Psalms 81:10-12

81:10 I am the Lord, your God,

the one who brought you out of the land of Egypt.

Open your mouth wide and I will fill it!’

81:11 But my people did not obey me; ¹ 

Israel did not submit to me. ² 

81:12 I gave them over to their stubborn desires; ³ 

they did what seemed right to them. ⁴ 

Exodus 19:5-6

19:5 And now, if you will diligently listen to me ⁵  and keep ⁶  my covenant, then you will be my ⁷  special possession ⁸  out of all the nations, for all the earth is mine, 19:6 and you will be to me ⁹  a kingdom of priests ¹⁰  and a holy nation.’ ¹¹  These are the words that you will speak to the Israelites.”

Deuteronomy 26:17-18

26:17 Today you have declared the Lord to be your God, and that you will walk in his ways, keep his statutes, commandments, and ordinances, and obey him. 26:18 And today the Lord has declared you to be his special people (as he already promised you) so you may keep all his commandments.

Deuteronomy 26:1

Presentation of the First Fruits

26:1 When ¹²  you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, and you occupy it and live in it,

Deuteronomy 12:22-25

12:22 Like you eat the gazelle or ibex, so you may eat these; the ritually impure and pure alike may eat them. 12:23 However, by no means eat the blood, for the blood is life itself ¹³  – you must not eat the life with the meat! 12:24 You must not eat it! You must pour it out on the ground like water. 12:25 You must not eat it so that it may go well with you and your children after you; you will be doing what is right in the Lord’s sight. ¹⁴ 

[81:11]  ¹ tn Heb “did not listen to my voice.”

[81:11]  ² tn The Hebrew expression אָבָה לִי (’avah liy) means “submit to me” (see Deut 13:8).

[81:12]  ³ tn Heb “and I sent him away in the stubbornness of their heart.”

[81:12]  ⁴ tn Heb “they walked in their counsel.” The prefixed verbal form is either preterite (“walked”) or a customary imperfect (“were walking”).

[19:5]  ⁵ tn Heb “listen to my voice.” The construction uses the imperfect tense in the conditional clause, preceded by the infinitive absolute from the same verb. The idiom “listen to the voice of” implies obedience, not just mental awareness of sound.

[19:5]  ⁶ tn The verb is a perfect tense with vav (ו) consecutive; it continues the idea in the protasis of the sentence: “and [if you will] keep.”

[19:5]  ⁷ tn The lamed preposition expresses possession here: “to me” means “my.”

[19:5]  ⁸ tn The noun is סְגֻלָּה (sÿgullah), which means a special possession. Israel was to be God’s special possession, but the prophets will later narrow it to the faithful remnant. All the nations belong to God, but Israel was to stand in a place of special privilege and enormous responsibility. See Deut 7:6; 14:2; 26:18; Ps 135:4; and Mal 3:17. See M. Greenburg, “Hebrew sÿgulla: Akkadian sikiltu,” JAOS 71 (1951): 172ff.

[19:6]  ⁹ tn Or “for me” (NIV, NRSV), or, if the lamed (ל) preposition has a possessive use, “my kingdom” (so NCV).

[19:6]  ¹⁰ tn The construction “a kingdom of priests” means that the kingdom is made up of priests. W. C. Kaiser (“Exodus,” EBC 2:417) offers four possible renderings of the expression: 1) apposition, viz., “kings, that is, priests; 2) as a construct with a genitive of specification, “royal priesthood”; 3) as a construct with the genitive being the attribute, “priestly kingdom”; and 4) reading with an unexpressed “and” – “kings and priests.” He takes the latter view that they were to be kings and priests. (Other references are R. B. Y. Scott, “A Kingdom of Priests (Exodus xix. 6),” OTS 8 [1950]: 213-19; William L. Moran, “A Kingdom of Priests,” The Bible in Current Catholic Thought, 7-20). However, due to the parallelism of the next description which uses an adjective, this is probably a construct relationship. This kingdom of God will be composed of a priestly people. All the Israelites would be living wholly in God’s service and enjoying the right of access to him. And, as priests, they would have the duty of representing God to the nations, following what they perceived to be the duties of priests – proclaiming God’s word, interceding for people, and making provision for people to find God through atonement (see Deut 33:9,10).

[19:6]  ¹¹ tn They are also to be “a holy nation.” They are to be a nation separate and distinct from the rest of the nations. Here is another aspect of their duty. It was one thing to be God’s special possession, but to be that they had to be priestly and holy. The duties of the covenant will specify what it would mean to be a holy nation. In short, they had to keep themselves free from everything that characterized pagan people (S. R. Driver, Exodus, 171). So it is a bilateral covenant: they received special privileges but they must provide special services by the special discipline. See also H. Kruse, “Exodus 19:5 and the Mission of Israel,” North East Asian Journal of Theology 24/25 (1980): 239-42.

[26:1]  ¹² tn Heb “and it will come to pass that.”

[12:23]  ¹³ sn The blood is life itself. This is a figure of speech (metonymy) in which the cause or means (the blood) stands for the result or effect (life). That is, life depends upon the existence and circulation of blood, a truth known empirically but not scientifically tested and proved until the 17th century a.d. (cf. Lev 17:11).

[12:25]  ¹⁴ tc Heb “in the eyes of the Lord.” The LXX adds “your God” to create the common formula, “the Lord your God.” The MT is preferred precisely because it does not include the stereotyped formula; thus it more likely preserves the original text.