Joshua 1:6

Hebrew Bible

4 Your territory will extend from the desert in the south to Lebanon in the north. It will extend all the way to the great River Euphrates in the east (including all Syria) and all the way to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. 5 No one will be able to resist you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not abandon you or leave you alone. 6 Be strong and brave! You must lead these people in the conquest of this land that I solemnly promised their ancestors I would hand over to them. 7 Make sure you are very strong and brave! Carefully obey all the law my servant Moses charged you to keep. Do not swerve from it to the right or to the left, so that you may be successful in all you do. 8 This law scroll must not leave your lips. You must memorize it day and night so you can carefully obey all that is written in it. Then you will prosper and be successful.

1 Kings 2:2

Hebrew Bible

1 When David was close to death, he told Solomon his son: 2 “I am about to die. Be strong and become a man! 3 Do the job the Lord your God has assigned you by following his instructions and obeying his rules, commandments, regulations, and laws as written in the law of Moses. Then you will succeed in all you do and seek to accomplish, 4 and the Lord will fulfill his promise to me, ‘If your descendants watch their step and live faithfully in my presence with all their heart and being, then,’ he promised, ‘you will not fail to have a successor on the throne of Israel.’

 Notes and References

"... As early as Joshua, the law of Moses is impressed upon the people (Joshua 1:6-9; 8:30-35; 22:5). The historian’s choice of Psalm 18 as part of David’s epitaph stresses his observance of all God’s laws (2 Samuel 22:21-24) - the irony of which in view of the narrative of his life was not lost on the historian himself, who later adds the comment in 1 Kings 15:5 that “David had not failed to keep any of the LORD’s commands - except in the case of Uriah the Hittite” (when, we might add, he broke half the Decalogue!). David passes on to Solomon the duty of obedience to the law of Moses, much as Moses had done to Joshua (1 Kings 2:2-4 = 1 Chronicles 28:8), and God himself repeats the lesson to Solomon in such a way as to subordinate the temple itself to the moral demands of the covenant law (1 Kings 6:11-13). Theologically and ethically, Sinai takes precedence over Zion (as Jeremiah later preached in the temple itself [Jeremiah 7]). Our historian’s sharp eye for irony exposes another jarring dissonance with Solomon. The king who urged his people that they should be fully committed to obeying all God’s commands (1 Kings 8:61) signally failed to do so himself (1 Kings 11:10-11). The wisdom given to him to exercise justice - a prime concern of the covenant law (1 Kings 3:9, 11, 28) - became squandered as a tourist attraction and a nice little earner for the palace (1 Kings 10:24-25) ..."

Arnold, Bill T. Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books (p. 264) InterVarsity Press, 2005

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