1. And this is the blessing that Moses . . . blessed the Israelites before his death. This second, concluding poem is placed exactly in the same position, just before the end of the book, as Jacob’s blessings before his death to the twelve future tribes. There are some precise echoes of Jacob’s blessing here (compare verses 13, 15, and 16 with Genesis 49:25 and 26.) There are also some parallels to the Song of Deborah. These correspondences suggest that in the premonarchic period there may have been an oral reservoir of poetic sayings about the tribes from which poets could draw to celebrate them. The archaic nature of the language and the political situation envisaged by the poem argue for its origins in the era before the monarchy was established. Judah here (in contrast to Genesis 49) is not represented as the tribe of kings. The poem appears to assume some form of national federation of all twelve tribes. The centralization of the cult at a single national site, one of the great themes of Deuteronomy, is nowhere implied: on the contrary, Zebulun and Issachar are said to offer sacrifices in their tribal territory (verse 19). Finally, because of the antiquity of the poem, the text shows signs of having been mangled at several points—the most egregious of these will be noted below—and at these junctures all efforts to rescue intelligible meaning from the reading that has come down to us are liable to be unavailing.

2. from Sinai. This poem, like the Song of Deborah and a few psalms, registers what looks like an early tribal memory that the grand inception of YHWH’s relationship with Israel was to the south, in the Sinai peninsula and in a series of associated sites, though there are some indications in the poetic texts that Mount Sinai might have been placed in northern Arabia.

He shone. This choice of verb, like the preceding “dawned,” reflects an early biblical poetic notion of the LORD’s powerful appearance in awesome refulgence.

appeared from Ribeboth-Kodesh. It is safest to construe the last term here as an otherwise unattested place-name, although some scholars understand it as “the myriads of Kadesh” or “the myriads of holy ones.” The verb for “apppeared” (or “came”) is the Hebrew cognate of the Aramaic ʾatah, which in early biblical Hebrew is restricted to poetic diction.

fire-bolts for them. The Hebrew ʾeshdat, anachronistically construed by later Hebrew exegetes to mean “fire of the law,” is not intelligible. Since God in biblical poetry, following Canaanite conventions, is often represented coming down to earth hurling lightning bolts as His weapons, this translation embraces the proposal that the text originally read ʾesh d[oleq]et (burning, or racing, fire) or something similar.

3. Yes, lover of peoples is He. This entire verse is one of the most problematic in the poem. Its principal difficulties: the epithet “lover of peoples” for God is peculiar, and one is constrained by the nationalist character of the poem to understand “peoples” as “the tribes.” The lines lurch from third-person to second-person references to God, leaving some doubt as to where the poet is talking about God and where about Israel. The verb rendered as “flung down” is uncertain of meaning. It is not entirely clear who the “holy ones” are and what is meant by “he bears Your utterances.” The inevitable conclusion is that this verse suffered serious damage in transmission.

4. A teaching. Since Moses here is referred to in the third person, the simplest way to understand this without emending the line is as an exclamation of the people—hence the quotation marks in the translation.

5. when the chiefs of the people gathered, / all together the tribes of Israel. The poet clearly envisages a grand assembly of all the tribes—an obviously premonarchic event—to confirm God’s kingship over Israel. (Jeshurun is of course an epithet for Israel.) This flourish concludes the introductory section of the poem and sets us up for the blessings of the tribes one by one.

6. Let Reuben . . . not die, / though his menfolk be but few. These urgent words, more prayer than blessing, obviously reflect a moment in early Israelite history when the tribe of Reuben, inhabiting territory east of the Jordan, habitually threatened by marauders, perhaps also in the process of being swallowed up by neighboring Gad, appeared to run the risk of extinction.

7. to his people You shall bring him. Jeffrey H. Tigay plausibly suggests that the reference is to bringing him back safe from battle. The next line in fact invokes combat.

8. Your Thummim and Your Urim. These oracular devices (see the comment on Exodus 28:30) appear in all other occurrences with Urim in first position. Perhaps the reversal was encouraged by the poetic form.

whom You tested at Massah. The story of the waters of Massah and Meribah (Exodus 17:2–7) makes no mention of a crucial role for the Levites. One may infer that this early poem drew on a narrative tradition not reflected in the story told in the Torah.

9. who says of his father and mother. The reference is obscure, but this sounds rather like the Levites’ ruthless denial of kinfolk in playing the role of the LORD’s avengers in the episode of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:26–29). Perhaps this same motif was attached to the Levites in an early story about Massah and Meribah that did not survive elsewhere.

11. Smash the loins. This violent image of martial triumph does not accord with the later sacerdotal role of the Levites, which exempted them from military duty. What it may pick up is the preceding allusion to the Levites as YHWH’s special militia, wielding their swords against all who betrayed him, even against their own kin.

12. between His shoulders he dwells. This appears to be an image of Benjamin carried on God’s shoulders. Rashi and others link the image with the proximity of Benjamin’s tribal territory to the Temple in Jerusalem, but that seems doubtful—especially because this poem does not envisage a central sanctuary.

13. Blessed of the LORD is his land. The tribal territory of Joseph was obviously proverbial for its fertility, and the language of the blessing to Joseph here strongly echoes the wording of Jacob’s blessing for Joseph in Genesis 49, which similarly invokes the heavens above the watery deep (tehom) below, and the bounty of hills everlasting.

from dew. Some manuscripts read meʿal, “above,” instead of the Masoretic mital, “from dew.” The attraction of that reading is that it makes a perfect parallelism with “below” at the end of the next verset.

16. the bush-dwelling One. This unique kenning for God is justified by the fact that it is Moses who is speaking. Moses first encountered God in the burning bush, and this poem begins by announcing that the LORD has come from Sinai—the mountain on which the bush (seneh) grew.

17. His firstborn bull is his glory. The idea of the firstborn bull as an embodiment of fierce power is clear enough, but the antecedent of “his” is ambiguous. Some attach it to Jacob, Joseph’s father, but Joseph was not Jacob’s firstborn, though he was Rachel’s firstborn. The most likely candidate is Joseph himself, the image of the goring bull representing his son Ephraim, who displaces the firstborn (see Genesis 48) and thus has “myriads” while his brother Manasseh has only “thousands.”

the ends of the earth. There is an ellipsis here. The sense is: “he gores peoples, / all together [the inhabitants of] the ends of the earth.”

and they are. This explains the reference of the bull metaphor. The myriads and the thousands are of course the subject, not the object, of the goring.

18. Rejoice, Zebulun, when you go out / and Issachar, in your tents. The bracketing of these two tribes under one blessing, and in one poetic parallelism, is unique in this poem. It seems plausible that these two neighboring tribes, both offspring of Leah, were so intertwined at an early point in Israelite national history that it was deemed appropriate to join them in a single blessing.

19. Peoples they call to the mountain. Most commentators understand “peoples,” ʿamim, as a poetic designation of the tribes, but one cannot exclude the possibility that Zebulun and Issachar actually invited (the sense of “call” here) neighboring peoples to participate in their sacrifices. It is unclear what mountain the poet has in mind, though it would have to be in the northern Galilee.

the plenty of seas . . . the hidden treasures of sand. In light of what is known about the tribal territory of Zebulun and Issachar, the sea in question would be the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret). But “the hidden treasures of sand” must refer to the murex, from which the precious purple dye was extracted, and perhaps also to glass (Phoenicia was famous for both). These natural resources would bring us to the shore of the Mediterranean, not of Lake Kinneret. Some scholars have speculated that after Barak’s victory over the Canaanites (Judges 4), these two tribes may have expanded westward to the seacoast.

21. the prime. The Hebrew reʿshit usually means “beginning,” but it also has the sense of the choice part or best, which the next verset seems to require.

for there is the lot of the hidden chieftain. This entire clause, and the rest of the verse as well, is one of the most obscure moments in the poem. Many traditional interpreters take this as a reference to the burial site of Moses, but difficulties abound: it is implausible that Moses would speak of his own future burial place; the term “chieftain,” meḥoqeq (perhaps literally, “one who gives the statute”), is nowhere else linked with Moses, and some even think it actually refers here to a digging tool, as it appears to do in Numbers 21:18. These lines probably invoke a once well-known story, now irretrievably lost, about a hidden (or, in the term’s rabbinic sense, important) leader, or even about some legendary spade, which explains the eminence of Gad. We remain equally in the dark about what event is alluded to when Gad is praised for performing “the LORD’s benefaction, / and His judgments for Israel.”

24. bathe in oil his foot. Though this phrase might refer to an abundance of olive trees in Asher’s territory, rubbing oneself with oil was a way of taking pleasurable care of the body, a kind of ancient Near Eastern antecedent to modern body lotions.

25. Iron and bronze your gate-bolts. The noun minʿalim means “shoes” in rabbinic Hebrew. Rashi preserves this sense by understanding the whole clause metaphorically: your land is shod in iron and bronze by virtue of the mountains in it that yield those metals. It is more likely that the image is one of military security, and the verbal stem n-ʿ-l does mean “to lock.”

your might. The Hebrew noun dovʾe appears only here in the biblical corpus, and so one is compelled to infer its meaning from context. The inference of “might” is as old as Onkelos’s Aramaic translation, which renders the word as toqpakh.

26. There is none like the God of Jeshurun. The Masoretic vocalization, kaʾel yeshurun turns this into a vocative, “There’s none like God, O Jeshurun.” It seems more likely that this is an epithet for the God of Israel, keʾel yeshurun, the two nouns linked in the construct state. In any case, this clause signals the summarizing movement of the poem, the blessings of the individual tribes having been completed.

riding through heavens. The image of God as a celestial warrior, riding a cherub through the skies, is drawn from Canaanite poetry and appears a number of times in Psalms and elsewhere. It is worth noting that the word for “help,” ʿezer, often has the sense of “rescue” from military threat.

27. from beneath, the arms everlasting. That is, God embraces or physically supports Israel.

28. untroubled Jacob’s abode. The normal meaning of ʿeyn yaʿqov would be “Jacob’s well,” which makes little sense here. Most scholars construe the noun as a derivative of the root ʿ-w-n, “to abide,” which thus yields a neat parallelism with “Israel dwelled securely.” This same root is reflected in maʿon, “refuge,” at the beginning of verse 27.

29. rescued. This verb is frequently associated with military victory, and the rest of this verse emphatically confirms that sense. The poem concludes with a triumphalist flourish that is dictated by the geostrategic reality of the Land of Israel. The tribes may be blessed with an abundance of natural resources—grain and wine and oil and the treasures of the sea and its shore—but they are surrounded and interpenetrated by alien peoples with hostile intentions, so that in order to enjoy their land, they must above all be militarily powerful. This idea that the LORD is Israel’s shield and sword betrays none of the concern expressed in the Song of Moses that Israel will swerve from God’s covenant and be doomed to catastrophic defeat and exile as a punishment.

on their backs will tread. Although most biblical occurrences of the noun bamot use it in the sense of “high places,” it appears that the topographical meaning of the term was an extension of its original anatomical sense (i.e., the “backs” of hills). Job 9:8 describes God “trampl[ing] on the crest [or backs] of the sea,” probably a reference to His triumph over the primordial sea monster Yamm. The linking of exactly the same verb and noun here is a virtually iconographic representation of utterly subjugating a defeated enemy.