Podcast: Micah Goodman on Politics and Power in Deuteronomy

This Week’s Guest: Micah Goodman

The book of Deuteronomy, which Jews around the globe read in synagogue each year in the period leading up to the High Holy Days, consists primarily of Moses’s final oration to the people of Israel. With the nation on the cusp of conquering Canaan and establishing its own sovereign government, Moses presents Israel with a set of laws and regulations surrounding power and kingship. It forms what many scholars call the “Mosaic Constitution.”

In his best-selling Hebrew book ha-N’um ha-Aharon shel Moshe (The Final Speech of Moses), the renowned Israeli intellectual Micah Goodman offers a thought-provoking and original interpretation of Deuteronomy, presenting profound insights about the Hebrew Bible’s revolutionary political teachings. The book has not yet been translated into English, though Goodman did recently teach an online course on the subject for the Tikvah Fund. And now, in this podcast, he speaks with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver about the ideas within it, about, that is, Deuteronomy’s laws regarding the monarchy, and what political and philosophical wisdom they still hold for us today. It’s an exclusive English-language preview of ideas otherwise only available in Hebrew.