May 10, 2025

Scripture Study Series

Deuteronomy 8, part 8

—On any given day outside our home you might spot cardinals, bluebirds and house finches enjoying sunflower seeds from our bird feeder; snapping turtles and deer crossing the yard after a refreshing drink from the creek; rabbits, skunks and moles retreating to their burrows; and squirrels scampering among the oak, pine and pecan trees. Another two hundred yards down our gravel drive my in-laws garden onions, watermelons, carrots, blueberries, tomatoes and more. It is a good land. It is home.

—In the unfolding story of Deuteronomy, the Israelites are not yet home, but they can see its undulating hills climbing into the setting sun just beyond the Jordan. Camped on the eastern shore an elderly Moses stands before his people, perhaps with raised staff in hand, pointing out to them the “good land … which the Lord is giving you” (8:7; 11:17) and charging them “to keep the commandments of the LORD” in order to avoid any future discipline (8:5-6).

—Perhaps you know it best by its description as “a land flowing with milk and honey” (11:9), for the Promised Land would prove to be ideal for animal husbandry and agriculture—milk and cheese from flocks and herds of goats, sheep and cattle that roam its expansive pasturelands as well as honey produced from the ubiquitous date palms and beehives throughout the land. But it’s also called a land of “wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and [again] honey” (8:8)—the harvest of the grains in spring, followed by summer fruits, and the olives and date palms in the fall.

—The prophet Isaiah would later describe this land of brooks, fountains, valleys and hills as a beautiful bride on her wedding day and as God’s delight (Deut. 8:7; Is. 62:4). The Israelites would soon embrace their new home from God’s good hand, and Moses too would soon know a new forever home in the embrace of his Savior.

–Daniel McCabe

On Location: David’s Cenotaph

—Ask anyone, even Google, and they’ll tell you that the holiest site for Jews in the city of Jerusalem is the Western Wall which Israel recovered during the Six-Day War of 1967. For the previous nineteen years from 1948-1967 the Jordanians controlled the Old City and the Temple Mount, and the Jews who had been expelled in 1948 had no access to the Wailing Wall as it was called during those years. So where did the Jews worship for nineteen years? At David’s cenotaph, of course.

—A cenotaph is a tomb or monument erected in memory of someone whose body is buried elsewhere. For example, John F. Kennedy is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, but you can visit his cenotaph in Dallas, Texas, the place of his assassination. Likewise, King David is buried in the City of David (1 Kings 2:10), just south of the Temple Mount, but since the Middle Ages, worshippers have gathered at his cenotaph on Mount Zion to the west of the City of David. David’s Tomb, as it is called today, is located on the ground floor of a two-story building whose upper floor is venerated as the site of the Upper Room where Jesus celebrated a Passover meal with his disciples on the night before his crucifixion. The ground floor of the building serves as a yeshiva, a Jewish school dedicated to the study of the Torah and the Talmud.

—Upon entering the building men are ushered to the right and women to the left, but both hallways lead separately to a small corner room that houses David’s cenotaph, draped with a beautiful parochet or covering. A niche behind the cenotaph, the walls of the building itself, and the findings of the site’s first Israeli archaeologist, Jacob Pinkerfeld, suggest an unbroken line of history that dates back to the first century. Christian graffiti, historical sources outside the Bible, and the orientation of the niche, which lines up directly with the site of Golgotha, suggest to many, including myself, that the site served initially as a place of worship for early Christians. How fitting then that this site would be chosen for the cenotaph of King David, given the opening verse of the New Testament, which reads, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David’ (Matthew 1:1).

—Daniel McCabe