Haazinu

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Haazinu ('Give Ear', Deuteronomy 32:1-52) is almost entirely the Song of Moses, a poem calling heaven and earth to witness, recounting God's care and Israel's ingratitude and the ultimate vindication of the people. It is often read on Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of return between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Haazinu's forty-three verses of poetry are set apart from the rest of the Torah by a distinctive scribal layout: Jewish law requires the Song of Moses to be copied in two narrow parallel columns, each line sitting directly beneath the one above it in a pattern the halakhic tradition calls 'tile upon tile,' and a Torah scroll in which this poem is written in ordinary prose format is considered invalid for ritual use. The same poetic material appears among the Dead Sea Scrolls in manuscripts that likewise preserve a stichographic, verse-by-verse layout, showing that the convention of setting this particular song visually apart from surrounding prose is attested centuries before the Masoretic scribal tradition that fixed it as law.

A single phrase in the Song of Moses carries one of the more significant textual variants in the Hebrew Bible. The Masoretic Text of Deuteronomy 32:8 states that the Most High set the boundaries of nations 'according to the number of the sons of Israel,' but a Dead Sea Scroll fragment of Deuteronomy found at Qumran, together with the ancient Greek Septuagint, instead reads 'according to the number of the sons of God,' implying a scene in which the nations of the earth are apportioned among lesser divine beings under a high god's authority. Text critics generally regard the Qumran and Septuagint reading as older, and discuss at length what the difference implies about how ancient Israelite tradition, and its later transmitters, understood the relationship between Israel's God and other divine or angelic beings, a question on which the biblical text itself does not speak with a single voice.

Traditional Jewish commentary works from the Masoretic reading as received and does not treat the variant as raising a live theological question, while the passage's broader use of parental and eagle imagery for God's care (Deuteronomy 32:6, 32:11) is read across the commentary tradition, apart from the disputed verse, as among the most tender language for divine care found anywhere in the Torah's frequently severe covenant rhetoric.