NOTES for Deu 8:10
At times one hears that the religion of the Old Testament was, compared with Christianity, a religion of the flesh; that well-being was understood by Old Testament people too materialistically, too earthbound; that the main signs of God's blessing were good harvests and good increase of livestock, many children, abundance and prosperity, triumph over the enemy in war. Some verses of the Torah, it would seem, confirm such an attitude. And yet speculations of this kind should be considered more a tribute to the spiritualism traditional in church-adjacent circles than a properly Yahwistic attitude.
As for Yahwism, which is usually what is meant by "Old Testament religion," it was completely alien to every kind of spiritualism, as indeed was Christianity, which was never a "religion of the spirit" or a "religion of suffering," as some called it, but the life of the Kingdom. Yahwism, for its part, knew a spiritual foretaste, a spiritual anticipation of that life. And Yahwism saw nothing blameworthy in earthly well-being, on one condition: that this well-being is not achieved by violating the Torah, the commandment given by God. The point here, of course, is not that before the coming of Christ people were naive enough to think that righteousness in the fallen world is accompanied by prosperity. One need only open Ecclesiastes or the Book of Job to be convinced that spiritually mature people did not suffer from such naivete even in pre-Christian times.
The point was something else: believing Yahwists looked at the God-given land as the Kingdom of God, which lacked only the righteousness of those who lived on that land in order to be revealed in fullness. And it must be acknowledged that there was a truth in this approach, though not the whole truth. In fact, the essence of the Kingdom of God does not lie in the nature of the universe, but in its relation to God. If God is at the center, the world becomes the Kingdom. And God, from the time of the Sinai theophany, had already come to His people and made a covenant bond with them precisely in order to remain among His people forever. And the people truly were called to become a community of the faithful, while the place where they lived was called to become the Kingdom. Of course, this concerns an ideal and a supreme task, one that could not be adequately resolved before the Messiah came into the world. And yet the people always carried an understanding that well-being on the God-given land is possible only if that land is the Kingdom. For God loves His people. And He wants them to be happy.