Then they took some of the fruit of the land in their hands and brought it down to us; and they reported back to us, and said, ‘It is a good land which the Lord our God is about to give us.’

Then the Amorites who lived in that hill country came out against you and chased you as bees do, and struck you down in Seir as far as Hormah.

I commanded Joshua at that time, saying, ‘Your eyes have seen everything that the Lord your God has done to these two kings [Sihon and Og]; so the Lord shall do the same to all the kingdoms into which you are about to cross.

So He declared to you His covenant which He commanded you to follow, the Ten Commandments; and He wrote them on two tablets of stone.

You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous (impassioned) God [demanding what is rightfully and uniquely mine], visiting (avenging) the iniquity (sin, guilt) of the fathers on the children [that is, calling the children to account for the sins of their fathers], to the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me,

You shall teach them diligently to your children [impressing God’s precepts on their minds and penetrating their hearts with His truths] and shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road and when you lie down and when you get up.

But this is how you shall deal with them: you shall tear down their altars and smash to pieces their sacred pillars, and cut down their Asherim (symbols of the goddess Asherah), and burn their carved or sculpted images in the fire.

So know today [with confident assurance] that the Lord your God is crossing [the Jordan] before you like a devouring fire. He will destroy them and He will subdue them before you, and you shall drive them out and destroy them quickly, just as the Lord has promised you.

Then the Lord said to me, ‘Arise, go down from here quickly, for your people whom you brought from Egypt have acted corruptly. They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them; they have made (cast) a molten image for themselves.’

“So I turned and came down from the mountain while the mountain was burning with fire, and the two tablets of the covenant were in my two hands.

Then, as before, I fell down before the Lord for [another] forty days and forty nights; I did not eat food or drink water, because of all the sin you had committed by doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke Him to anger.

I took your sinful thing, the calf which you had made, and burned it in the fire and thoroughly crushed it, grinding the metal thoroughly until it was as fine as dust; and I threw its dust into the brook that came down from the mountain.

“So I fell down and lay face down before the Lord forty days and nights because the Lord had said He would destroy you.

The Lord wrote on the tablets, like the first writing, the Ten Commandments which the Lord had spoken to you on the mountain from the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly; then the Lord gave them to me.

Then I turned and came down from the mountain and put the tablets in the ark which I had made; and they are there, just as the Lord commanded me.”

He is your praise and glory; He is your God, who has done for you these great and awesome things which you have seen with your own eyes.

Your fathers went down to Egypt, seventy persons [in all], and now the Lord your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven.

You shall teach them [diligently] to your children [impressing God’s precepts on their minds and penetrating their hearts with His truths], speaking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up.

Are they not across the Jordan, west of the road, toward the sunset, in the land of the Canaanites who live in the Arabah, opposite Gilgal, beside the oaks of Moreh?

You shall tear down their altars and smash their [idolatrous] pillars and burn their Asherim in the fire; you shall cut down the carved and sculpted images of their gods and obliterate their name from that place.

You shall not behave this way toward the Lord your God, for they have done for their gods every repulsive thing which the Lord hates; for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire [as sacrifices] to their gods.

then you shall investigate and search out [witnesses] and ask thorough questions. If it is true and the matter is established that this loathsome thing has been done among you,

then you shall bring that man or that woman who has done this evil thing to the gates [of your city] and you shall stone the man or the woman to death.

as [for example] when a man goes into the forest with his neighbor to cut wood, and his hand swings the axe to cut down the tree, but the iron head slips off the wooden handle and hits his companion and he dies—the offender may escape to one of these cities and live;

“When you besiege a city for a long time, making war against it in order to capture it, you shall not destroy its [fruit-bearing] trees by swinging an axe against them; for you may eat from them, and you shall not cut them down. For is the tree of the field a man, that it should be besieged (destroyed) by you?

Only the trees which you know are not fruit trees shall you destroy and cut down, so that you may build siegeworks against the city that is making war with you until it falls.

and the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a [river] valley with running water, which has not been plowed or planted, and shall break the heifer’s neck there in the valley.

You shall not see your countryman’s donkey or his ox fall down along the road, and ignore [your duty to help] them; you shall certainly help him lift it up.

But when evening comes, he shall bathe in water, and at sundown he may return to the camp.

and you shall have a spade among your tools, and when you [prepare to] sit down outside [to relieve yourself], you shall dig a hole with it and shall turn and cover up your waste.

You shall give him his wages on the day that he earns them before the sun sets—for he is poor and is counting on it—so that he does not cry out to the Lord against you, and it becomes a sin for you.

then it shall be that if the guilty man deserves to be beaten, the judge shall make him lie down and be beaten in his presence with a [certain] number of stripes in proportion to his offense.

then his brother’s widow shall approach him in the presence of the elders, and pull his sandal off his foot and spit in his face; and she shall answer and say, ‘So it is done to that man who does not build up his brother’s household.’

Then the priest will take the basket from you and place it before the altar of the Lord your God.

And you shall say before the Lord your God, ‘My father [Jacob] was a wandering Aramean, and he [along with his family] went down to Egypt and lived there [as strangers], few in number; but while there he became a great, mighty and populous nation.

And now, look, I have brought the first of the produce of the ground which You, O Lord, have given me.’ And you shall place it before the Lord your God, and shall worship before the Lord your God;

I have not eaten from the tithe while mourning, nor have I removed any of it when I was [ceremonially] unclean [making the tithe ceremonially unclean], nor offered any of it to the dead. I have listened to the voice of the Lord my God; I have done everything in accordance with all that You have commanded me.

Look down from Your holy dwelling above, from heaven, and bless Your people Israel, and the land which You have given us, as You have sworn to our fathers, a land [of plenty] flowing with milk and honey.’

These [tribes] shall stand on Mount Ebal to pronounce the curse [for disobedience]: Reuben, Gad, Asher, Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali.

The Lord will make the rain of your land powder and dust; from heaven it will come down on you until you are destroyed.

“The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies; you will go out against them one way, but flee before them seven ways, and you will be an example of terror to all the kingdoms of the earth [when they see your destruction].

The stranger who lives among you will rise above you higher and higher, and you will go down lower and lower.

They will besiege you in all your cities until your high and fortified walls in which you trusted come down throughout your land; and they will besiege you in all your cities throughout your land which the Lord your God has given you.

It will happen that when he (a renegade) hears the words of this oath, and he imagines himself as blessed, saying, ‘I will have peace and safety even though I walk within the stubbornness of my heart [rejecting God and His law], in order that the watered land dwindles away along with the dry [destroying everything],’

All the nations will say, ‘Why has the Lord done this thing to this land? Why this great outburst of anger?’

But I will certainly hide My face [from them] in that day because of all the evil which they will do, for they will turn to other gods [to worship lifeless idols, to honor handmade relics].

“How could one chase a thousand,
And two put ten thousand to flight,
Unless their Rock had sold them,
And the Lord had given them up?

He said,

“The Lord came from Sinai,
And dawned on them from Seir;
He shone forth from Mount Paran,
And He came from among ten thousand holy ones;
At His right hand was a flaming fire, a law, for them.

“His majesty is like a firstborn young bull,
And his horns like the horns of the wild ox;
With them he will gore the peoples,
All of them together, to the ends of the earth.
And those are the ten thousands of Ephraim,
And those are the thousands of Manasseh.”

Of Dan he said,

“Dan is a lion’s cub,
That leaps forth from Bashan.”

Now Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is opposite Jericho. And the Lord showed him all the land, from Gilead to Dan,