Deuteronomy 33:6

Thou shalt not seek, etc.] So Ezra 9:12 of the peoples of the land. But Jeremiah (Jeremiah 29:7) counselled the exiled Jews to seek the peace of Babylonia. The spirit of his counsel is as much in advance of the spirit of this law, as Isaiah 56:3 ff. is in advance of Deuteronomy 33:1.

7, 8 ( 8, 9). Edomites and Egyptians are not to be abominated; the one people is Israel's blood-brother (unlike Moab and Ammon), the other was his host; their third generation may enter the congregation. Here too there is no reason against an early date.

The political hostility of Israel to Edom, fierce before the Exile, was then and after still fiercer. But their kinship was an old tradition and this law like the others of the group reflects not a political situation but a religious principle. The attitude to Egypt appears to conflict with the feeling usual in D that the Egyptians had only been the enslavers of Israel house of bondmen, fiery furnace, etc. Yet D also elsewhere remembers that the poor and weak nomad, who was the father of Israel, became in Egypt a great nation (Deuteronomy 26:5); and further the admission into Israel of the third generation of an Egyptian was apparently already allowed in the 7th cent. b.c. (see on Deuteronomy 33:8). Thus the Maccabean date, proposed for this law by Berth., is unnecessary.

On the whole this seems the most probable rendering of a perhaps intentionally ambiguous oracle. Others take the second line differently: but let his men be fewas reflecting the actual condition of the tribe (Driver); nor let his men be few(Graf) continuing the influence of the previous negative, but see Driver's note against this; so that his men be few(Dillm., Steuern., etc.), which is much the same as the paraphrase above. Heb. let his men be a number, an idiom elsewhere used only of a small number (see on Deuteronomy 4:27) so that the suggested let his men be numerous(cp. LXX) is improbable. In Genesis 49:4 Reuben though the firstborn shall not have the excellency; see the notes there. In Judges 5:16 the tribe is scorned for its failure to join the others against the Canaanites, and except for 1 Chronicles 5:3-10 does not again appear in Israel's history. Nor does Mesha of Moab, 9th cent. b.c., name it. The oracle is therefore probably earlier than that date.

LXX A, etc., read Let Simeon be many in number, and Heilprin (Hist. Poetry of the Ancient Hebrews. i. 113 ff.) supported by Bacon (Triple Tradition of the Exodus, 271 f.) conjectures that the first couplet of the next blessing in Judah was originally of Simeon with a play upon his name: Hearshema- the voice of Shime-on and bring him in unto his people, and takes the rest of 7 along with Deuteronomy 33:11 as the original oracle on Judah, in a place more suitable to that tribe, after Levi and immediately before Benjamin. The hypothesis is clever. Yet the introduction of Simeon in a few codd. of the LXX may be a later attempt to fill up the number of the 12 tribes; while on the other hand the absence of Simeon from the poem is explicable by the fortunes of the tribe; cursed in Genesis 49:7; absorbed in Judah, Jos 19:1-9, 1 Chronicles 4:24 ff., and otherwise absent from the history of Israel. Had Simeon been mentioned originally, he could hardly have dropped out.

7  And this of Judah, and he said:

Hear, Lord, the voice of Judah!

And bring him in to his people.

His own hands have striven for him,

But Thou shalt be help from his foes.