I.
We read at Deuteronomy 31:30, “Then Moses recited the words of this song, to the very end, in the hearing of the whole assembly of Israel …” and this song of Moses follows. It has similarities to the pattern we find in some of the Psalms and the Hebrew prophets

Let’s read it slowly and then give it another hearing trying to hear it as the Hebrew people might have heard it that day.

II.
Deuteronomy 32:3–6, 10–14, 18 (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition)

Deuteronomy 32:3-6

For I will proclaim the name of the Lord,
     ascribe greatness to our God!

The Rock, his work is perfect,
     and all his ways are just.
A faithful God, without deceit,
     just and upright is he;
yet his degenerate children have dealt falsely with him,
     a perverse and crooked generation.
Do you thus repay the Lord,
     O foolish and senseless people?
Is not he your father who created you,
     who made you and established you?

Deuteronomy 32:10-14

He sustained him in a desert land,
     in a howling wilderness waste;
he shielded him, cared for him,
     guarded him as the apple of his eye.
As an eagle stirs up its nest
     and hovers over its young,
as it spreads its wings, takes them up,
     and bears them aloft on its pinions,
the Lord alone guided him;
     no foreign god was with him.
He set him atop the heights of the land
     and fed him with produce of the field;
he nursed him with honey from the crags,
     with oil from flinty rock,
curds from the herd, and milk from the flock,
     with fat of lambs and rams,
Bashan bulls and goats,
     together with the choicest wheat—
     you drank fine wine from the blood of grapes.

Deuteronomy 32:18

You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you;
     you forgot the God who gave you birth.

III.
What captures you in this song?

The description and attributes and actions attributed to God?

The description of a “foolish and senseless people”?

Do you think the people are so bad they should be called “… degenerate … perverse and crooked …”?

Is Moses unloading on the people for all the trouble they have given him through the years?

Or, is he asking them to recognize the best and worse they are capable of?

charles
{ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est}