NOTES for Deu 3:1-29

The people had no special, separately set aside time in which to learn how to fight. They had to learn war as they went, moving along the way on which God was leading His people and encountering enemies along that way, enemies who became the Hebrews' teachers in everything concerning war. Yet the main teacher still remained God Himself. It was He who taught His people the spiritual wholeness without which real courage is impossible, and without which one therefore cannot become a warrior, remaining at best only a bully and a brawler. To become a warrior and gain courage, one had to learn to follow God without turning back and without looking around to either side.

The first ability, not turning back, not remembering Egypt and Egyptian life every hour, a life that now began to look almost heavenly, came only when the generation of the Exodus passed away, the generation of those who had left Egypt. Most of that generation was completely unready to follow God without looking back. Their children were different: they were the ones who faced the first clashes with the enemy, the first battles, still local and not nearly as large in scale as those that awaited the people in Palestine, but already giving some idea of the enemies with whom they would later have to deal. As for the ability not to look around to either side, an important role was played here by the habit of moving after God step by step, in particular through territory where the people found themselves surrounded by tribes that were, if not hostile, then at least not very friendly. Here it is God Himself who lays out the route for His people; it is He who determines whom to bypass and with whom to enter into war. In this case they had to rely not on their own intuition or military experience (which, in fact, they still hardly had), but on God's instructions.

Of course, the life of the people was not reduced to war alone. War was only one part of it, and the place it would take in the people's life depended greatly on the people's spiritual condition. Yet it was precisely during war, in critical and sometimes even extreme situations, that the people acquired the qualities that would serve them later in peaceful life if they did not lose them: the ability to hear God and do what He commands. These qualities are absolutely necessary for everyone, and fallen humanity, unfortunately, often gains them only on the edge of life and death.