Canticle Two – The (Second) Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32:1-43)
After the Law had been written, again an Ode of Moses.
Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; let the earth hear the words of my mouth.
May my teaching drop like the rain, my speech condense like the dew;
like gentle rain on grass, like showers on new growth.
For I will proclaim the name of the Lord; ascribe greatness to our God!The Rock, his work is perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God, without deceit, just and upright is he;
yet his degenerate children have dealt falsely with him, a perverse and crooked generation.
Do you thus repay the Lord, O foolish and senseless people? Is not he your father, who created you, who made you and established you
Remember the days of old, consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you; your elders, and they will tell you.
When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods; the Lord’s own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.He sustained him in a desert land, iin a howling wilderness waste; he shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye.
As an eagle stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young; as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions,
the Lord alone guided him; no foreign god was with him.
He set him upon the heights of the land, and fed him with produce of the field; he nursed him with honey from the crags, with oil from flinty rock;
curds from the herd, and milk from the flock, with fat of lambs and rams; Bashan bulls and goats, together with the choicest wheat you drank fine wine from the blood of grapes.
Jacob ate his fill; Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked. You grew fat, bloated, and gorged! He abandoned God who made him, and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation.
They made him jealous with strange gods, with abhorrent things they provoked him.
They sacrificed to demons, not God, to deities they had never known, to new ones recently arrived, whom your ancestors had not feared.
You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.The Lord saw it, and was jealous; he spurned his sons and daughters.
He said: I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children in whom there is no faithfulness.
They made me jealous with what is no god, provoked me with their idols. So I will make them jealous with what is no people, provoke them with a foolish nation.
For a fire is kindled by my anger, and burns to the depths of Sheol; it devours the earth and its increase, and sets on fire the foundations of the mountains.
I will heap disasters upon them, spend my arrows against them:
wasting hunger, burning consumption, bitter pestilence. The teeth of beasts I will send against them, with venom of things crawling in the dust.
In the street the sword shall bereave, and in the chambers terror, for young man and woman alike, nursing child and old gray head.
I thought to scatter them and blot out the memory of them from humankind;
but I feared provocation by the enemy, for their adversaries might misunderstand and say, Our hand is triumphant; it was not the Lord who did all this.They are a nation void of sense;there is no understanding in them.
If they were wise, they would understand this; they would discern what the end would be.
How could one have routed a thousand, and two put a myriad to flight, unless their Rock had sold them, the Lord had given them up
Indeed their rock is not like our Rock; our enemies are fools.
Their vine comes from the vine-stock of Sodom, from the vineyards of Gomorrah; their grapes are grapes of poison, their clusters are bitter;
their wine is the poison of serpents, the cruel venom of asps.Is not this laid up in store with me, sealed up in my treasuries?
Vengeance is mine, and recompense, for the time when their foot shall slip; because the day of their calamity is at hand, their doom comes swiftly.Indeed the Lord will vindicate his people, have compassion on his servants, when he sees that their power is gone, neither bond nor free remaining.
Then he will say: Where are their gods, the rock in which they took refuge, who ate the fat of their sacrifices, and drank the wine of their libations? Let them rise up and help you, let them be your protection!See now that I, even I, am he; there is no god besides me. kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand.
For I lift up my hand to heaven, and swear: As I live for ever,
when I whet my flashing sword, and my hand takes hold on judgement; I will take vengeance on my adversaries, and will repay those who hate me.
I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh with the blood of the slain and the captives, from the long-haired enemy.Praise, O’heavens, his people, worship him, all you gods! For he will avenge the blood of his children, and take vengeance on his adversaries; he will repay those who hate him, and cleanse the land for his people.
(It should be noted that the Second Ode is never chanted, except only in Great Lent, during which on Tuesday only it is chanted to the end. And for each of the troparia of the Second Ode of the Canon we say, Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee.)