Ulangan 29:20-28

29:20 The Lord will be unwilling to forgive him, and his intense anger ¹  will rage ²  against that man; all the curses ³  written in this scroll will fall upon him ⁴  and the Lord will obliterate his name from memory. ⁵  29:21 The Lord will single him out ⁶  for judgment ⁷  from all the tribes of Israel according to all the curses of the covenant written in this scroll of the law. 29:22 The generation to come – your descendants who will rise up after you, as well as the foreigner who will come from distant places – will see ⁸  the afflictions of that land and the illnesses that the Lord has brought on it. 29:23 The whole land will be covered with brimstone, salt, and burning debris; it will not be planted nor will it sprout or produce grass. It will resemble the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord destroyed in his intense anger. ⁹  29:24 Then all the nations will ask, “Why has the Lord done all this to this land? What is this fierce, heated display of anger ¹⁰  all about?” 29:25 Then people will say, “Because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt. 29:26 They went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods they did not know and that he did not permit them to worship. ¹¹  29:27 That is why the Lord’s anger erupted against this land, bringing on it all the curses ¹²  written in this scroll. 29:28 So the Lord has uprooted them from their land in anger, wrath, and great rage and has deported them to another land, as is clear today.”

Ulangan 32:21-26

32:21 They have made me jealous ¹³  with false gods, ¹⁴ 

enraging me with their worthless gods; ¹⁵ 

so I will make them jealous with a people they do not recognize, ¹⁶ 

with a nation slow to learn ¹⁷  I will enrage them.

32:22 For a fire has been kindled by my anger,

and it burns to lowest Sheol; ¹⁸ 

it consumes the earth and its produce,

and ignites the foundations of the mountains.

32:23 I will increase their ¹⁹  disasters,

I will use up my arrows on them.

32:24 They will be starved by famine,

eaten by plague, and bitterly stung; ²⁰ 

I will send the teeth of wild animals against them,

along with the poison of creatures that crawl in the dust.

32:25 The sword will make people childless outside,

and terror will do so inside;

they will destroy ²¹  both the young man and the virgin,

the infant and the gray-haired man.

The Weakness of Other Gods

32:26 “I said, ‘I want to cut them in pieces. ²² 

I want to make people forget they ever existed.

[29:20]  ¹ tn Heb “the wrath of the Lord and his zeal.” The expression is a hendiadys, a figure in which the second noun becomes adjectival to the first.

[29:20]  ² tn Heb “smoke,” or “smolder.”

[29:20]  ³ tn Heb “the entire oath.”

[29:20]  ⁴ tn Or “will lie in wait against him.”

[29:20]  ⁵ tn Heb “blot out his name from under the sky.”

[29:21]  ⁶ tn Heb “set him apart.”

[29:21]  ⁷ tn Heb “for evil”; NAB “for doom”; NASB “for adversity”; NIV “for disaster”; NRSV “for calamity.”

[29:22]  ⁸ tn Heb “will say and see.” One expects a quotation to appear, but it seems to be omitted. To avoid confusion in the translation, the verb “will say” is omitted.

[29:23]  ⁹ tn Heb “the anger and the wrath.” This construction is a hendiadys intended to intensify the emotion.

[29:24]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “this great burning of anger”; KJV “the heat of this great anger.”

[29:26]  ¹¹ tn Heb “did not assign to them”; NASB, NRSV “had not allotted to them.”

[29:27]  ¹² tn Heb “the entire curse.”

[32:21]  ¹³ sn They have made me jealous. The “jealousy” of God is not a spirit of pettiness prompted by his insecurity, but righteous indignation caused by the disloyalty of his people to his covenant grace (see note on the word “God” in Deut 4:24). The jealousy of Israel, however (see next line), will be envy because of God’s lavish attention to another nation. This is an ironic wordplay. See H. Peels, NIDOTTE 3:938-39.

[32:21]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “what is not a god,” or a “nondeity.”

[32:21]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “their empty (things).” The Hebrew term used here to refer pejoratively to the false gods is הֶבֶל (hevel, “futile” or “futility”), used frequently in Ecclesiastes (e.g., Eccl 1:1, “Futile! Futile!” laments the Teacher, “Absolutely futile! Everything is futile!”).

[32:21]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “what is not a people,” or a “nonpeople.” The “nonpeople” (לֹא־עָם, lo’-’am) referred to here are Gentiles who someday would become God’s people in the fullest sense (cf. Hos 1:9; 2:23).

[32:21]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “a foolish nation” (so KJV, NAB, NRSV); NIV “a nation that has no understanding”; NLT “I will provoke their fury by blessing the foolish Gentiles.”

[32:22]  ¹⁸ tn Or “to the lowest depths of the earth”; cf. NAB “to the depths of the nether world”; NIV “to the realm of death below”; NLT “to the depths of the grave.”

[32:22]  sn Sheol refers here not to hell and hell-fire – a much later concept – but to the innermost parts of the earth, as low down as one could get. The parallel with “the foundations of the mountains” makes this clear (cf. Pss 9:17; 16:10; 139:8; Isa 14:9, 15; Amos 9:2).

[32:23]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “upon them.”

[32:24]  ²⁰ tn The Hebrew term קֶטֶב (qetev) is probably metaphorical here for the sting of a disease (HALOT 1091-92 s.v.).

[32:25]  ²¹ tn A verb is omitted here in the Hebrew text; for purposes of English style one suitable to the context is supplied.

[32:26]  ²² tc The LXX reads “I said I would scatter them.” This reading is followed by a number of English versions (e.g., KJV, ASV, NIV, NCV, NRSV, NLT, CEV).