Deuteronomy 10

There's been a lot of contentious talk about foreigners, refugees, and non-white people lately. I don't want to get too into that serious issue right here, so I'll instead use a relevant example from the first specimen of media that comes to mind (which is really all that I do in these posts anyway).

In the Japanese TV drama Our House, a Japanese saxophonist's wife dies a few years after bearing their fourth child. Less than six months later, the man brings home a woman from America named Alice with the intent of marrying her, much to the consternation of his oldest daughter, Sakurako (who seems to be the only person in the family with a spine). Outside of Sakurako and, in the later episodes, Alice, the characters are just as silly and frothy as they look in the image below, but the point is that some of the strife stems from Alice's status as an interloping foreigner in Sakurako's eyes. It doesn't help that Alice used to work at a casino in America, helping to confirm Sakurako's assumption that Alice is a woman of easy virtue.

One of Moses's many perspicacious exhortations in this chapter is to "love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt" (verse 19). At first brush, this seems at odds with God's intention for the Israelites to wipe out the immoral inhabitants of Canaan. But I don't think God is saying to approve of everyone, foreigner or not, if they're unscrupulous reprobates. He's saying to conquer the Canaanites because of their wicked acts, not because they look funny by Israelite standards. Just as blackguards and miscreants can come from any race, righteousness isn't just limited to the Israelites.

One could say that verses 12-22 are a string of Moses nuggets--we've hit the pay lode here--but the one that jumps out to me is verse 14: "To the LORD your God belongs the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it." I know the heavens and earth belong to God, but what I find intriguing is Moses's use of the term "highest heavens"--which implies that heaven has several levels. I don't know if "heaven" just means "sky and space" and "highest heavens" means the heaven where God and the angels reside--or if heaven does really resemble the Paradiso of Dante's The Divine Comedy with nine spheres and the Empyrean. Thinking about the geography of a spiritual plane just makes my head hurt, so I think it would be sensible to stop here.