Cornelius a Lapide
Table of Contents
Synopsis of the Chapter
Moses continues to exhort the Hebrews to keep the law of God: first, on account of the benefits they have already received from Him, because God fed them with manna in the desert and preserved their garments intact. Second, verse 7, on account of the benefits they are yet to receive, in the abundance of the land of Canaan, if they obey God. Third, verse 19, by threatening them with destruction if they forsake God.
Vulgate Text: Deuteronomy 8:1-20
1. Every commandment that I command you today, take careful heed to observe: that you may live and multiply and enter and possess the land which the Lord swore to your fathers. 2. And you shall remember the entire journey by which the Lord your God led you these forty years through the desert, to afflict you and test you, so that what was in your heart might be known, whether you would keep His commandments or not. 3. He afflicted you with want and gave you manna for food, which neither you nor your fathers knew: to show you that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. 4. Your garment with which you were covered did not wear out from age, and your foot was not worn raw — behold, it is now the fortieth year. 5. That you may consider in your heart that, just as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God has disciplined you, 6. that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God, and walk in His ways, and fear Him. 7. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of streams and waters and springs; in whose plains and mountains rivers burst forth from the depths: 8. a land of wheat and barley and vines, in which fig trees, pomegranates, and olive groves grow: a land of oil and honey. 9. Where without any want you shall eat your bread and enjoy the abundance of all things: whose stones are iron, and from whose mountains copper ore is mined; 10. so that when you have eaten and are satisfied, you may bless the Lord your God for the excellent land He has given you. 11. Be watchful and take care lest you ever forget the Lord your God and neglect His commandments and judgments and ceremonies which I command you today: 12. lest after you have eaten and are satisfied, and have built fine houses and dwelt in them, 13. and have herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, and abundance of silver and gold and all things, 14. your heart be lifted up, and you not remember the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage: 15. and who was your guide in the great and terrible wilderness, where there were fiery serpents and scorpions and the dipsas snake, and no water at all: who brought streams from the hardest rock, 16. and fed you with manna in the wilderness, which your fathers did not know. And after He afflicted and tested you, at the end He had mercy on you, 17. lest you say in your heart: "My strength and the power of my hand have brought me all these things," 18. but you may remember the Lord your God, because He Himself gave you strength, to fulfill His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as the present day shows. 19. But if, forgetting the Lord your God, you follow foreign gods, worship them, and adore them: behold, I now foretell that you shall utterly perish. 20. Just as the nations which the Lord destroyed at your coming, so you also shall perish, if you have been disobedient to the voice of the Lord your God.
Verse 1: Every Commandment That I Command You Today
1. EVERY COMMANDMENT THAT I COMMAND YOU TODAY, TAKE CAREFUL HEED TO OBSERVE. -- "Take heed," that is, carefully observe, and, as the Hebrew has it, guard, and this because it must be done for God's sake and by God's command; for, as Abulensis rightly says: "If men serving earthly lords are most attentive, out of reverence for them, lest anything be lacking in their service, how attentive and careful we ought to be when we serve God, or carry out any of His commandments! For the reverence and majesty of God are infinitely distant from the reverence and majesty of men. Therefore we must carry out God's commandments with great fear, taking most diligent care that nothing be lacking in them; hence it is said in Psalm 2: Serve the Lord in fear, and rejoice before Him with trembling; and elsewhere: Cursed is he who does the work of the Lord negligently. This reverence and caution, then, is what is signified by 'take heed that you do,' that is, be very attentive to these things." Thus far Abulensis.
Verse 3: He Afflicted You with Want
3. HE AFFLICTED YOU WITH WANT. -- For in the desert the Hebrews found no meat, no crops, indeed often not even vegetables: whence they murmured, and so God gave them manna, as is clear from Exodus 16:3.
Morally, learn here that God feeds those whom He afflicts with want with manna, that is, spiritual food, so that those who fast in the belly may be refreshed in the mind; and that those who lack earthly consolations may abound in heavenly ones. Conversely, those who abound in human consolations are deprived of divine ones; hence the children of Israel, as soon as they tasted the produce of the land of Canaan, lost the manna from heaven, Joshua 5:12. So Jacob, poor and wretched, fleeing Esau, saw the ladder reaching to heaven and God leaning upon it, Genesis 28:12. So St. John, afflicted by hunger and hardships in exile, saw those sublime mysteries of the Apocalypse. So Stephen at his stoning saw Jesus standing at the right hand of the power of God. Hence Christ assigns to John's disciples this sign of Himself foretold by Isaiah: "The poor have the Gospel preached to them," Matthew 11:5. And St. James, epistle chapter 2, verse 5: "Has not God," he says, "chosen the poor in this world, rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which God has promised to those who love Him?" "Thus the Religious is poor in his cell, rich in his conscience," says St. Bernard. And the Apostle, 2 Corinthians 4, having said in verse 8: "In all things we suffer tribulation, but are not distressed; we are in want, but are not forsaken," adds in verse 16: "Although our outward man is corrupted, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation works above measure in sublime fashion an eternal weight of glory in us."
Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone
TO SHOW YOU THAT MAN DOES NOT LIVE BY BREAD ALONE (for He sustained you in the desert for 40 years without bread, through manna), BUT BY EVERY WORD THAT PROCEEDS FROM THE MOUTH OF GOD. -- In Hebrew: "by everything that comes from the mouth of the Lord shall man live," meaning: Man will live by whatever thing the Lord has commanded or ordained for the sustaining of human life, as the Jews lived on manna; to such an extent, says Abulensis, that if God commanded us to eat serpents, basilisks, stones, bronze, etc., we would be better nourished by them than by the most delicate foods; indeed, if He willed or commanded it, we would live without any food at all; as Simeon Stylites spent twenty-eight Lenten periods without food or drink, and Christ lived forty days without food in the desert, and to the devil tempting Him to gluttony He responded with these very words: "Man does not live by bread alone," etc. So also Elijah, Moses, and others lived for a long time without food. Something similar happens even now in saints who, intent on prayer and contemplation, are nourished by spiritual delights that extinguish the memory and appetite for food and sensible things. So Cassian, Collation 19, chapter 4, reports of Abbot John that, occupied with spiritual delights, he could not remember whether he had eaten the day before or not.
Note this Hebraism: "A word went forth from someone," or "from the mouth of someone," that is, it pleased him, it was his will, or it was his decree. So Laban says with his household, Genesis 24:50: "The matter has gone forth from the Lord; we cannot speak anything to you beyond His pleasure," meaning: it pleases the Lord that Rebecca should marry Isaac; we cannot and should not resist God's good pleasure. And Jeremiah 44:17, the wicked Jews say: "We will do every word that shall come forth from our mouth," that is, everything that pleases us.
Mystically, St. Ambrose on Luke 4 says: Man lives by every word of God, that is, by the nourishment of the heavenly word, by which the soul is fed, and in comparison to which bodily hunger is to be disregarded; and such a word is, first, Christ; second, Sacred Scripture; third, prayer and the inspiration of God. Some wish this to be the literal sense, but from what has been said it is clear that it is the mystical sense.
Verse 4: Your Garment Did Not Wear Out
4. YOUR GARMENT WITH WHICH YOU WERE COVERED DID NOT WEAR OUT FROM AGE. -- Because, says Ibn Ezra, manna was of such a temperament that it did not produce sweat, by which garments become worn and deteriorate. But this alone was not sufficient here; for garments are worn out by use alone, especially if one is traveling. It was therefore a miraculous solidity, granted by God to the garments of the Hebrews for forty years, so that they would in no way be torn or worn out. Hence it further appears that these garments grew with the children; for otherwise they would not have fitted their growing bodies, and so the Hebrews, having grown larger, would have had to go about naked -- for where could each individual in so great a number have obtained other garments? So says Abulensis. Likewise the garments of St. Apollonius (who was the father of 500 monks, a man of wondrous holiness) did not grow old, says Palladius in the Lausiac History, chapter 52, although he lived in the desert of the Thebaid for 40 years, just like the Hebrews.
God granted a similar miracle to St. Abraham the Hermit, which St. Ephrem, who was his intimate companion, recounts in his Life: "His appearance," he says, "was like a rose in bloom; for by divine grace he was sustained in all things, and he enjoyed the delight of spiritual joy. Indeed, even in the hour of his falling asleep, he was seen with so beautiful a countenance that it was as if he had been attended by a company of angels. But another admirable grace of God was seen in him: that in all his fifty years of abstinence, he never changed the hair-shirt garment with which he had been clothed, and it served him so faithfully to the very end of his life that others afterwards were able to share in that same garment which had already served him when it was old." The meritorious cause of this integrity of body and garments was the integrity and constancy of his mind. "For throughout the entire time of his conversion he never swerved from the rule of his way of life, nor did any day in all those years pass without his tears. No oil approached his body, nor did he ever wash his face or feet with water. He conducted himself in the struggle of his way of life as though he were about to die each day. In that admirable abstinence of his, and constant vigils, and floods of tears, and sleeping on the ground, and mortification of the body, he never became more relaxed or feebler, nor was he wearied by any sluggishness or tedium: but like one hungering or thirsting, his mind could never be sated with the sweetness of his way of life."
So St. Mary of Egypt lived in the desert for 47 years, subsisting for the first seventeen on two loaves of bread (which she had brought with her) and herbs, and spending the remaining thirty without food, and with her clothes worn out she was naked, scorched by cold and heat so that she looked like an Ethiopian woman. Hence she said to Zosimas: "Food, drink, and clothing for me is the word of God; because man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." And Job 24, according to the Septuagint: "Because they had no clothing, they wrapped themselves in rock." And St. Paul the First Hermit, dying at the age of 113, said to St. Antony: "Behold, the one whom you sought with so much labor, with limbs rotting with old age, covered by unkempt white hair; behold, you see a man who will soon be dust; but since the time of my falling asleep is now at hand, and, what I always desired -- to depart and be with Christ -- with the race finished, there remains for me the crown of justice: you have been sent by the Lord to cover my poor body with earth, indeed to return earth to earth." So says St. Jerome in the Life of St. Paul.
Among the Jews there is a tradition that their ancestors, while in Egypt, did not change three things they had received from their forebears: namely, their names, their language, and their garments. So reports our Serarius on Joshua 2, Question 25.
Your Foot Was Not Worn Raw
YOUR FOOT WAS NOT WORN RAW. -- In Hebrew: "did not swell," meaning: Your foot neither swelled nor was injured or worn. For travelers are accustomed to develop swollen blisters on their feet, which first inflate before they are rubbed raw; and again, by walking for a long time, they wear away the skin of their feet.
You may object: In Numbers 11:1 it says that the people were in pain because of the labor of the journey. I answer: That labor was slight -- namely, some fatigue, but not injury to the feet. Add that this labor was not so much the cause as the pretext for their murmuring, as I said there. Finally, that was a single instance of labor on one particular occasion or day; for we do not read that they labored on the remaining days thereafter. So says Abulensis; indeed, that all were strong and vigorous for the journey is sufficiently indicated by the Psalmist, Psalm 104:37, when he says: "There was no one feeble among their tribes."
Second: "Your foot was not worn raw" -- "foot," that is, shoe, both because "foot," i.e. shoe, is here contrasted with "garment," and because Moses explains it thus in Deuteronomy 29, saying: "Your garments were not worn out, nor were the sandals of your feet consumed with age." So in Ecclesiastes 21:3 [Exodus 21:3], the Hebrew word gaph, that is "body," is taken for clothing of the body, whence our translator renders: "with whatever garment (in Hebrew it is gaph, that is, with whatever body) he entered, with such let him go out." So in Isaiah 41:3: "The path shall not appear at his feet" -- "at his feet," that is, in his muddy and worn-out shoes. So saraballa in Chaldean means legs and leg-coverings, as St. Jerome attests in Daniel 3. So Sanchez, Prolegomena to the Canticle.
BEHOLD, IT IS NOW THE FORTIETH YEAR -- since we came out of Egypt and have continuously received from God these benefits of garments and health.
Verse 9: Whose Stones Are Iron
9. WHOSE STONES (of the land of Canaan) ARE IRON -- meaning: In Canaan there are iron mines, from which stones and masses of ore are extracted, from which iron is smelted.
Verse 10: You Shall Bless the Lord
10. SO THAT WHEN YOU HAVE EATEN AND ARE SATISFIED, YOU MAY BLESS THE LORD. -- Jews even now at their banquets use a long blessing and thanksgiving, and indeed at feasts they bless the cup separately and the bread separately; moreover, at table whenever something new and fine is brought, they repeat the blessing, so that when fine wine, or spices, or fruits of trees, etc. are served, they say: "Blessed are You, O Lord our God and Creator, who are good and do good to all, who created this delicious wine, these spices, these fruits," etc., as is evident from their book of ritual. Hence Christ too, both on other occasions and at the Last Supper He gave thanks and blessed both the cup and the bread. And the Apostle, 1 Timothy 4:3, says that the foods which God created are to be received with thanksgiving. "Because every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving. For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer." See what was said there.
Verse 15: The Dipsas Snake
15. IN WHICH THERE WAS, etc., THE DIPSAS SNAKE. -- The Chaldean translator renders this as "a place of thirst"; more recent translators render it "dryness"; but the Septuagint and the Hebrew agree with our translator: tsimmaon, derived from tsimma, that is, from thirst; whence Isidore, Book 12 of the Etymologies, chapter 14: The dipsas, he says, is called in Latin situla (i.e. "water bucket"), namely from thirst; for dipsas snakes are called the most harmful of serpents, because those bitten by them immediately become parched and burn with thirst: wherefore, drinking water incessantly, they finally burst and shatter. Solinus treats of these in his Polyhistor, in the chapter on Africa, and other historians, especially those who write about the army of Cato in Libya, where this kind of serpent lurks beneath heaps of sand: they relate that a soldier bitten by a dipsas ran with insane urgency to the sea, and after drinking a great quantity of salt water, suddenly expired. Great therefore was God's providence and benevolence toward the Hebrews, that for forty years they were not harmed by these serpents, which abound in the desert.
Verse 16: After He Afflicted and Tested You
16. AND AFTER HE AFFLICTED AND TESTED YOU. -- In Hebrew: "to afflict and test you, and thus at last to do you good." But the sense amounts to the same thing, namely: First God afflicted and tested you through thirst and hunger; but immediately afterward, by giving water and manna, He had mercy on you: this is clear from what precedes.
Verse 17: Lest You Say in Your Heart
17. LEST YOU SAY IN YOUR HEART: "MY STRENGTH AND THE POWER OF MY HAND HAVE BROUGHT ME ALL THESE THINGS." -- Therefore Seneca errs when he says: "It is a gift of the immortal gods that we live, but of philosophy that we live well"; and that man who said to Jupiter: "Give me strength, give me wealth; a calm mind I shall provide for myself."
Note: God allows His own people to be brought into straits, so as to teach them to distrust themselves and their own strength, and to trust in God; hence all Israel prays as Holofernes approaches, Judith 6: "Show, O Lord, that You do not abandon those who trust in You, and that You humble those who glory in their own strength"; for, as Proverbs 18:10 says: "The name of the Lord is a most strong tower: the just man runs to it and is exalted"; and Psalm 30, verse 5: "Blessed is the man whose hope is the name of the Lord," so also Judas Maccabeus, having invoked the Lord, struck down Nicanor and other enemies, 2 Maccabees chapter 15.
St. Basil teaches, in his Institutes on the Perfect Life, that the servants of God are assailed by the devil with various temptations, but that those are overcome who trust in themselves more than is right; for, as Serapion says in Cassian, Collation 5, chapter 4: "It is impossible for anyone to earn a triumph over any passion whatsoever, before he has understood that he cannot obtain a victory over the devil even once by his own industry or labor"; and Jeremiah chapter 17: "Cursed," he says, "is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his arm." St. Augustine in his Soliloquies, chapter 15: "I believed," he says, "that I was something when I was nothing; I thought myself wise, and I was deceived; I said I was rich and had need of nothing, and I did not know that I was poor, blind, naked, and wretched. But now I see that whatever good there is, small or great, is Your gift. I believed I was sufficient unto myself, and I did not perceive that You were governing me, until You withdrew Yourself from me a little, and immediately I fell into myself, and that I rose again was from You."
Hence the prayer of David, Psalm 17:2: "I will love You, O Lord, my strength; the Lord is my rock, my refuge, and my deliverer." Following David's example, the holy Fathers in the desert, as Cassian attests in Collation 10, chapter 10, at the very beginning of any temptation or action would immediately pray: "O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me." The Church uses the same verse at the beginning of the Canonical Hours: Cassian there gives the reason. And St. Paul, Philippians 2: "God is He who works in you both to will and to accomplish"; and chapter 4: "I can do all things in Him who strengthens me"; and 2 Corinthians 2: "But thanks be to God, who always makes us triumph in Christ Jesus"; and St. James, chapter 1: "Every best gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights." And the Poet: "In Him we live and move and have our being." "For," as St. Augustine says, Book 4 of On Genesis Literally, chapter 12, "the world could not stand even for the blink of an eye if God withdrew His governance from it."