Deuteronomy 33:18

BLESSING OF ZEBULUN AND ISAACHAR (Deuteronomy 33:18,19)

"Of Zebulun he said,

Rejoice, Zebulun, in thy going out;

And, Isaachar, in thy tents.

They shall call the peoples unto the mountain;

There shall they offer sacrifices of righteousness:

For they shall suck the abundance of the seas,

And the hidden treasures of the sand."

The most remarkable feature of all these blessings is the generality of the terms in which the message is conveyed and the total lack of specifics. Such expressions as "mountain," "seas," and "sand," have no specific denotation whatever. Furthermore, it is not stated that these tribes would live on the sea-coast, on the sand, or on the mountain; yet such things would "bless" them. The scholars who postulate a later time when this or that tribe lived here or there are simply reading a lot of things into these lines that are not there, nor have they ever been there. Keil has a very discerning paragraph on this feature of these blessings (a paragraph which Keil attributed in part to a prior scholar named Schultz):

"Throughout these blessings, the speaker rises to a height of ideality which it would have been impossible for any later author to reach, at some subsequent time when the confusions and divisions of later ages had actually occurred. The author (Moses) here sees nothing of those calamities from without which fell upon the nation again and again with destructive fury, nothing of the Canaanites who still remained in the land, and nothing of the hostility of the tribes one toward another; he simply sees how they work together in the most perfect harmony, each contributing his part to realize the lofty ideal of Israel. And again he grasps this ideal and the realization of it in so elementary a way, and so thoroughly from the other side, without regard to any inward transformation and glorification, that he must have lived in a time preceding the prophetic age, and before the moral conflicts had taken place ... In this peculiar characteristic of the blessing of Moses, we have the strongest proof of its authenticity.[17]

It is a stupid error, therefore, for one to suppose that he can find traces of later ages mentioned in these blessings. "There is no such thing in the whole blessing as a distinct reference to the peculiar historical circumstances of Israel that arose after Moses' death."[18] Even the "majesty" ascribed to Ephraim in Deuteronomy 33:17, although surely prophetic of the glory that came to that tribe, nevertheless fails to reveal the sinful and licentious nature of Ephraim's dominance, and the untimely end of Northern Israel, which he founded.