The Discourses of Deuteronomy and the Death of Moses

On the first day of the eleventh month of the fortieth year Moses began to speak. Deuteronomy is his farewell address, delivered in the plains of Moab to a generation that does not remember Egypt. He retells the journey without softening it, naming where the people failed and where he failed. He repeats the Ten Utterances, pronounces the Shema — hear, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one — and sets out the laws of settled life: courts, kingship, war, the field, the poor, the seventh year. He puts the choice bluntly: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; choose life. He sings the song Haazinu and blesses the tribes one by one, hands leadership to Joshua before the whole people, writes the Torah down and gives it to the Levites. On the seventh of Adar, his birthday, aged a hundred and twenty, he climbed Mount Nebo, was shown the whole Land, and died there by the word of God; no one knows his burial place to this day.