Torah Portion: Deuteronomy 26:1-29:9

Ki Tavo (‘When you enter [the land]’)

This week’s Torah portion starts to draw Deuteronomy towards a conclusion with instructions for the feast of first fruits and tithing in the third year. The last part of chapter 26 reads a bit like the vows of a marriage ceremony - but this is between God the husband and Israel his holy bride.

Then in chapter 27 come some practicalities about how to keep God’s covenantal laws in mind, setting up a centre of worship at Shechem between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, with the laws written on stones overlaid with plaster for all to read and an altar set up for offerings.

The Levites were then to speak out to Israel the consequences for keeping or breaking the covenant - a series of blessings and curses, respectively - concluding with the instruction to “therefore observe faithfully all the terms of this covenant, that you may succeed in all that you undertake” (Deut 29:8).

A Curiosity

In the middle of the first set of curses I found a curiosity: “Cursed be he who lies with his father’s wife, for he has removed his father’s garment” (Deut 27:20).

This translation is taken from the Jewish Study Bible. The King James translation is similar but modern versions, though they give a straightforward understanding that it is wrong for a man to have sex with his mother, seem to lose something. Let me explain.

Cross-references to this verse include Deuteronomy 23:1, which says “No man shall marry his father’s former wife, so as to remove his father’s garment” and Leviticus 18:8, which says “Do not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife; it is the nakedness of your father”. These cross-references led me to that strange incident at the end of the account of Noah, in Genesis 9:23-24, where Ham saw his father’s nakedness but Shem and Japheth covered it.

The lesson that I draw from all these passages is God’s concern that the father of a family (and by implication, the family itself) should not be deeply humiliated by such breaches of trust which are tantamount to stripping someone naked in public to humiliate them.

God Humiliated

In Hosea, it was the wife who by prostituting herself uncovered the Prophet’s nakedness, giving a picture of the greater atrocity being enacted by Israel, deeply humiliating God in front of the world. And yet God stretched out to forgive and redeem. By coming in the person of Yeshua the Messiah, God chose to take my place, being stripped naked and deeply humiliated before mankind to pay the sentence that was my own due.

And now today, what is such a large part of Yeshua’s Bride doing compromising with humanism or the New Age, getting into bed with Islam and so on? By these actions Yeshua is being deeply humiliated again. But be warned, when Yeshua comes the second time it will be in glory, to judge.

In the words of Hebrews 2:3: “…how will we escape [God’s judgment for disobedience] if we ignore such a great deliverance?”

Author: John Quinlan

Old Testament references from the Jewish Study Bible. New Testament references from the Complete Jewish Bible.