7:1 When the Lord your God brings you to the land that you are going to occupy and forces out many nations before you – Hittites, 1 Girgashites, 2 Amorites, 3 Canaanites, 4 Perizzites, 5 Hivites, 6 and Jebusites, 7 seven 8 nations more numerous and powerful than you – 7:2 and he 9 delivers them over to you and you attack them, you must utterly annihilate 10 them. Make no treaty 11 with them and show them no mercy! 7:3 You must not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 7:4 for they will turn your sons away from me to worship other gods. Then the anger of the Lord will erupt against you and he will quickly destroy you. 7:5 Instead, this is what you must do to them: You must tear down their altars, shatter their sacred pillars, 12 cut down their sacred Asherah poles, 13 and burn up their idols. 7:6 For you are a people holy 14 to the Lord your God. He 15 has chosen you to be his people, prized 16 above all others on the face of the earth.
7:7 It is not because you were more numerous than all the other peoples that the Lord favored and chose you – for in fact you were the least numerous of all peoples. 7:8 Rather it is because of his 17 love 18 for you and his faithfulness to the promise 19 he solemnly vowed 20 to your ancestors 21 that the Lord brought you out with great power, 22 redeeming 23 you from the place of slavery, from the power 24 of Pharaoh king of Egypt. 7:9 So realize that the Lord your God is the true God, 25 the faithful God who keeps covenant faithfully 26 with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, 7:10 but who pays back those who hate 27 him as they deserve and destroys them. He will not ignore 28 those who hate him but will repay them as they deserve! 7:11 So keep the commandments, statutes, and ordinances that I today am commanding you to do.
7:12 If you obey these ordinances and are careful to do them, the Lord your God will faithfully keep covenant with you 29 as he promised 30 your ancestors. 7:13 He will love and bless you, and make you numerous. He will bless you with many children, 31 with the produce of your soil, your grain, your new wine, your oil, the offspring of your oxen, and the young of your flocks in the land which he promised your ancestors to give you. 7:14 You will be blessed beyond all peoples; there will be no barrenness 32 among you or your livestock. 7:15 The Lord will protect you from all sickness, and you will not experience any of the terrible diseases that you knew in Egypt; instead he will inflict them on all those who hate you.
7:16 You must destroy 33 all the people whom the Lord your God is about to deliver over to you; you must not pity them or worship 34 their gods, for that will be a snare to you. 7:17 If you think, “These nations are more numerous than I – how can I dispossess them?” 7:18 you must not fear them. You must carefully recall 35 what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and all Egypt, 7:19 the great judgments 36 you saw, the signs and wonders, the strength and power 37 by which he 38 brought you out – thus the Lord your God will do to all the people you fear. 7:20 Furthermore, the Lord your God will release hornets 39 among them until the very last ones who hide from you 40 perish. 7:21 You must not tremble in their presence, for the Lord your God, who is present among you, is a great and awesome God. 7:22 He, 41 the God who leads you, will expel the nations little by little. You will not be allowed to destroy them all at once lest the wild animals overrun you. 7:23 The Lord your God will give them over to you; he will throw them into a great panic 42 until they are destroyed. 7:24 He will hand over their kings to you and you will erase their very names from memory. 43 Nobody will be able to resist you until you destroy them. 7:25 You must burn the images of their gods, but do not covet the silver and gold that covers them so much that you take it for yourself and thus become ensnared by it; for it is abhorrent 44 to the Lord your God. 7:26 You must not bring any abhorrent thing into your house and thereby become an object of divine wrath 45 along with it. 46 You must absolutely detest 47 and abhor it, 48 for it is an object of divine wrath.
8:1 You must keep carefully all these commandments 49 I am giving 50 you today so that you may live, increase in number, 51 and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised to your ancestors. 52 8:2 Remember the whole way by which he 53 has brought you these forty years through the desert 54 so that he might, by humbling you, test you to see if you have it within you to keep his commandments or not. 8:3 So he humbled you by making you hungry and then feeding you with unfamiliar manna. 55 He did this to teach you 56 that humankind 57 cannot live by bread 58 alone, but also by everything that comes from the Lord’s mouth. 59 8:4 Your clothing did not wear out nor did your feet swell all these forty years. 8:5 Be keenly aware that just as a parent disciplines his child, 60 the Lord your God disciplines you. 8:6 So you must keep his 61 commandments, live according to his standards, 62 and revere him. 8:7 For the Lord your God is bringing you to a good land, a land of brooks, 63 springs, and fountains flowing forth in valleys and hills, 8:8 a land of wheat, barley, vines, fig trees, and pomegranates, of olive trees and honey, 8:9 a land where you may eat food 64 in plenty and find no lack of anything, a land whose stones are iron 65 and from whose hills you can mine copper. 8:10 You will eat your fill and then praise the Lord your God because of the good land he has given you.
8:11 Be sure you do not forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments, ordinances, and statutes that I am giving you today. 8:12 When you eat your fill, when you build and occupy good houses, 8:13 when your cattle and flocks increase, when you have plenty of silver and gold, and when you have abundance of everything, 8:14 be sure 66 you do not feel self-important and forget the Lord your God who brought you from the land of Egypt, the place of slavery, 8:15 and who brought you through the great, fearful desert of venomous serpents 67 and scorpions, an arid place with no water. He made water flow 68 from a flint rock and 8:16 fed you in the desert with manna (which your ancestors had never before known) so that he might by humbling you test you 69 and eventually bring good to you. 8:17 Be careful 70 not to say, “My own ability and skill 71 have gotten me this wealth.” 8:18 You must remember the Lord your God, for he is the one who gives ability to get wealth; if you do this he will confirm his covenant that he made by oath to your ancestors, 72 even as he has to this day. 8:19 Now if you forget the Lord your God at all 73 and follow other gods, worshiping and prostrating yourselves before them, I testify to you today that you will surely be annihilated. 8:20 Just like the nations the Lord is about to destroy from your sight, so he will do to you 74 because you would not obey him. 75
9:1 Listen, Israel: Today you are about to cross the Jordan so you can dispossess the nations there, people greater and stronger than you who live in large cities with extremely high fortifications. 76 9:2 They include the Anakites, 77 a numerous 78 and tall people whom you know about and of whom it is said, “Who is able to resist the Anakites?” 9:3 Understand today that the Lord your God who goes before you is a devouring fire; he will defeat and subdue them before you. You will dispossess and destroy them quickly just as he 79 has told you. 9:4 Do not think to yourself after the Lord your God has driven them out before you, “Because of my own righteousness the Lord has brought me here to possess this land.” It is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out ahead of you. 9:5 It is not because of your righteousness, or even your inner uprightness, 80 that you have come here to possess their land. Instead, because of the wickedness of these nations the Lord your God is driving them out ahead of you in order to confirm the promise he 81 made on oath to your ancestors, 82 to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 9:6 Understand, therefore, that it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is about to give you this good land as a possession, for you are a stubborn 83 people!
9:7 Remember – don’t ever forget 84 – how you provoked the Lord your God in the desert; from the time you left the land of Egypt until you came to this place you were constantly rebelling against him. 85 9:8 At Horeb you provoked him and he was angry enough with you to destroy you. 9:9 When I went up the mountain to receive the stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant that the Lord made with you, I remained there 86 forty days and nights, eating and drinking nothing. 9:10 The Lord gave me the two stone tablets, written by the very finger 87 of God, and on them was everything 88 he 89 said to you at the mountain from the midst of the fire at the time of that assembly. 9:11 Now at the end of the forty days and nights the Lord presented me with the two stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant. 9:12 And he said to me, “Get up, go down at once from here because your people whom you brought out of Egypt have sinned! They have quickly turned from the way I commanded them and have made for themselves a cast metal image.” 90 9:13 Moreover, he said to me, “I have taken note of these people; they are a stubborn 91 lot! 9:14 Stand aside 92 and I will destroy them, obliterating their very name from memory, 93 and I will make you into a stronger and more numerous nation than they are.”
9:15 So I turned and went down the mountain while it 94 was blazing with fire; the two tablets of the covenant were in my hands. 9:16 When I looked, you had indeed sinned against the Lord your God and had cast for yourselves a metal calf; 95 you had quickly turned aside from the way he 96 had commanded you! 9:17 I grabbed the two tablets, threw them down, 97 and shattered them before your very eyes. 9:18 Then I again fell down before the Lord for forty days and nights; I ate and drank nothing because of all the sin you had committed, doing such evil before the Lord as to enrage him. 9:19 For I was terrified at the Lord’s intense anger 98 that threatened to destroy you. But he 99 listened to me this time as well. 9:20 The Lord was also angry enough at Aaron to kill him, but at that time I prayed for him 100 too. 9:21 As for your sinful thing 101 that you had made, the calf, I took it, melted it down, 102 ground it up until it was as fine as dust, and tossed the dust into the stream that flows down the mountain. 9:22 Moreover, you continued to provoke the Lord at Taberah, 103 Massah, 104 and Kibroth-Hattaavah. 105 9:23 And when he 106 sent you from Kadesh-Barnea and told you, “Go up and possess the land I have given you,” you rebelled against the Lord your God 107 and would neither believe nor obey him. 9:24 You have been rebelling against him 108 from the very first day I knew you!
9:25 I lay flat on the ground before the Lord for forty days and nights, 109 for he 110 had said he would destroy you. 9:26 I prayed to him: 111 O, Lord God, 112 do not destroy your people, your valued property 113 that you have powerfully redeemed, 114 whom you brought out of Egypt by your strength. 115 9:27 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; ignore the stubbornness, wickedness, and sin of these people. 9:28 Otherwise the people of the land 116 from which you brought us will say, “The Lord was unable to bring them to the land he promised them, and because of his hatred for them he has brought them out to kill them in the desert.” 117 9:29 They are your people, your valued property, 118 whom you brought out with great strength and power. 119