Eikev

¹⁶ You shall destroy all the peoples that the Lord your God delivers to you, showing them no pity. And you shall not worship their gods, for that would be a snare to you. ¹⁷ Should you say to yourselves, “These nations are more numerous than we; how can we dispossess them?” ¹⁸ You need have no fear of them. You have but to bear in mind what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and all the Egyptians: ¹⁹ the wondrous acts that you saw with your own eyes, the signs and the portents, the mighty hand, and the outstretched arm by which the Lord your God liberated you. Thus will the Lord your God do to all the peoples you now fear. ²⁰ The Lord your God will also send a plague against them, until those who are left in hiding perish before you. ²¹ Do not stand in dread of them, for the Lord your God is in your midst, a great and awesome God.

²² The Lord your God will dislodge those peoples before you little by little; you will not be able to put an end to them at once, else the wild beasts would multiply to your hurt. ²³ The Lord your God will deliver them up to you, throwing them into utter panic until they are wiped out. ²⁴ He will deliver their kings into your hand, and you shall obliterate their name from under the heavens; no man shall stand up to you, until you have wiped them out.

²⁵ You shall consign the images of their gods to the fire; you shall not covet the silver and gold on them and keep it for yourselves, lest you be ensnared thereby; for that is abhorrent to the Lord your God. ²⁶ You must not bring an abhorrent thing into your house, or you will be proscribed like it; you must reject it as abominable and abhorrent, for it is proscribed.

Chapter 8
¹ You shall faithfully observe all the Instruction that I enjoin upon you today, that you may thrive and increase and be able to possess the land that the Lord promised on oath to your fathers.

² Remember the long way that the Lord your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past forty years, that He might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts: whether you would keep His commandments or not. ³ He subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had ever known, in order to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but that man may live on anything that the Lord decrees. ⁴ The clothes upon you did not wear out, nor did your feet swell these forty years. ⁵ Bear in mind that the Lord your God disciplines you just as a man disciplines his son. ⁶ Therefore keep the commandments of the Lord your God: walk in His ways and revere Him.

⁷ For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; ⁸ a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey; ⁹ a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper. ¹⁰ When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you.

¹¹ Take care lest you forget the Lord your God and fail to keep His commandments, His rules, and His laws, which I enjoin upon you today. ¹² When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, ¹³ and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, ¹⁴ beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God — who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage; ¹⁵ who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land with no water in it, who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock; ¹⁶ who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers had never known, in order to test you by hardships only to benefit you in the end — ¹⁷ and you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” ¹⁸ Remember that it is the Lord your God who gives you the power to get wealth, in fulfillment of the covenant that He made on oath with your fathers, as is still the case.

¹⁹ If you do forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve them or bow down to them, I warn you this day that you shall certainly perish; ²⁰ like the nations that the Lord will cause to perish before you, so shall you perish — because you did not heed the Lord your God.

Chapter 9
¹ Hear, O Israel! You are about to cross the Jordan to go in and dispossess nations greater and more populous than you: great cities with walls sky-high; ² a people great and tall, the Anakites, of whom you have knowledge; for you have heard it said, “Who can stand up to the children of Anak?” ³ Know then this day that none other than the Lord your God is crossing at your head, a devouring fire; it is He who will wipe them out. He will subdue them before you, that you may quickly dispossess and destroy them, as the Lord promised you. ⁴ And when the Lord your God has thrust them from your path, say not to yourselves, “The Lord has enabled us to possess this land because of our virtues”; it is rather because of the wickedness of those nations that the Lord is dispossessing them before you. ⁵ It is not because of your virtues and your rectitude that you will be able to possess their country; but it is because of their wickedness that the Lord your God is dispossessing those nations before you, and in order to fulfill the oath that the Lord made to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

⁶ Know, then, that it is not for any virtue of yours that the Lord your God is giving you this good land to possess; for you are a stiffnecked people. ⁷ Remember, never forget, how you provoked the Lord your God to anger in the wilderness: from the day that you left the land of Egypt until you reached this place, you have continued defiant toward the Lord.

⁸ At Horeb you so provoked the Lord that the Lord was angry enough with you to have destroyed you. ⁹ I had ascended the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the Tablets of the Covenant that the Lord had made with you, and I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights, eating no bread and drinking no water. ¹⁰ And the Lord gave me the two tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God, with the exact words that the Lord had addressed to you on the mountain out of the fire on the day of the Assembly.

¹¹ At the end of those forty days and forty nights, the Lord gave me the two tablets of stone, the Tablets of the Covenant. ¹² And the Lord said to me, “Hurry, go down from here at once, for the people whom you brought out of Egypt have acted wickedly; they have been quick to stray from the path that I enjoined upon them; they have made themselves a molten image.” ¹³ The Lord further said to me, “I see that this is a stiffnecked people. ¹⁴ Let Me alone and I will destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven, and I will make you a nation far more numerous than they.”

¹⁵ I started down the mountain, a mountain ablaze with fire, the two Tablets of the Covenant in my two hands. ¹⁶ I saw how you had sinned against the Lord your God: you had made yourselves a molten calf; you had been quick to stray from the path that the Lord had enjoined upon you. ¹⁷ Thereupon I gripped the two tablets and flung them away with both my hands, smashing them before your eyes. ¹⁸ I threw myself down before the Lord — eating no bread and drinking no water forty days and forty nights, as before — because of the great wrong you had committed, doing what displeased the Lord and vexing Him. ¹⁹ For I was in dread of the Lord’s fierce anger against you, which moved Him to wipe you out. And that time, too, the Lord gave heed to me. — ²⁰ Moreover, the Lord was angry enough with Aaron to have destroyed him; so I also interceded for Aaron at that time. — ²¹ As for that sinful thing you had made, the calf, I took it and put it to the fire; I broke it to bits and ground it thoroughly until it was fine as dust, and I threw its dust into the brook that comes down from the mountain.

²² Again you provoked the Lord at Taberah, and at Massah, and at Kibroth-hattaavah.

²³ And when the Lord sent you on from Kadesh-barnea, saying, “Go up and take possession of the land that I am giving you,” you flouted the command of the Lord your God; you did not put your trust in Him and did not obey Him.

²⁴ As long as I have known you, you have been defiant toward the Lord.

²⁵ When I lay prostrate before the Lord those forty days and forty nights, because the Lord was determined to destroy you, ²⁶ I prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord God, do not annihilate Your very own people, whom You redeemed in Your majesty and whom You freed from Egypt with a mighty hand. ²⁷ Give thought to Your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and pay no heed to the stubbornness of this people, its wickedness, and its sinfulness. ²⁸ Else the country from which You freed us will say, ‘It was because the Lord was powerless to bring them into the land that He had promised them, and because He rejected them, that He brought them out to have them die in the wilderness.’ ²⁹ Yet they are Your very own people, whom You freed with Your great might and Your outstretched arm.”

Chapter 10
¹ Thereupon the Lord said to me, “Carve out two tablets of stone like the first, and come up to Me on the mountain; and make an ark of wood. ² I will inscribe on the tablets the commandments that were on the first tablets that you smashed, and you shall deposit them in the ark.”

³ I made an ark of acacia wood and carved out two tablets of stone like the first; I took the two tablets with me and went up the mountain. ⁴ The Lord inscribed on the tablets the same text as on the first, the Ten Commandments that He addressed to you on the mountain out of the fire on the day of the Assembly; and the Lord gave them to me. ⁵ Then I left and went down from the mountain, and I deposited the tablets in the ark that I had made, where they still are, as the Lord had commanded me.

⁶ From Beeroth-bene-jaakan the Israelites marched to Moserah. Aaron died there and was buried there; and his son Eleazar became priest in his stead. ⁷ From there they marched to Gudgod, and from Gudgod to Jotbath, a region of running brooks.

⁸ At that time the Lord set apart the tribe of Levi to carry the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant, to stand in attendance upon the Lord, and to bless in His name, as is still the case. ⁹ That is why the Levites have received no hereditary portion along with their kinsmen: the Lord is their portion, as the Lord your God spoke concerning them.

¹⁰ I had stayed on the mountain, as I did the first time, forty days and forty nights; and the Lord heeded me once again: the Lord agreed not to destroy you. ¹¹ And the Lord said to me, “Up, resume the march at the head of the people, that they may go in and possess the land that I swore to their fathers to give them.”

¹² And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God demand of you? Only this: to revere the Lord your God, to walk only in His paths, to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, ¹³ keeping the Lord’s commandments and laws, which I enjoin upon you today, for your good. ¹⁴ Mark, the heavens to their uttermost reaches belong to the Lord your God, the earth and all that is on it! ¹⁵ Yet it was to your fathers that the Lord was drawn in His love for them, so that He chose you, their lineal descendants, from among all peoples — as is now the case. ¹⁶ Cut away, therefore, the thickening about your hearts and stiffen your necks no more. ¹⁷ For the Lord your God is God supreme and Lord supreme, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, ¹⁸ but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing. — ¹⁹ You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

²⁰ You must revere the Lord your God: only Him shall you worship, to Him shall you hold fast, and by His name shall you swear. ²¹ He is your glory and He is your God, who wrought for you those marvelous, awesome deeds that you saw with your own eyes. ²²Your ancestors went down to Egypt seventy persons in all; and now the Lord your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven.

Chapter 11
¹ Love, therefore, the Lord your God, and always keep His charge, His laws, His rules, and His commandments.

² Take thought this day that it was not your children, who neither experienced nor witnessed the lesson of the Lord your God —

His majesty, His mighty hand, His outstretched arm; ³ the signs and the deeds that He performed in Egypt against Pharaoh king of Egypt and all his land; ⁴ what He did to Egypt’s army, its horses and chariots; how the Lord rolled back upon them the waters of the Sea of Reeds when they were pursuing you, thus destroying them once and for all; ⁵ what He did for you in the wilderness before you arrived in this place; ⁶ and what He did to Dathan and Abiram, sons of Eliab son of Reuben, when the earth opened her mouth and swallowed them, along with their households, their tents, and every living thing in their train, from amidst all Israel —

⁷ but that it was you who saw with your own eyes all the marvelous deeds that the Lord performed.

⁸ Keep, therefore, all the Instruction that I enjoin upon you today, so that you may have the strength to enter and take possession of the land that you are about to cross into and possess, ⁹ and that you may long endure upon the soil that the Lord swore to your fathers to assign to them and to their heirs, a land flowing with milk and honey.

¹⁰ For the land that you are about to enter and possess is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come. There the grain you sowed had to be watered by your own labors, like a vegetable garden; ¹¹ but the land you are about to cross into and possess, a land of hills and valleys, soaks up its water from the rains of heaven. ¹² It is a land which the Lord your God looks after, on which the Lord your God always keeps His eye, from year’s beginning to year’s end.

¹³ If, then, you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day, loving the Lord your God and serving Him with all your heart and soul, ¹⁴ I will grant the rain for your land in season, the early rain and the late. You shall gather in your new grain and wine and oil — ¹⁵ I will also provide grass in the fields for your cattle — and thus you shall eat your fill. ¹⁶ Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and bow to them. ¹⁷ For the Lord’s anger will flare up against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce; and you will soon perish from the good land that the Lord is assigning to you.

¹⁸ Therefore impress these My words upon your very heart: bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a -symbol on your forehead, ¹⁹ and teach them to your children — reciting them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up; ²⁰ and inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates — ²¹ to the end that you and your children may endure, in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to assign to them, as long as there is a heaven over the earth.

²² If, then, you faithfully keep all this Instruction that I command you, loving the Lord your God, walking in all His ways, and holding fast to Him, ²³ the Lord will dislodge before you all these nations: you will dispossess nations greater and more numerous than you.²⁴ Every spot on which your foot treads shall be yours; your territory shall extend from the wilderness to the Lebanon and from the River — the Euphrates — to the Western Sea. ²⁵ No man shall stand up to you: the Lord your God will put the dread and the fear of you over the whole land in which you set foot, as He promised you.