Deuteronomy 8:9

A land wherein thou shall eat bread without scarceness,.... That is, should have plenty of all sorts of provisions, which bread is often put for: thou shall not lack anything in it; for necessity and

A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass. A land whose stones are iron.

Where are mines of iron in a manner as plentiful as stones, and upon which travellers must tread, as in other parts they do upon stones; and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass, to wit, in great plenty. These are mentioned, because they had none such in Egypt whence they came.

Deuteronomy 8:9 A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any [thing] in it; a land whose stones [are] iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.Ver. 9. Thou shalt not lack anything in it.] Of the Island of Cyprus it is said, that it sendeth forth great abundance of commodities to other countries, of whom it craveth no help again. It was anciently called Macaria, the Blessed. Marcellinus, to show the fertility of it, saith that Cyprus aboundeth with such plenty of all things, that without the help of any other foreign country, it is, of itself, able to build a tall ship from the keel to the topsail, and so put it to sea, furnished of all things needful. Of Egypt also it is reported, that it is so fruitful a country, Ut cunctos mortales pascere, deos ipsos excipere hospitio salva re posse gloriaretur. It was anciently called publicum orbis horreum, the world’ s great barn; as some foreign writers have termed our country the court of Queen Ceres, the granary of the western world, the Fortunate Island, the Paradise of Pleasure, and Garden of God. The worst is, that as Aristotle was wont to tax his Athenians, that whereas they were famous for two things, the best land, and the best laws, frumentis uterentur, legibus nequaquam, they abused their plenty, and lived lawlessly; so it may be said of us, that we live in God’ s good land, but not by God’ s good laws. Turk. Hist. Laert, lib. v. cap. 1.

(9) Whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.—We do not hear of mining operations in Palestine from sacred history. “Brass,” i.e., copper; and so in all passages.

Verse 9. A land whose stones are iron] Not only meaning that there were iron mines throughout the land, but that the loose stones were strongly impregnated with iron, ores of this metal (the most useful of all the products of the mineral kingdom) being every where in great plenty. Out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.] As there is no such thing in nature as a brass mine, the word נחשת nechosheth should be translated copper; of which, by the addition of the lapis calaminaris, brass is made. See Clarke on Exodus 25:3.

9. without scarceness] The noun is found only here, and its adj. thrice only in the late Ecclesiastes 4:13; Ecclesiastes 9:15 f.; cp. Isaiah 40:20. Scarcity of bread is a great curse of the desert nomads: some tribes taste it but once a month, others not so often, and it is regarded as a luxury (Robinson, Bib. Res. ii. 497, cp. i. 197 f., Musil, Arabia Petr. iii. ‘Ethnolog. Reisebericht,’ 148). Their hunger for it is a frequent cause of their raids on the fellahin (for an instance see von Oppenheim, Vom Mittelmeer zum Pers. Golf, i. 269). whose stones are iron] Whether iron here means basalt as in Deuteronomy 3:11 (q.v.) is doubtful, for basalt is not confined to fertile lands, but is also found in the desert. More probably it is iron proper: not introduced to Palestine till the arrival of Israel or perhaps later. Like copper it came from the North (Jeremiah 15:12), where the Phoenicians and Arameans seem to have moulded and worked it in the Lebanons (Ramman-Nirari III of Assyria records it as tribute from Aram-Damascus; and Idrisi, see ZDPV, viii. 134, mentions a mine above Beyrout). Josephus speaks of the Iron Mountain running as far as Moabitis (IV. B.J. Deuteronomy 8:2) and the Letter of Aristeas says that both iron and copper were brought before the Persian period from the Mts of Arabia. ‘Some have denied that the promise to Israel of iron in the rocks of their own land is justified by the geological facts. But ancient sources of the ore have been discovered at Ikzim on Mt Carmel, and near Burme, N. of the Jabbok’ (Jerus. i. 332). Some of the hot springs of Palestine are impregnated with iron (Driver quoting Burckhardt, 33 f.). The excess of the references to iron and to furnaces in Jer. and Deut. over those in previous writers points to an increase of the metal in Israel before 650 b.c. brass] ‘In the O.T. this never refers to the alloy of zinc to which the term is now confined’ (J. H. Gladstone, PEFQ, 1898, 253 n.) but means either bronze, copper with alloy of tin, or pure copper. In W. Asia no source of tin has been certainly identified. But in a paper on ‘Copper and its Alloys in Antiquity’ (reported in Athenaeum, Feb. 3, 1906) the President of the Anthropological Institute gives his opinion that bronze was made directly from a copper ore containing tin long before the two metals were artificially mixed. The sources of copper for Palestine were Cyprus, the Lebanons (‘the land of Nuḥ ?ashshi’ or bronze), Edom, and N. Arabia (Tell-el-Amarna Letters (Winckler’s ed.), 25, 27, 31 ff.; see the present writer’s article ‘Trade, etc.’ in Enc. Bibl. § 7; and for the copper-mines and smelting furnaces of N. Edom at Fênân, the Phainôn of antiquity, see Musil, Edom, i. 156 f., 287, 298, 323, ii. 7 f.).

7, 8. A good land — In these verses Moses contrasts the sterility of the almost waterless desert with the fertility of the land they are soon to possess. They are to have a land of brooks and fountains.