NOTES for Deu 7:1-26
Speaking of the land that the people are to enter, Moses mentions the pagan altars that must be completely demolished and destroyed. He speaks first of the altars, not of the pagans themselves, for it was the pagan cults that posed the chief spiritual problem for the people. Yet the one was inseparable from the other: in those days and places every city and every tribe had its own altars, without which the life of the city or tribe was inconceivable, so that an altar could be destroyed only together with those to whom it belonged.
Even here, however, people still had a choice: to fight to the end or to flee and go in search of a new place to settle. The people, meanwhile, faced painstaking spiritual work connected with acquiring the habit of following the Torah. This concerns the commandments, laws and judicial rulings mentioned in the text, all of which had to be observed. In the Russian Synodal translation, the laws are called “statutes,” while the judicial rulings are called “laws.”
What is described here is the logic of following the Torah, of observing the commandments of the Decalogue in everyday life. Indeed, what is a judicial ruling and how does it arise? A judge who judges according to the laws of the Torah must first assess the situation and the actions of the particular people involved, judging whether all this conforms to the commandments and the existing laws. What is assessed, of course, is not the person but the particular act, for only God can judge the person. Having assessed and weighed everything, the judge must decide whether the actions of each person being judged conform to the commandments of the Decalogue and to the Torah as a whole.
Yet every person stands in exactly the same position with respect to themselves. Anyone wishing to follow the Torah likewise assesses the situations in which they find themselves and their own actions for conformity with the commandments of the Decalogue, while keeping in mind the laws of the Torah as a kind of body of precedents, since they all arose from experience of following—or, more precisely, failing to follow—the same commandments.
Everyone becomes the judge of their own actions before God, and if, when a person meets God face to face, God confirms that this judgement was correct, the person is justified before Him. The people had to learn precisely this judgement of God, this divine assessment of every situation, every choice made, every decision taken and every act performed. Of course, not everyone was ready for this work, nor did everyone want to undertake it, but that was the choice of each particular person; the path itself was open to everyone.