“... One truly remarkable passage, Deuteronomy 5:1-5, illustrates this point, and I can’t tell you how many times I read this before I finally saw it. Moses relays the Ten Commandments to this new generation of Israelites living forty years after these commandments were first given on Mt. Horeb (Sinai), and he says: Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today; you shall learn them and observe them diligently. The LORD our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. Not with our ancestors did the LORD make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today. The LORD spoke with you face to face at the mountain, out of the fire. ‘With us . . . with us . . . with you . . . to you.’ How can that be? The whole point of the forty-year time-out between Sinai and Moab was for the disobedient original generation to die in the wilderness, so God could start over again with a new batch of Israelites. So why is this writer treating this new generation as if they were present forty years ago when by definition they weren’t? This makes no sense. Or does it? Think of Deuteronomy as a motivational sermon. The second generation was to see itself as the ‘exodus generation,’ to whom God is present and accessible, not a long-gone deity from days of old. Deuteronomy reimagines God for a new time and place. ...”