as ‘my tôrâ’, there looms behind it ‘the tôrâ’, majestic and absolute. It is only moral perversity that can reject it: ‘Those who forsake the law praise the wicked’ (28:4). As for a people deprived of revelation, 29:18 holds out little hope for them. ‘Where there is no vision’ (or, RSV, ‘prophecy’) ‘the people run wild; but he that keepeth the law’ (the other main form of Old Testament revelation), ‘happy is he’. To end on this note, however, would be to disguise the fact that the explicitly religious
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