“You are to write on the stones all the words of this Torah very clearly.”
-Deuteronomy 27:8
We’re told in verse 8 that the teachings of HASHEM through Moses were to be written “very clearly” on the plastered stones.
The original Hebrew here is BA’ER HEITEV.
A literal rendering would be…
…”setting it out well”.
The idea is that the words were to be inscribed in such a way that the letters were big, clear and very easy-to-read.
However, there is more nuance to BA’ER HEITEV and the ancient Jewish sages have done some incredible work on this topic that sheds much light on the Lord’s true intent behind this instruction.
Here’s the situation.
The Lord wanted to make sure these words of the Torah were written in such a way that anyone whether common or privileged would be able to understand their meaning.
This was another one of those areas where Israel separated themselves from the gentile nations.
In the religious mindset of most Middle Eastern cultures of that time, God’s words were normally rendered in some “mystical” form that ONLY God’s direct servants or priests were able to correctly decipher.
The belief promoted was that only the priests were entitled to have direct access to a god’s divine words and only the priests could correctly understand them.
The objective of course was to control the people.
Because if it was only the priesthood who possessed the divine words and even if these words were displayed publicly, that meant whatever the priests said was truth and thus any and all forms of dissent could easily be quelled.
However, this was not to be the case in Israel.
The words inscribed on the plastered stones were to be written in plain easy-to-understand language that even the most common man in Israel would be able to understand.
This would demonstrate that the Lord’s Torah was to be possessed by all of Israel (and all those who would be grafted in to Israel) and NOT just some privileged or priestly class.
We’ll continue this discussion the next time we meet.
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