Deuteronomy 32

Moses' Last Song: The Psychology of Covenant, Memory, and Rebellion

Deuteronomy 32 reads as a compact psychological drama staged entirely within consciousness. The chapter is less a chronicle of external events than a drama of inner states: voices of heaven and earth, a Rock that is the enduring self, a young people who grow complacent and riotous, and a divine Presence that alternately nourishes, withdraws, and judges. When read this way, every character, place and action maps to a state of mind, and the arc of the song becomes a lesson about how imagination fashions personal reality.

The opening call, “Give ear, O ye heavens... hear, O earth,” is an invocation to the different levels of awareness within the psyche. The heavens are the higher imaginal faculties: the contemplative, receptive states that can hold abstractions and ideals. The earth is the practical, sensory field where imaginal seed becomes perceived experience. The “words of my mouth” dropping as rain and dew describe how inner speech — the stories we tell ourselves — condenses into outward circumstance. Psychologically, doctrine that “drops as the rain” is the habit of imagination repeated until it waters the ground of perception and yields observable fruit.

The repeated naming of God as the Rock, perfect in work and truth, points to the stable center of consciousness: the witnessing I, the self that, when rightly identified with, refrains from the turbulence of reactive states. This Rock is not a remote being but the sustaining awareness that underlies all imaginal activity. When the song extols this Rock, it calls attention to the fact that creativity emerges from a firm inner core; the integrity of that core determines what the imagination will construct.

Israel in this chapter is the self as it awakens and is led by attention. The narrative of finding Israel “in a desert land” and feeding it from unlikely sources — honey from rock, oil from flint — depicts the imagination’s ability to produce rich inner experience from barren perceptions when attention is rightly applied. The wildness of the wasteland stands for the barren, habitual mindset; the provision that comes from the Rock stands for unexpected insight delivered when the inner eye rests in an invincible center rather than in outer circumstances.

But the account turns abruptly: Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked. Here Jeshurun is the ego that has tasted abundance and mistakes the feeling of provision for its own power. Psychologically this is complacency: a self that has been affirmed by successful imaginal acts begins to identify with the outer results instead of with the inner source. The act of “kicking” is rebellion against the very attention that produced the blessing. The people forsook the Rock — in inner terms, attention drifted from the identifying center and sought substitutes in transient images and idols.

Idols and “strange gods” in the song map to substitute states of mind: desire, fear, public opinion, and habitual labels that request attention and then claim it. When attention fixes on these substitutes, the creative faculty is redirected to fabricate consequences consistent with them. Thus the text’s language about sacrificing to devils and to new gods is a vivid metaphor for investing imagination in lower images — the petty stories, the anxieties, the illusions of human esteem — and expecting those images to save or satisfy. The result is spiritual poverty disguised as fullness.

The divine reaction — hiding the face and allowing the end to be seen — is a crucial psychological principle: when the imagining being withdraws from its higher center, the higher faculty withdraws its sustaining attention, allowing the consequences of misdirected imagination to reveal themselves. This is not capricious punishment but the natural law of correspondence: imagine in fear and scarcity, and you will see scarcity; imagine in gratitude and abundance, and abundance will manifest. "I will hide my face" therefore signifies the withholding of creative attention from the false self so that its beliefs can be tested and exposed.

The fury pictured — fire kindled, arrows, serpents, hunger, sword and terror — are metaphors for the internal phenomena that follow sustained negative imaginal acts. Fire is the intensity of belief; arrows are focused words and judgments that pierce relationships; serpents of the dust are the creeping, insidious anxieties born of identification with transient images. These images do not require an external agent to act: they are the natural consequences of a particular inner orientation. When the imagination is habitual in fear or bitterness, the psyche will produce experiences that are exact reflections of those imaginal scripts.

An instructive line reads like this: “For their rock is not as our Rock.” Here the text contrasts two ways of grounding: one is a counterfeit rock — an image, an idol, or a system of thought that masquerades as the center but is actually a constructed belief — and the other is the true Rock, the living awareness that holds imagination coherently. Psychologically, success and failure hinge on which center one acknowledges. Belief in a false rock will produce the bitter fruit of disappointment; belief in the true center yields resilience and creative flow.

The chapter’s vivid descriptions of vines of Sodom and grapes of gall reveal the kind of inner food one consumes mentally. An imaginal diet of bitterness, envy, slander, and panic yields inner wine that is poison. The psyche is nourished by the narratives it rehearses, and those narratives determine tone, mood, and eventual circumstance. The sealed store of vengeance and recompense is the built-in corrective of consciousness: if attention remains on poison, the self will eventually face its own mirror.

Yet interwoven with judgment is mercy: the Lord will judge his people and repent himself for his servants when he sees their power is gone. In psychological terms, this movement represents the awakening of self-awareness when illusion breaks down. When the fabricated images no longer sustain the ego, the deeper self reasserts itself, offering restitution. This is the restorative arc of imagination: collapse often precipitates reflective awakening and redirection of attention back to the Rock.

The song’s command to “set your hearts unto all the words” is an invitation to deliberate discipline of imagination. The law mentioned here is not external statute but the interior creative law: what is fixed in the heart becomes form. The imperative to teach children is the injunction to shape the next cycle of habitual attention. The promise that “it is not a vain thing...because it is your life” makes plain the practical, present power of imagination: the law works now; it is the instrument by which days are prolonged and territories of possibility are entered.

Finally the closing scene — the ascent to mountain Nebo, the beholding of Canaan, and the pronouncement of death — symbolizes the contemplative perspective gained at the end of a life stage. Mount Nebo is a vantage of higher awareness where the mind, having lived through its dramas, sees the promised land as an interior territory to be possessed, not as a physical real estate. The death of Moses is the natural relinquishing of the role of legislator; the voice of instruction moves from one functionary to the heart of each person. Psychologically, the teacher’s final ascent is the moment when the instruction is internalized and the student is summoned to embody the creative law themselves.

Read as a whole, Deuteronomy 32 teaches that imagination is the operative Creator. The Rock is the central self; Israel is the attention that can be nurtured or corrupted; idols are misdirected imaginal acts whose consequences will inevitably appear. The drama of punishment and redemption is the inner economy of attention: withdraw support from false images, and they will reveal their failure; return to the Rock, and the imagination can again produce honey from rock. The chapter thus functions as a manual of biblical psychology — a call to recognize that the sacred song spoken in the heights of awareness will, if rehearsed faithfully, distill as dew upon the grass of daily life, changing perception and therefore reality.