The sun hung low and hot over the eastern bank of the Jordan, a great bronze coin melting into a haze of dust and distant hills. The air itself felt granular, thick with the smell of dry earth, animal hide, and the slow smoke of cookfires from a thousand family groups. Moses stood on a rise of flint-strewn ground, his back to the promised land. Before him, a sea of faces, weathered and young and everything between, watched him. They were not the generation that had trembled at Sinai. These were their children, born to wandering, their sandals worn thin on wilderness stone.

He cleared his throat, a sound like rock grinding on rock. His voice, when it came, did not boom. It was lower, frayed at the edges by forty years of wind and command, but it carried with a strange, pressing clarity on the still air.

“Listen,” he said, and the simple word stilled the murmur of goats and children. “Listen to the decrees and laws I am about to teach you. Follow them so that you may live. So that you may go in and take possession of the land the Lord, the God of your fathers, is giving you.”

He paused, his eyes scanning the crowd, seeing not just them, but the ghosts of their parents behind them. “Do not add to what I command you,” he said, his finger coming up, not in anger but in grave emphasis. “And do not subtract from it. You saw with your own eyes what the Lord did at Baal-Peor. The Lord your God destroyed from among you everyone who followed the Baal of Peor. But you who held fast to the Lord your God… you are all alive today.”

A few of the older ones nodded, their faces grim. They remembered the plague, the sudden silence in tents, the terrible cost of foreign altars.

Moses’s hands spread wide, empty. “See, I have taught you. Just as the Lord my God commanded me. Follow them in the land you are entering to possess. Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations. They will hear about all these decrees and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him?”

He let the question hang. The only sound was the flutter of a tent cloth. He was pulling them back, away from the riverbank, away from the fear of giants and walled cities, back to the mountain.

“And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of law I am setting before you today?” His voice dropped, became almost confidential, a grandfather telling a fearful story by the fire. “Only be careful. Watch yourselves closely. Do not forget the things your eyes have seen. Do not let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.”

He described it then, not as a theological event, but as a memory seared into the senses. “Remember the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb. The mountain burning with fire to the very heavens, with black clouds and deep darkness. The Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice.”

His own eyes seemed to look through the present, seeing that terrifying intimacy. “He declared his covenant to you. He gave you the ten words, writing them on two tablets of stone. And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you the decrees and laws you are to follow in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess.”

The warning that followed was sharp, urgent. “You saw no form of any kind the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb. Therefore, watch yourselves very carefully. Do not become corrupt and make for yourselves an idol, an image of any shape. Do not look up at the sky and see the sun or the moon or the stars and be drawn into bowing down to them. The Lord your God has allotted them to all the peoples under the heavens.”

His tone shifted, laced with a sorrow that felt personal, ancient. “But as for you, the Lord took you and brought you out of the iron-smelting furnace, out of Egypt, to be the people of his inheritance, as you now are.”

A sigh, heavy with years, escaped him. “The Lord was angry with me because of you. He swore that I would not cross the Jordan. I must die in this land. I will not cross over. But you will. You will cross over and take possession of that good land. Be careful not to forget the covenant of the Lord your God that he made with you. Do not make for yourselves an idol in the form of anything. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.”

He spoke then of scattering, of a future failure so real to him it was as if he could taste the ashes of it. He spoke of exile, of serving gods of wood and stone in foreign lands. “But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul. In your distress, when all these things have happened, you will return to the Lord your God and obey him. For the Lord your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your ancestors.”

The final plea was the softest, yet the most powerful. It was no longer the lawgiver, but an old man who had seen the fire and the cloud, and who loved this stubborn, chosen people.

“Ask now about the former days, long before your time, from the day God created human beings on the earth. Ask from one end of the heavens to the other. Has anything so great as this ever happened, or has anything like it ever been heard of? Has any other people heard the voice of God speaking out of fire, as you have, and lived? Or has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?”

Silence, profound and complete.

“You were shown these things so that you might know that the Lord is God; besides him there is no other. From heaven he made you hear his voice to discipline you. On earth he showed you his great fire, and you heard his words from out of the fire. Because he loved your ancestors, he chose you, their descendants.”

He took a step back, his strength seeming to ebb with the setting sun. The law was given. The choice was laid bare. The land lay just across the river, shimmering in the twilight, a gift wrapped in a warning.

“Acknowledge and take to heart this day that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth below. There is no other. Keep his decrees and commands, which I am giving you today, so that it may go well with you and your children after you, and that you may live long in the land the Lord your God gives you for all time.”

He turned then, slowly, and looked west across the darkening water. He did not speak again. The people dispersed to their tents, the words settling into them like the cool of the evening—a weight, a promise, a fire they would now have to carry across the river without him.