The other side I wanted to present is that the Old Testament, Deuteronomy in particular, wants to centralize worship “to the place where God chooses to make his name dwell.” This motif stands out like red ink on the pages of Deuteronomy:
“These are the statutes and rules that you shall be careful to do in the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess, all the days that you live on the earth…you shall seek the place that the Lord your God will choose out of all your tribes to put his name and make his habitation there. There you shall go,and there you shall bring your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and the contribution that you present, your vow offerings, your freewill offerings, and the firstborn of your herd and of your flock. And there you shall eat before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your households, in all that you undertake, in which the Lord your God has blessed you.
You shall not do according to all that we are doing here today, everyone doing whatever is right in his own eyes, for you have not as yet come to the rest and to the inheritance that the Lord your God is giving you…then to the place that the Lord your God will choose, to make his name dwell there, there you shall bring all that I command you: your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and the contribution that you present, and all your finest vow offerings that you vow to the Lord.
Take care that you do not offer your burnt offerings at any place that you see, but at the place that the Lord will choose in one of your tribes, there you shall offer your burnt offerings, and there you shall do all that I am commanding you.
You may not eat within your towns the tithe of your grain or of your wine or of your oil, or the firstborn of your herd or of your flock, or any of your vow offerings that you vow, or your freewill offerings or the contribution that you present,but you shall eat them before the Lord your God in the place that the Lord your God will choose. – Deuteronomy 12:1-19 (approximately)
I’m sorry for the long quote. Deuteronomy 12 kicks off the this unique feature and binds the laws that Moses dictates to the people around this centralization theme. In a similar way to the other Pentateuchal books, Israel was required to worship God differently than the current occupants of Canaan. Unlike those books, Deuteronomy intermingles laws regarding purity with laws regarding social justice. The centralization theme provides that context for this assortment of laws:
Then to the place that the Lord your God will choose, to make his name dwell there, there you shall bring all that I command you: your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and the contribution that you present, and all your finest vow offerings that you vow to the Lord.And you shall rejoice before the Lord your God, you and your sons and your daughters, your male servants and your female servants, and the Levite that is within your towns, since he has no portion or inheritance with you. – Deuteronomy 12:11-12.
You shall tithe all the yield of your seed that comes from the field year by year. And before the Lord your God, in the place that he will choose, to make his name dwell there, you shall eat the tithe of your grain, of your wine, and of your oil, and the firstborn of your herd and flock, that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always…At the end of every three years you shall bring out all the tithe of your produce in the same year and lay it up within your towns. And the Levite, because he has no portion or inheritance with you, and the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, who are within your towns, shall come and eat and be filled, that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands that you do.- Deuteronomy 14:22-29 (approximately).
Law keeping has two axes: 1) love God, 2) love neighbor. The central location for feasts and sacrifices is the intersection of both axes. In this way, Israel, time after time, is reminded of God’s redemptive act and love toward an undeserving and hard-hearted people and their responsibility to care for their brothers, the poor, the widows, and the fatherless.
Another point to notice, although English obscures the point (you may have a footnote in your Bible), is that the “you” in Deuteronomy is often a singular “you” (not y’all). We should rather call it a collective “you.” Israel is addressed as a whole, not as individual tribes. They are unified under God, committed to one law, and act collectively as one people. Von Rad sums the idea up nicely:
[All] these things, the products of nature and civilisation, are gifts, and in fact blessings accruing from salvation, which Jahweh’s love desires to present to his people…Thus in Deuteronomy everything is interrelated and gathered together to give a unified theological conspectus – one Jahweh, one (comprehensive) Israel, one revelation (תורה), one promised land (נחלה), one place of worship, one prophet.
Their unique status as a nation is established by Yahweh’s salvific love and their commitment to Deuteronomic idea of oneness. Their rejection of Yahweh and his revelation through the Torah is a forfeiture of that divine blessing. Their mistreatment of the poor also counts as a rejection of God’s law (see Amos 8 as an example). The continual, practical reminder of their “oneness” emphasizes that their wholeness as a nation revolves on their full-hearted commitment to love of God and neighbor.
nathanielcooley 
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