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Deuteronomy 12:1-3
New Catholic Bible
Deuteronomy 12:1-3
New Catholic Bible
The Deuteronomic Code[a]
Chapter 12
One Place of Worship.[b] 1 These are the statutes and the decrees that you must be careful to observe in the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you as an inheritance for the whole time that you live upon the earth. 2 You must totally destroy all the places where the nations that you shall dispossess served their gods, whether they be on the high mountains or upon the hills or under every green tree. 3 You are to overturn their altars and break their sacred pillars. You must burn their wooden idols in fires, you must cut down their carved idols and obliterate their names from that place.
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- Deuteronomy 12:1 By means of its liturgy the people of God seek to establish a lifegiving relationship with God. Deuteronomy does not mean to suppress all other liturgical activity; the point is that worship must express the faith of the entire people. It is enough that any deviations be avoided and that every trace of pagan practices be rejected.
- Deuteronomy 12:1 In the sanctuaries that had been built in various parts of the country the ceremonies were often contaminated by the Canaanite religion. To get rid of these pagan deviations and to strengthen the religious and political unity of the people, Deuteronomy requires the suppression of these sanctuaries, some of which had played an important role in Israel’s past, even though they had originally been pagan. This centralization of worship in the place determined by God, namely, the Jerusalem temple, goes back probably to the time of the great reform of King Josiah at the end of the seventh century (2 Ki 22–23), but it is here attributed to Moses, who had inspired Israel’s life of worship. As a result of this centralization, certain everyday actions such as the slaughtering of animals, which had hitherto been done at the sanctuaries, would be done by each individual at home and would therefore no longer have a sacral character (Deut 12:15).
