The Jewish orthodox sages and Rabbis understood the literalness of all of the Old Testament prophecies. Premillennialists and dispensationalists are in good company in seeing the Bible interpreted in a normal, literal hermeneutic. Someday, the eyes of the Jews will be open in seeing the Lord Jesus Christ as the promised Messiah. Meanwhile, their interpretative notes and commentaries on great prophetic passages continue to support the “rightness” of looking for future prophecy being fulfilled actually, and literally!
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Deuteronomy 28:63-68
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Sources:
The Pentateuch and Haftorahs.
Society and Religion in the Second Temple Period, Michael Avi-Yonah and Zvi Baras (Jerusalem: Massada Publishing, 1977).
The Messiah Texts, Raphael Patai (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1979).
Dictionary of Judaism in the Biblical Period, William Green, ed. (Peabody, MS: Hendrickson, 1999).
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Deuteronomy 28:63-68
Worldwide dispersion of the Jews Prophesied
28:63 This section, through verse 68, gives
the prophecy of the dispersion of the Jewish people, the climax of which
took place in AD 70, with the destruction of Jerusalem and the great
temple by the Romans. This brought about the final scattering of Israel
worldwide. The Jews have wandered throughout the nations until most
recently. Many started returning to the Holy Land, the Promised Land,
around the 1880s. This flow increased in the 1920s following the Balfour
Declaration in which the British government promised to carve out a
homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. The establishment of the
nation of Israel in 1947 brought about the near-complete restoration of
the Jews from around the world.
The Lord will delight over you. When a
son walks in the right way, it is the father’s joy to help him and to
show him kindness. If the son falls on evil ways, the father’s joy must
find some means—evil painful ones—to bring him back to the right path.
In like manner, God “rejoices” to bring upon sinful Israel the trials
and sufferings of exile, in order thereby to purify and elevate him, and
thus restore him to His favor.
28:64 The Lord will scatter you.
In 2 Kings 24 it is reported that Jehoiachin was carried away to Babylon
with 10,000 of his subjects.
Shall serve other gods. Being taken to a
pagan land would mean ultimate absorption into the religion, as well as
into the life, of heathenism. This happened to many of the Jews who went
into the Seventy-year Babylonian captivity, but not to all. A remnant
survived to return (50,000 total) over a one-hundred year period to
re-establish in Judah the city of Jerusalem and rebuild a temple. But
many, many ended up being scattered around the globe!
28:65 Among those nations. Israel
is to have no rest—never-ceasing anxiety, life in perpetual jeopardy, an
unendurable present, and a future of undefined terrors.
Failing of eyes. Usually taken to mean
the gradual extinction of all hope; or, the eyes refuse their function
of seeing, because they view only horror.
Despair of soul. A mind tortured and
restless.
28:66 Your life shall hang in doubt
before you. Like an object suspended by a tender thread and held in
front of one’s eyes—about to fall down and break at any moment; but in
the next comment, even worse!
No assurance of your life. “You shall
expect every moment to be your last.” (Driver) Better, “You shall not
believe in your life,” i.e. “You cannot believe that these things are
happening that are happening to you, that they are real; deluding
yourself with the vain hope that it is all an evil dream.” (Steinthal)
28:67 In the morning you shall say …
Even as he that suffers acute pain yearns for the hours to pass.
This verse graphically depicts the agonized uncertainty, protracted by
day and by night. These things listed above were the continual
experiences of the Jewish people scattered among the Gentiles the last
two thousand years! The pogroms and holocausts that fell upon the Jewish
communities were horrible events!
28:68 And the Lord shall bring you
back to Egypt in ships. The Jews were to never go back to Egypt for
commercial purposes (see 17:16), but they would return in slavery. This
would happen in AD 70 when the temple was destroyed. Josephus reports
that the prophecy of this verse (28:68) was fulfilled before his very
eyes when 97,000 young Jewish men and women were chained together and
taken to work the salt mines in Egypt as slaves. At the destruction of
Jerusalem by the Romans, both Titus and Hadrian consigned multitudes of
Jews into slavery with Egypt receiving a large proportion of them.
Under Moses, 600,000 Jews came out of Egypt in
1445 BC on foot. They became a disciplined force in the desert, but now
it is predicted they would be carried back cooped up in slave ships. The
Romans had a fleet in the Mediterranean, and this was an easier and
safer way of transporting prisoners than by land across the sands.
Shall offer yourselves for sale. You
will in vain seek and yearn to be bought as man-servants and maid
servants. (Rashi)
But there will be no buyer. Josephus
records that when at the destruction of the temple, the Roman troops
grew weary of slaughter, and 97,000 of the younger prisoners were
spared. Those over seventeen years were sent to the mines, or the arenas
to fight as gladiators or against wild animals; those under seventeen
were sold as slaves; but the market was so glutted that, though offered
at nominal prices, none would buy them! Those who remained un-purchased
were sent into confinement, where they perished by hundreds and
thousands from hunger.
Of course, those who were taken, which was
almost all the Jews of the city of Jerusalem, “will never see it (the
land) again!”
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Sources:
The Pentateuch and Haftorahs.
Society and Religion in the Second Temple Period, Michael Avi-Yonah and Zvi Baras (Jerusalem: Massada Publishing, 1977).
The Messiah Texts, Raphael Patai (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1979).
Dictionary of Judaism in the Biblical Period, William Green, ed. (Peabody, MS: Hendrickson, 1999).
