Deuteronomy 5:3

not … with our fathers Rather, forefathers, i.e. the Patriarchs -those great Grandfathers of thy Church 1 [119] with whom, however, D recognises a previous covenant, Deuteronomy 4:31; Deuteronomy 7:12; Deuteronomy 8:18. The immediate fathers of the generation had all passed away before the entry into Moab, according to Deuteronomy 2:14 f. Here it is said emphatically that those with whom the covenant at Ḥoreb had been made were still allus, all of usalive here this day. Dillmann meets the contradiction by taking Deuteronomy 2:14 f. as a later gloss. Others find in it a proof of the difference of authorship between the first discourses Deuteronomy 1:6 to Deuteronomy 4:49 and the present series; but this still leaves unsolved the difference within the former between Deuteronomy 1:30 and Deuteronomy 2:14 f. A more probable explanation is that the speaker is made to ignore the tradition of the death of those who had been adults at Ḥoreb (of which the author cannot well have been ignorant) for rhetorical purposes: (1) to emphasise the contrast between the Patriarchs and Israel after the Exodus; and (2) to emphasise the new responsibility which the Ḥoreb covenant had laid on the latter, in all its successive generations. What Dillmann on Deuteronomy 1:30 says of the previous discourse is true of this one (cp. Deuteronomy 11:2-7): -In the whole discourse Moses conceives the present generation as identical with the previous one."

[119] Donne, The Litanie, vii.