Deuteronomy 4:24 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Ver. 24. For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire— That is, inflexibly just in punishing the contemners of his law; and who, from the rectitude of his nature, will be as far from letting moral evil pass with impunity, as fire is from not consuming its proper fuel. The same metaphor is used, (chap. Deuteronomy 9:3.) to express the awful and speedy vengeance which the providence of God was to take upon the idolatrous Canaanites. In this place it alludes to the awful appearance of the divine glory when the law was given from mount Sinai. Bishop Huet conjectures, that the ancient Persians took occasion from these words to worship the fire; at first as the image, or, to use Maximus Tyrius's expression, (Dissert. 38. p. 397.) as the symbol of the Divinity, and afterwards as the Divinity himself. It is also very probable, that divers traces in the fabulous history of Bacchus have been derived from an ignorant tradition of these particulars. The cry used by the Bacchanals was composed of two words, each of which, as Bochart observes, signifies fire. See his Canaan, lib. i. c. 18.