like to zero in on Deuteronomy 29 to use it as an example of how “hidden” information can be found right in the biblical text using more acceptable principles of hermeneutics, and that this information is not extraneous to the text at hand but actually reinforces it.
The first point to determine is exactly where a given passage starts and ends. And here we run into controversy on both ends. Thus, the Hebrew numbering system, unlike the one in most of our English translations, considers Deuteronomy 29:1 as the end of chapter 28 instead. And there are those scholars today who argue that Deut. 29:29 should be rightly considered to be the introduction to chapter 30 instead of closing out chapter 29.
The second issue in understanding Deuteronomy 29 is how to divide it into separate paragraphs in order to better get a handle on the overall flow of the chapter. Levinson, for example, comes up with the following divisions: Introduction (v. 1), Review of Israel's History (vv. 2-9), and Penalty for Disobedience (vv. 10-29). But a more usual scholarly consensus (Cousins, Thompson, Mayes) recognizes three divisions: A.1-9, B.10-15, and C.16-29, with the last section sometimes broken into two smaller ones. So this is a second issue that needs clarification.
As a starting point, let us make two starting assumptions and see where that leads us: (1) that the three-fold division above is the correct one and (2) the present chapter divisions are correct. The usual place to begin looking for confirmation is to examine each of the openings and closings of the three sections for similarities. This is what one comes up with:
Section A: As an inclusion [i.e. set of bookends] we can see the phrase “the words of the/this covenant” in verses 1 and 9.
Section B: There is an inclusion formed from “You stand assembled today...before the LORD your God (v. 10)” and “You who stand here with us today before the LORD our God (v. 15).” Mayes even detects a chiasm (symmetrical organization around a midpoint) for verses 10-15. Whether or not this is correct, Levinson does feel that the repeated phrase “sworn by an oath” in verses 12 and 14 “frames the central idea [of the whole chapter], the binding relationship between God and Israel.”
Section C: There is an approximate inclusion with allusions to idols in verses 17 and 26. In addition, the section begins much like the opening of Section A: “You have seen (vv. 2,17)” and “in the land of Egypt (vv. 2,16).” Also, the endings of both sections are similar: “observe the words of this covenant (v. 9)” and “observe all the words of this law (v. 29).”
So far, our reasoning appears to confirm that the present Chapter 29 is correctly separated as a distinct literary unit from the bracketing chapters. In addition, it seems to indicate that a three-fold division of the chapter is the best way to understand it. Thirdly, there appears to be a correspondence between the first and third sections, with the central point of the chapter located in the middle of Section B.
From this point, we can now start looking for the “hidden” information in the chapter for possible confirmation of the above and to lead us to a better understanding of the chapter as a whole.
The information I am talking about is coded in the key words and phrases in the chapter and involves numbers, but not in the sense of gematria. The only numbers of importance here are symbolic ones well recognized by biblical scholars for centuries: “three” standing for the Deity (as in the Trinity) and “four” representing the creation (as in the four corners of the earth or the four living creatures of Revelation).
By adding the two numbers together we get “seven” as the totality of the universe, symbolizing perfection or completion (as in the seven days of Creation or the many “sevens” that appear in the completing book of the Bible).
By multiplying the two numbers, representing God working through His creation or those who are specially chosen by God, we come up with the symbolic rationale for twelve tribes of Israel and twelve apostles.
So what does this have to do with hidden information in Deuteronomy 29? Let me explain.
There are several words and phrases which are repeated throughout this chapter, and as with many other discrete literary units in the Bible (especially in the Old Testament), they tend to appear exactly 7 or 12 times. Thus, “covenant” occurs seven times; there are seven time indications given in the chapter; the divine designation YAHWEH (often rendered as LORD in English translations) appears 12 times; and the phrase “LORD your/our God” is used 12 times.
What can we deduce from these statistics? The first point is that if you look at the text of Deuteronomy 29 carefully, you will note that these symbolically significant numbers are disrupted if one either considers v. 1 as belonging to the previous chapter and/or deletes v. 29 as being more properly considered as the beginning of Chapter 30. So we have another way of confirming the limits of the passage we are assuming to be a unity.
Just as important is the way the above key words and phrases are distributed within chapter 29:
All the appearances of LORD alone appear in Sections A and C, none in B. This can be taken as additional information indicating that there is a general correspondence between the first and last sections of the chapter.
There is another indication that Section B is a transition section of sorts in that “the LORD your God” appears only in A and B while “the LORD our God” is found only in B and C. And note that within Section B, Moses only includes himself in the phrase after he has stated in v. 14 that he is making the oath along with the rest of the people.
But perhaps the most telling use of the above statistics concerns the seven time indicators within the chapter. All five of the usages of “today” appear in Section B where Moses directs the Israelites' attention to the importance of their actions at that present time as they consider what God expects of them in terms of His “covenant” (a word which is evenly divided in appearance between all three sections, indicating that it is an everlasting agreement) with them.
Bracketing these occurrences of “today” are the reference to “up to this day” in Section A (v. 4) and “forever” in Section C (v. 29). So the conclusion is that we can now firmly propose the following structure for Deuteronomy 29. Notice that I have broken out verses 1 and 29 due to their similarities, but they can alternatively be considered as part of their adjacent sections.
Figure 1: Organization of Deuteronomy 29
I. Introduction (v. 1)
II. Past Blessing (vv. 1-9)
III. Present Covenant (vv. 10-15)
II'. Future Curses (vv. 16-28)
I'. Conclusion (v. 29)
Thus, we can now clearly see that the “covenant” between God and the Israelites is an eternal one (the word appearing in all three major sections) stretching back into the past (Section II), confirmed in the present (Section III) and stretching forward to the end of time (Section II'). And the purpose statement appears in the center of the center section at v. 13: “in order that he may establish you...as his people, and that he may be your God, as he promised you and as he swore to your ancestors.”
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