Where can we go? Our brothers have discouraged us, saying: The people are larger and taller than we are; the cities are large, fortified to the heavens. We also saw the descendants of the Anakim there.’

The Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be reduced to a few survivors among the nations where the Lord your God will drive you.

Someone could flee there who committed manslaughter, killing his neighbor accidentally without previously hating him. He could flee to one of these cities and stay alive:

a land where you will eat food without shortage, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you will mine copper.

He led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its poisonous snakes and scorpions, a thirsty land where there was no water. He brought water out of the flint-like rock for you.

For the land you are entering to possess is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sowed your seed and irrigated by hand as in a vegetable garden.

No one will be able to stand against you; the Lord your God will put fear and dread of you in all the land where you set foot, as He has promised you.

Destroy completely all the places where the nations that you are driving out worship their gods—on the high mountains, on the hills, and under every green tree.

If the place where Yahweh your God chooses to put His name is too far from you, you may slaughter any of your herd or flock He has given you, as I have commanded you, and you may eat it within your gates whenever you want.

You are to eat a tenth of your grain, new wine, and oil, and the firstborn of your herd and flock, in the presence of Yahweh your God at the place where He chooses to have His name dwell, so that you will always learn to fear the Lord your God.

But if the distance is too great for you to carry it, since the place where Yahweh your God chooses to put His name is too far away from you and since the Lord your God has blessed you,

Sacrifice to Yahweh your God a Passover animal from the herd or flock in the place where the Lord chooses to have His name dwell.

You must only sacrifice the Passover animal at the place where Yahweh your God chooses to have His name dwell. Do this in the evening as the sun sets at the same time of day you departed from Egypt.

Rejoice before Yahweh your God in the place where He chooses to have His name dwell—you, your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the Levite within your gates, as well as the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow among you.

When a Levite leaves one of your towns where he lives in Israel and wants to go to the place the Lord chooses,

Then if you are not satisfied with her, you are to let her go where she wants, but you must not sell her for money or treat her as merchandise, because you have humiliated her.

you must take some of the first of all the land’s produce that you harvest from the land Yahweh your God is giving you and put it in a container. Then go to the place where the Lord your God chooses to have His name dwell.

You will become an object of horror, scorn, and ridicule among all the peoples where the Lord will drive you.

“Indeed, you know how we lived in the land of Egypt and passed through the nations where you traveled.

The Lord uprooted them from their land in His anger, rage, and great wrath, and threw them into another land where they are today.’

“When all these things happen to you—the blessings and curses I have set before you—and you come to your senses while you are in all the nations where the Lord your God has driven you,

then He will restore your fortunes, have compassion on you, and gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you.

He will say: “Where are their gods,
the ‘rock’ they found refuge in?

He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab facing Beth-peor, and no one to this day knows where his grave is.