Ver. 16. Thou shalt sleep with thy fathers— Sleep, says Jameson, is a common word for death; and, to those who believe a resurrection, has a peculiar propriety, to put them in mind that death should not have dominion over them for ever; but that in the morning of the resurrection they shall awake, as certainly as they fall asleep. Who can believe from such phrases as these, that Moses, and all Israel with him, imagined their law wholly temporal; that they looked not for a better Canaan, where God should be their God for ever and ever? The paraphrast Jonathan, full of these ideas, thus paraphrases the words: "Thou shalt lie down in the dust with thy fathers, and thy soul shall be kept as a treasure in the repository of eternal life with those fathers." We may just observe, that the shalls and wills, in the next verses, are strangely intermixed. The judicious reader, however, will easily discern how they are to be altered.
Related Commentaries of Deuteronomy 31:16
Deuteronomy 31:16
16 And the LORD said unto Moses, Behold, thou shalt sleepa with thy fathers; and this people will rise up, and go a whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land, whither they go to be among them, and will forsake me, and break my covenant which I have made with them.