6. Thou shalt not seek, etc.] So Ezra 9:12 of the peoples of the land. But Jeremiah (Jeremiah 29:7) counselled the exiled Jews to seek the peace of Babylonia. The spirit of his counsel is as much in advance of the spirit of this law, as Isaiah 56:3 ff. is in advance of Deuteronomy 33:1.

7, 8 (8, 9). Edomites and Egyptians are not to be abominated; the one people is Israel’s blood-brother (unlike Moab and Ammon), the other was his host; their third generation may enter the congregation.—Here too there is no reason against an early date.

The political hostility of Israel to Edom, fierce before the Exile, was then and after still fiercer. But their kinship was an old tradition and this law like the others of the group reflects not a political situation but a religious principle. The attitude to Egypt appears to conflict with the feeling usual in D that the Egyptians had only been the enslavers of Israel—house of bondmen, fiery furnace, etc. Yet D also elsewhere remembers that the poor and weak nomad, who was the father of Israel, became in Egypt a great nation (Deuteronomy 26:5); and further the admission into Israel of the third generation of an Egyptian was apparently already allowed in the 7th cent. b.c. (see on Deuteronomy 33:8). Thus the Maccabean date, proposed for this law by Berth., is unnecessary.

6. On the whole this seems the most probable rendering of a—perhaps intentionally—ambiguous oracle. Others take the second line differently:—but let his men be few as reflecting the actual condition of the tribe (Driver); nor let his men be few (Graf) continuing the influence of the previous negative, but see Driver’s note against this; so that his men be few (Dillm., Steuern., etc.), which is much the same as the paraphrase above. Heb. let his men be a number, an idiom elsewhere used only of a small number (see on Deuteronomy 4:27) so that the suggested let his men be numerous (cp. LXX) is improbable.—In Genesis 49:4 Reuben though the firstborn shall not have the excellency; see the notes there. In Jdg 5:16 the tribe is scorned for its failure to join the others against the Canaanites, and except for 1 Chronicles 5:3-10 does not again appear in Israel’s history. Nor does Mesha of Moab, 9th cent. b.c., name it. The oracle is therefore probably earlier than that date.

LXX A, etc., read Let Simeon be many in number, and Heilprin (Hist. Poetry of the Ancient Hebrews. i. 113 ff.) supported by Bacon (Triple Tradition of the Exodus, 271 f.) conjectures that the first couplet of the next blessing in Judah was originally of Simeon with a play upon his name: Hear—shema‘—the voice of Shime‘on and bring him in unto his people, and takes the rest of 7 along with Deuteronomy 33:11 as the original oracle on Judah, in a place more suitable to that tribe, after Levi and immediately before Benjamin. The hypothesis is clever. Yet the introduction of Simeon in a few codd. of the LXX may be a later attempt to fill up the number of the 12 tribes; while on the other hand the absence of Simeon from the poem is explicable by the fortunes of the tribe; cursed in Genesis 49:7; absorbed in Judah, Joshua 19:1-9, 1 Chronicles 4:24 ff., and otherwise absent from the history of Israel. Had Simeon been mentioned originally, he could hardly have dropped out.

7 And this of Judah, and he said:—

Hear, Lord, the voice of Judah!

And bring him in to his people.

His own hands have striven for him,

But Thou shalt be help from his foes.

6–25. The Blessing Proper

6 Re’ubén, may he live and not die,

Though few be his men.

Verses 6-25. - Blessings on the tribes individually. With these may be compared the blessing which Jacob pronounced on his sons as representing the tribes of which they were the heads. The two resemble each other in many points; the differences are such as naturally arose from the different relations of the speakers to the objects of their address, and the changes in the condition and prospects of the tribes which during the lapse of centuries had come to pass. Verse 6. - And let not his men be few. The negative, though not expressed in the Hebrew, is to be carried into this clause from the preceding. Though the rights of primogeniture had been withdrawn from Reuben, and Jacob had declared that he should not excel, Moses here assures the tribe of continuance, and even prosperity. Their number was not to be small; which was, perhaps, said to comfort them, in view of the fact that their numbers had greatly diminished in the course of their wanderings in the desert (comp. Numbers 1:21 with Numbers 26:7). At no time, however, was this tribe numerous as compared with the others; nor was it ever distinguished either by the enterprise of its members or by the eminence of any of them in the councils of the nation or the management of affairs. Deuteronomy 33:6The blessings upon the tribes commence with this verse. "Let Reuben live and not die, and there be a (small) number of his men." The rights of the first-born had been withheld from Reuben in the blessing of Jacob (Genesis 49:3); Moses, however, promises this tribe continuance and prosperity. The words, "and let his men become a number," have been explained in very different ways. מספּר in this connection cannot mean a large number (πολὺς ἐν ἀριθμῷ, lxx), but, like מספּר מתי (Deuteronomy 4:27; Genesis 34:30; Jeremiah 44:28), simply a small number, that could easily be counted (cf. Deuteronomy 28:62). The negation must be carried on to the last clause. This the language will allow, as the rule that a negation can only be carried forward when it stands with emphatic force at the very beginning (Ewald, 351) is not without exceptions; see for example Proverbs 30:2-3, where three negative clauses follow a positive one, and in the last the לא is omitted, without the particle of negation having been placed in any significant manner at the beginning. - Simeon was the next in age to Reuben; but he is passed over entirely, because according to Jacob's blessing (Genesis 49:7) he was to be scattered abroad in Israel, and lost his individuality as a tribe in consequence of this dispersion, in accordance with which the Simeonites simply received a number of towns within the territory of Judah (Joshua 19:2-9), and, "having no peculiar object of its own, took part, as far as possible, in the fate and objects of the other tribes, more especially of Judah" (Schultz). Although, therefore, it is by no means to be regarded as left without a blessing, but rather as included in the general blessings in Deuteronomy 33:1 and Deuteronomy 33:29, and still more in the blessing upon Judah, yet it could not receive a special blessing like the tribe of Reuben, because, as Ephraim Syrus observes, the Simeonites had not endeavoured to wipe out the stain of the crime which Jacob cursed, but had added to it by fresh crimes (more especially the audacious prostitution of Zimri, Numbers 25). Even the Simeonites did not become extinct, but continued to live in the midst of the tribe of Judah, so that as late as the eighth century, in the reign of Hezekiah, thirteen princes are enumerated with their families, whose fathers' houses had increased greatly (1 Chronicles 4:34.); and these families effected conquests in the south, even penetrating into the mountains of Seir, for the purpose of seeking fresh pasture (1 Chronicles 4:39-43). Hence the assertion that the omission of Simeon is only conceivable from the circumstances of a later age, is as mistaken as the attempt made in some of the MSS of the Septuagint to interpolate the name of Simeon in the second clause of Deuteronomy 33:6. Deuteronomy 33:6 Interlinear
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