Deuteronomy 4:26

Hebrew Bible

24 For the Lord your God is a consuming fire; he is a jealous God. 25 After you have produced children and grandchildren and have been in the land a long time, if you become corrupt and make an image of any kind and do other evil things before the Lord your God that enrage him, 26 I invoke heaven and earth as witnesses against you today that you will surely and swiftly be removed from the very land you are about to cross the Jordan to possess. You will not last long there because you will surely be annihilated. 27 Then the Lord will scatter you among the peoples and there will be very few of you among the nations where the Lord will drive you. 28 There you will worship gods made by human hands—wood and stone that can neither see, hear, eat, nor smell.

Isaiah 1:2

Hebrew Bible

1 Here is the message about Judah and Jerusalem that was revealed to Isaiah son of Amoz during the time when Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah reigned over Judah. 2 Listen, O heavens, pay attention, O earth! For the Lord speaks: “I raised children, I brought them up, but they have rebelled against me! 3 An ox recognizes its owner, a donkey recognizes where its owner puts its food; but Israel does not recognize me, my people do not understand.” 4 Beware sinful nation, the people weighed down by evil deeds. They are offspring who do wrong, children who do wicked things. They have abandoned the Lord, and rejected the Holy One of Israel. They are alienated from him.

 Notes and References

"... Ninth Interpretation ... Another interpretation of 'Give ear, O heavens': Since Moses was close to heaven he said, 'Give ear, O heavens.' And since he was far from the earth, he said, 'Let the earth hear the utterance of my mouth.' Along came Isaiah and confirmed this usage: 'Hear, O heavens' (Isaiah 1:2), for he was far from heaven, and 'give ear, O earth' (ibid), for he was close to the earth.' This interpretation pays particular attention to the fact that Moses uses different but parallel verbs in summoning heaven and earth. This is no mere stylistic redundancy but expressive of Moses' status at the time he uttered these words. The suggested meaning is confirmed by a comparison of the lemma with its closest scriptural parallel, in which Isaiah uses the same verbs to summon heaven and earth but in reverse order: the verb give ear, used by Moses for heaven and by Isaiah for earth, denotes closeness, whereas the verb hear, used by Moses for the earth and by Isaiah for heaven, denotes distance. The two prophets are portrayed as being somewhere between heaven and earth, with Moses being closer to the former and Isaiah to the latter ..."

Fraade, Steven D. From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and Its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (pp. 138-139) University of New York Press, 1991

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