Twenty-Two Commentaries on One Verse

Twenty-two, and he could name every one of them.

Six in translation. Four he reads in the original because he can. Three of them are older than the printing press and one is a single paragraph by a man whose whole surviving output is eleven pages, and that paragraph has been in his head for two years.

All of it on one verse. The same verse, since a Tuesday in autumn three years ago when he read it and could not move past it.

He has a document. Cross-referenced. He knows where the argument turns and which of the twenty-two are talking past each other and which two are secretly saying the same thing in different centuries.

And a man he knows lost his job in May.

Not a friend, exactly. Somebody from the same building, a nodding acquaintance for six years, with a family and a mortgage and the sort of pride that means he will not say anything.

He knows about it because somebody mentioned it.

And the verse he has spent three years and twenty-two commentaries on is about exactly this. Not vaguely. Precisely, in its plain sense, on any of the twenty-two readings, on the reading he himself would defend.

He noticed that in June and he has not been able to un-notice it since.

Last week he opened the document to add something and looked at the file name, which has a version number in it, and it is up to eleven.

The word is very near, and the last three words are the ones nobody quotes

Let me be honest about the twenty-two, because they are not a joke and treating them as one would be a cheap way to write this.

Three years on one verse is not dilettantism. Reading four of them in the original is real work that most people cannot do, and the paragraph by the man with eleven surviving pages has been in your head for two years because it deserves to be. Nothing here is telling you that this was wasted or that a careful mind is a liability.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a rebuke: the verse is not far off and it never was, and the distance you have put between yourself and it is not scholarly distance, it is just distance. That is not my sharp reading of a long project, it is what stands written in Deuteronomy, in the sentence that says exactly this and then ends in three words that almost nobody quotes, and the same Holy Spirit who put that ending there was with you when you looked at the version number last week.

Read it whole, and stay to the end of it.

No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.Deuteronomy 30:14

So you may obey it.

That is the purpose clause and it is the last thing in the sentence. The nearness is not so that it may be understood, and not so that it may be discussed well, though both of those are good. It is near, in the mouth and the heart, in order that it may be done.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a twenty-third reading: you have that verse in your mouth and in your heart already, more thoroughly than almost anybody alive, because the written word says it is very near and puts obedience as the reason for the nearness, and the Spirit of God is the one who has not let you un-notice May since June.

Now let me name what version eleven is, and I will say it plainly because you would see through anything else.

The document has become the way you handle that verse without being handled by it. Every new reading is a genuine contribution and it also postpones the plain sense by another few weeks, and the plain sense has a man in it with a mortgage and no job and too much pride to say anything.

You are not avoiding the verse. You are the world expert on it. That is what makes this a subtler trap than laziness, and it is why nobody around you can see it, and it is why it has held for three years.

And here is what the passage does to that. It says the word is not up in heaven so that somebody would have to go and fetch it, and not across the sea so that somebody would have to cross for it. It rules out distance twice, and then it names the mouth and the heart, and then it says why. What is written closes every escape route into remoteness, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to master it further before you obey it once.