In his translation of Deut 3:23-24, Robert Alter rendered the passage as:
“And I pleaded with the LORD at
the that time, saying, ‘My Master, LORD, You Yourself have begun to show Your servant
Your greatness and Your strong hand, for what god is there in the heavens and
on the earth who could do like Your deeds and like Your might? (Robert Alter, The
Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:619)
Commenting on the question posed in Deut 3:24, we read that:
for what god is there in the
heavens and on the earth. Given the Deuteronomist’s rigorous monotheism,
the plausible sense of these words is that the supposed gods of heaven and
earth have no real substance and therefore no power to perform any acts.
Nevertheless, the formulation, perhaps as a kind of verbal fossil, carries a
trace of the older view that there may be other gods, but ones that are no
match for YHWH. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W.
W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:619)
This conclusion is mirrored in the following from Bratcher and
Hatton:
What god is there …? This is a rhetorical question, a way of
stating “There is no god in heaven or on earth,” that is, no other god
anywhere. The question does not deny the existence of other gods; it denies
that any other god has the power that Yahweh, the God of Israel, has. (Robert
G. Bratcher and Howard A. Hatton, A Handbook on Deuteronomy [UBS
Handbook Series; New York: United Bible Societies, 2000], 80)
