Deuteronomy 29

Deuteronomy 29: The Covenant of Choice — An Inner Drama of Consequence

Deuteronomy 29 read as an inner drama shows not a distant treaty between tribes, but an intimate covenant drawn up by consciousness with itself. In this telling Moses is not merely a lawgiver outside you; he is the speaking self, the faculty of deliberate awareness calling the whole psyche to account. The assembly of Israel is the multiplicity within: captains and elders, little ones and strangers, the hewer of wood and the drawer of water — all the functions and feelings, habits and impulses that compose a human interior. The ground of Moab is not geography but a standpoint of attention where the self reviews its history and either chooses commitment or repeats old slavery.

The chapter begins with a summons: these are the words of the covenant. Psychologically this is an invitation to make an inner agreement — to establish, consciously, how imagination will operate in one's life. A covenant, in the language of mind, is a fixed pattern of attention and feeling: the promises we hold to ourselves and the laws we obey by habit. To command Moses to make the covenant is to command the conscious self to set terms for the unconscious. When Moses calls all Israel, it is the awakening voice that gathers every inner part, even those usually ignored, in order that the whole may be addressed and transformed.

The inventory of memory follows: what the LORD did before your eyes in Egypt, the signs and miracles, the leading through forty years. This is the rehearsal of prior states. Egypt stands for the old conditioning: the slavery of identification with sense, the repetitive compulsions and collective programs that have dominated life. The miracles and signs are moments when imagination rose and created an alternative; the wilderness years are the inner time of purification when the habitual garments did not wear out because the core identity, the imaginal center, was being trained. 'Thy clothes are not waxen old' is a way of saying that imagination, when rightly used, renews the self and does not wear thin the deeper sense of I AM.

Yet a sharp note cuts through: 'The LORD hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear.' In plain psychological language this is the common human blindness: one may have witnessed inner possibilities but not been inwardly receptive. One can have experienced glimpses of freedom and still lack the reflective faculty that turns glimpse into habit. The covenant is therefore a required conversion of attention: to move from passive witness to active participator in imagination.

The taking of lands from Sihon and Og reads as conquest of inner adversaries. These names are not enemies outside but states of resistance in the psyche: fear, primitive reflexes, old rage and the tyrannies of habit. To have 'smitten them' and given their land as an inheritance to tribes is the process by which formerly reactive impulses are transmuted into useful parts. The Reubenites, Gadites and half-tribe of Manasseh are ways the psyche apportions territory; when imagination rules, formerly hostile passions are annexed to serve the larger life.

'Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper' becomes a practical insistence: sustain the imaginal discipline. Prosperity here is inner integrity and outer correspondence. The covenant is not mere thought; it is practiced orientation. The assembly 'this day' — every present moment — is the arena in which the covenant either holds or dissolves. The mention of all categories of people inside the camp insists that no aspect of self is excluded: even the stranger is included, meaning those unconscious contents usually rejected must be admitted into the covenantal field.

The warning passages are the psychology of self-deception. When one hears 'the words of this curse' and yet blesses oneself in the heart, saying 'I shall have peace though I walk in the imagination of mine heart,' the text shows the grave danger of divided attention. Blessing oneself while continuing to imagine contrary states is the classic double life: the lip-affirmation without inner assumption. Imagination creates; what one persistently pictures and feels will solidify. To secretly persist in images opposed to the covenant is to plant 'a root that beareth gall and wormwood' — bitter, parasitic inner programs that will eventually poison relationships, creativity, and even the soil of life itself.

The severe images of land becoming 'brimstone and salt' after forsaking the covenant are symbolic descriptions of psychic desolation. When a person turns to idols — that is, substitutes artificial supports for the living imagination — the inner field becomes barren. The 'plagues' and 'sicknesses' that other nations observe represent the visible consequences of an inner orbit turned outward toward objects rather than inward toward presence. The story anticipates a social psychology: a society that forgets covenantal imagination will manifest ruin that future witnesses will interpret as the result of turning away. Thus the macro mirrors the micro: individual imaginal failure yields communal collapse.

The chapter draws a decisive line between secret and revealed. 'Secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever' places two domains within the psyche. The secret things are the deep unconscious processes, the creative source whose depths cannot be commanded directly; God as the deep imaginative source remains sovereign. Yet what is revealed — the contents of conscious choice, the formulations of the covenant, the practical rules for attention — belongs to us to steward and pass on. In practice, this is a psychology of responsibility: we cannot control the depth processes, but we can adopt and model conscious imaginal practices that shape the revealed life.

From this chapter then emerges a clear mechanics of transformation. First, acknowledge the assembly: integrate the parts, the captains and the little ones, the strangers and the servants. Second, remember the liberation story: do not relegate miracles to history but make them present by recollective attention. Third, enact the covenant: conceive, feel, and inhabit the imaginal scene of the desired state until it becomes the center of being. Fourth, renounce the double-mindedness that blesses outwardly yet secretly maintains contrary inner pictures. Fifth, recognize that inner barrenness is a product of misimagining and that restoration comes by sustained imaginative fidelity.

The ethical tone of the chapter is not punitive in a moralistic sense but functional: imagination is creative and therefore moral in its consequences. To persistently imagine scarcity, humiliation, or betrayal is to forge chains; to persistently imagine dignity, provision, and harmony is to forge liberation. The punishment language of 'blotted out' and 'separated unto evil' maps to the loss of identity when one abandons the central imaginal life; the 'blotting out of a name' is the erasure of the self one intended to be.

Lastly, this passage is an instruction in pedagogy of the soul. Covenant-keeping is a daily, generational task: 'that it may be for the time to come' — teachable, transmissible imaginal disciplines. The 'children that shall rise up after you' are the next iterations of habit: the inner educations we set now recreate the future experience. The 'stranger that shall come from a far land' is the new influence, the foreign thought or novel possibility; treat it within the covenant, for even strangers have a place and can be transformed.

To read Deuteronomy 29 as biblical psychology is to see it as a manual for interior governance. It teaches that imagination is not idle fancy but constitutive energy; that obligation is not law outside but attention inside; that curses and blessings are the longitudinal consequences of what the self habitually imagines. The final counsel — to take the revealed words to heart and act on them — is simply the ancient advice to choose your imaginal life, because what you inhabit inwardly will arrange the outward world.