EKPOMA REVIEW

Deut 8:1-20 is often read as covenant exhortation, land theology, and literary rhetoric. This article argues that the chapter also offers a psychologically alert account of moral formation in conditions of scarcity and abundance. Its movement from wilderness hunger to settled prosperity, from divine provision to the warning against self-generated power, provides a grammar for reading contemporary forms of materialism, entitlement, social comparison, and spiritual amnesia. Replacing a technical textual-critical approach with a conceptual framework drawn from moral memory, gratitude research, and psycho-social formation, the study shows how Deuteronomy 8 construes remembering not simply as mere mental recall but as a disciplined communal practice that protects desire from becoming self-enclosed. The text’s insistent commands to remember Yahweh, not to forget, and to bless after eating, disclose an anthropology in which gratitude, humility, and obedience stand against the corrosive effects of abundance. The article retains the core literary insights of earlier exegetical work on the structure, rhetoric, land motif, wilderness motif, and key verbal repetitions of Deuteronomy 8, while bringing them into conversation with recent psychological literature about gratitude and materialism. It concludes that the chapter can serve as a theological and psycho-social resource for persons and groups seeking to cultivate gratitude, resist narcissistic self-sufficiency, and reframe prosperity as a received gift rather than an autonomous achievement.

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