The starting point for this question is Moshe's own declaration in Devarim 4:5-8, where he frames the laws themselves as the visible proof of Israel's wisdom — the nations will look on and say, "Surely, that great nation is a wise and discerning people," and will marvel that no other nation has statutes as just as this Teaching. The laws are not merely rules for daily life; they are the medium through which Israel's identity and relationship with God become legible to the world.
Yet the deeper danger of settled, prosperous life is precisely the amnesia it breeds, and Devarim 8:10-18 addresses this head-on: once Israel builds houses, plants vineyards, and accumulates wealth, the temptation will be to say, "My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me" — a forgetting of God that begins with forgetting the commandments. Moshe's lawgiving is therefore also a preemptive antidote: the laws anchor gratitude and divine awareness inside the rhythms of material success.
This is why Devarim 30:11-20 frames the entire body of instruction as a life-or-death choice rather than a legal code: "I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse — choose life," and Moshe insists that the Instruction is "not too baffling for you, nor beyond reach — the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart." The laws are the concrete shape of that choice; obedience to them is identified with love of God, walking in His ways, and flourishing on the land.
The Ramban (Ramban on Devarim 1:1) reads the opening of the book as signaling that Moshe "began to explain the commandments" to the people — the speech is understood as an act of deliberate elucidation, not mere repetition, offered precisely at this transitional moment before the crossing into the land.
רש"ר הירש, דברים א ג, וראה שם עוד reads the opening eleven chapters as conveying foundational outlooks and general obligations toward God and His Torah — explained on the basis of a retrospective survey of the past — and declares that Moshe spoke these words for all generations, requiring every individual in Israel to absorb them in spirit and soul in order to be a faithful member of the covenant.
Sotah 14a supplies the Gemara's observation that many commandments can only be fulfilled in the Land of Israel — Moshe himself is said to have desired to enter the Land precisely so that those mitzvot could be realized through him — making the timing of this legal discourse, delivered on the eve of entry, essential rather than incidental.
The Sefat Emet (Sefat Emet, Bamidbar, Chukat 19) observes that at this juncture the preparation for entering the Land began — a preparation for the spread of holiness even while engaged with the nations of the world, with Israel now moving under their own inherited spiritual power rather than under desert-era miraculous guidance.
Taken together, the through-line is this: Moshe's farewell laws are not administrative housekeeping. They are the transfer of the very capacity for self-governance — intellectual, moral, and spiritual — without which settled national life collapses into idolatry or arrogance. The Rambam (Mishneh Torah, Human Dispositions 1:7) teaches that character is formed only through repeated action until the right disposition becomes effortless and fixed in the self; Moshe's repeated, elaborated presentation of the laws is itself the rehearsal that is meant to inscribe them into the people before they no longer have him.