Ki-Tavo
091314t.pat By Patrick Shannon
Ki-Tavo, it means, when you enter, when you come into the [land] Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8 A lot of folks refer to this as the blessings and curses section, because this is where there is a big section near the end of the Torah about the blessings and a list, long list of curses. This blessings, If you obey the commands of Yahweh, it starts off, and they are wonderful things, blessed in the city, blessed in the field, you’ll be fruitful, growth, prosperity, more than you can have, your storehouses will be full, blessings in all you do, victory in war. Lending, never having to borrow, and being the head among the nations, not the tail, not having to follow other super kingdoms. IF you obey the commands of Yahweh. The curses, we don’t like to think about these, they are scary, we cringe when we read through the section, we kind of, that we don’t have to go through that , cursed agriculture, the plants dying, and not yielding fruit. Drought, cursed livestock, pestilence, barrenness, diseases, every disease, debt, losing in war, starvation to the point of cannibalism, exile, slavery, and being the tail to other nations. A little clarity here, we don’t quite know if these apply to us….or we know we don’t keep the commands perfectly so do we really deserve that list. We know we aren’t really experiencing that today, so maybe not hopefully, we wonder how Yahweh can be so seemingly cruel. Is it over? Since the Israelites were exiled? The clarity to all of this is here in Ki Tavo. I tend to see these Torah portions in a graphic form like this. From the beginning of chapter 26, to 29 verse 8, I have four columns with colored blocks. And the first column under 26, which starts when you come into the land, is the section about the basket of first fruits and that is verses 1 to 11. And then it’s a section about your tithe. And then there’s a today, you are becoming Elohim’s people and he will be your God. 27 has two major sections the twelve (12) stones and the altar that they are commanded to build when they cross the Jordan and come into the land. Mt. Gerazim and Mt. Abel, ceremony in which six (6) tribes will stand on one side of one mountain and six (6) tribes will stand on the other side of the mountain and the Levites shall cry out certain curses, the thirteen (13) curses, and all the people shall say “Amen.” Imagine that, two whole mountains full of just hundreds of thousands of people yelling “Amen” to these curses. Chapter 28, the thirty (31) blessings and then long list, the rest of chapter 28 of the curses. Very interesting comparison there…(continued in audio).
