1“And now, Israel, hear the statutes and the laws that I am about to teach you to do, so you may live, and you shall come and take hold of the land that the LORD God of your fathers is about to give to you. 2You shall not add to the word that I charge you and you shall not subtract from it, to keep the commands of the LORD your God which I charge you. 3Your own eyes have seen that which the LORD did at Baal Peor, for every man that went after Baal Peor did the LORD your God destroy from your midst. 4But you, the ones clinging to the LORD your God, are all of you alive today. 5See, I have taught you the statutes and the laws as the LORD my God has charged me, to do thus within the land into which you are about to come to take hold of it. 6And you shall keep and do, for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the eyes of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and will say, ‘Only a wise and understanding people is this great nation.’ 7For what great nation is there that has gods close to it like the LORD our God whenever we call to Him? 8And what great nation is there that has just statutes and laws like all this teaching that I am about to set before you today? 9Only be you on the watch and watch yourself closely lest you forget the things that your own eyes have seen and lest they swerve from your heart—all 10the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your sons and to your sons’ sons: the day that you stood before the LORD your God at Horeb when the LORD said to me, ‘Assemble the people to Me that I may have them hear My words, so that they learn to fear Me all the days that they live on the soil, and so that they teach their sons.’ 11And you came forward and stood at the bottom of the mountain, and the mountain was burning with fire to the heart of the heavens—darkness, cloud, and dense fog. 12And the LORD spoke to you from the midst of the fire. The sound of words you did hear but no image did you see except the sound. 13And He told you His covenant that He charged you to do, the Ten Words, and He wrote them on two tablets of stone. 14And me did the LORD charge at that time to teach you statutes and laws for you to do in the land into which you are crossing over to take hold of it. 15And you shall be very watchful of yourselves, for you saw no image on the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire, 16lest you act ruinously and make you a sculpted image of any likeness, the form of male or of female, 17the form of any beast that is on the earth, the form of any winged bird that flies in the heavens, 18the form of anything that crawls on the ground, the form of any fish that is in the waters under the earth, 19lest you raise your eyes to the heavens and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the array of the heavens, and you be led astray and bow down to them and worship them, for the LORD your God allotted them to all the peoples under the heavens. 20But you did the LORD take and He brought you out from the iron’s forge, from Egypt, to become for Him a people in estate as this day. 21And the LORD was incensed with me because of your words and He swore not to let me cross the Jordan and not to let me come into the goodly land that the LORD your God is about to give you in estate. 22For I am about to die in this land, I am not to cross the Jordan, but you are to cross over and you will take hold of this goodly land. 23Be you on the watch, lest you forget the covenant of the LORD your God which He has sealed with you, and you make for yourselves a sculpted image of any sort, against which the LORD your God has charged you. 24For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous god. 25When you beget sons and sons of sons and are long in the land, and you act ruinously and make a sculpted image of any sort and do evil in the eyes of the LORD your God to anger Him, 26I have called to witness against you the heavens and the earth that you shall surely perish quickly from upon the land into which you are about to cross the Jordan to take hold of it. You shall not long endure upon it, for you will surely be destroyed. 27And the LORD will scatter you among the peoples and you shall be left men few in number among the nations where the LORD will drive you. 28And you shall worship there their gods that are human handiwork, wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. 29And you shall search for the LORD your God from there, and you shall find him when you seek Him with all your heart and with all your being. 30When you are in straits and all these things find you in time to come, you shall turn back to the LORD your God and heed His voice. 31For the LORD your God is a merciful god. He will not let you go and will not destroy you and will not forget your fathers’ covenant that He swore to them. 32For, pray, ask of the first days that were before you, from the day God created a human on the earth and from one end of the heavens to the other end of the heavens, has there been the like of this great thing or has its like been heard? 33Has a people heard God’s voice speaking from the midst of the fire, as you yourself have heard, and still lived? 34Or has God tried to come to take Him a nation from within a nation in trials and signs and portents and in battle and with a strong hand and an outstretched arm and with great terrors, like all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? 35You yourself were shown to know that the LORD is God, there is none besides Him. 36From the heavens He made you hear His voice to reprove you, and on the earth He showed you His great fire, and His words you heard, from the midst of the fire. 37And since He did love your fathers He chose their seed after them and brought you out from Egypt through His presence with His great power, 38to dispossess nations greater and mightier than you from before you, to bring you to give to you their land in estate as on this day. 39And you shall know today and take to your heart that the LORD, He is God in the heavens above and on the earth below, there is none else. 40And you shall keep His statutes and His commands which I am about to charge you today, that He do well with you and with your sons after you and so that you long endure on the soil that the LORD your God is about to give you for all time.”
41Then did Moses divide off three towns across the Jordan where the sun rises 42for a murderer to flee there who murdered his fellow man without knowing and he was not his enemy in time past, that he might flee to one of those towns and live: 43Bezer in the wilderness in the land of the plain for the Reubenite, and Ramoth in the Gilead for the Gadite, and Golan in the Bashan for the Manassite.
44And this is the teaching that Moses set before the Israelites. 45These are the treaty terms and the statutes and the laws that Moses spoke to the Israelites when they came out from Egypt, 46across the Jordan in the valley opposite Beth Peor in the land of Sihon king of the Amorite whom Moses, and the Israelites, struck down when they came out from Egypt. 47And they took hold of his land and the land of Og king of the Bashan, the two kings of the Amorite who are across the Jordan where the sun rises, 48from Aroer which is on the bank of the Wadi Arnon as far as Sion, which is Hermon, 49and all the Arabah across the Jordan to the east as far as the Arabah Sea, at the foot of the Pisgah slopes.
CHAPTER 4 NOTES
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1. And now, Israel, hear. The first Hebrew word here, weʿatah, “and now,” is often used in a logical rather than a temporal sense, to introduce a conclusion or mark a transition in the stages of a discourse. At this point, it introduces the grand sermon that concludes this whole preamble to the main body of the Book of Deuteronomy (chapters 5–31). The verb “to hear,” often, as here, in the imperative (shemaʿ), is one of the signature terms of Deuteronomy. The Hebrew verb means “to hear,” “to listen,” “to heed,” and “to understand,” and quite frequently all those meanings come into play. In this preeminently didactic book, the Israelites are repeatedly enjoined to devote careful attention to the exhortations and the laws that Moses delivers to them—to listen, absorb, understand, and obey.
so you may live. This is another verbal refrain that punctuates the sermon. For the Deuteronomist, with deportations and the destruction of nations vividly on the political horizon, history has become a very dangerous realm, and Moses repeatedly urges Israel to follow the only path that, according to the Deuteronomic view, will avert impending disaster.
2. You shall not add . . . you shall not subtract. Jeffrey H. Tigay proposes that this strict-constructionist view of the Mosaic teaching is intended to be limited to the injunction to worship a single God: one is not free to add other objects of worship nor to remove YHWH as the object of worship. But such a cultic sense of “subtract” is rather strained, and it is more likely that Moses here is represented enjoining strict construction precisely in order to diminish any impression (in fact, an abundantly warranted impression) that Deuteronomy is effecting a revision of a good many earlier laws and traditions.
4. you, the ones clinging to the LORD your God, are all of you alive today. The very physical existence of the audience for Moses’s sermon is palpable proof of the principle he announced at the beginning of the sermon, “so you may live.”
6. Only a wise and understanding people is this great nation. The primacy of wisdom in the worldview of Deuteronomy is sharply reflected here. Israel’s greatness as the other nations come to recognize it is not in its fecundity and military might (as, for example, in Balaam’s oracles in Numbers) but in its wisdom, demonstrated by its adherence to a set of just statutes and laws. The next lines (verses 7–8) are testimony to God’s decision to be close to Israel through the statutes and teachings He reveals to them.
10. the day that you stood before the LORD. “The day” or “on the day” is an epic locution for “when.” Having begun with a general exhortation to cling to God’s laws, the sermon now focuses in on the defining moment four decades earlier when Israel stood at the foot of Mount Sinai and God revealed to them his law in thunder and lightning.
12. The sound of words you did hear but no image did you see. The account of the Sinai epiphany in Exodus is less rigorous about excluding the aspect of sight. The Israelites there are enjoined to keep their distance precisely in order that they will see nothing, and then the seventy elders in the sacred feast on the mountain are vouchsafed a vision of the effulgence surrounding God. The Deuteronomist, by contrast, is sternly aniconic, in keeping with his steady polemic against all cults of divine images; he is a writer who insists on hearing the divine, and seeing only God’s portentous acts in history.
except the sound. Abraham ibn Ezra ingeniously connects this slightly odd turn of phrase with the synesthetic “and all the people were seeing the sounds [i.e., the thunder]” (Exodus 20:18).
15. be very watchful of yourselves. It should be noted that the Hebrew freely swings between second-person plural and second-person singular, an oscillation perfectly idiomatic in biblical Hebrew and by no means to be attributed to a collation of different sources. It may be that the speaker on occasion switches to the singular form in order to emphasize the effect of imperative address to each individual, but that is not certain.
16. a sculpted image of any likeness, the form. Philologists have sought to draw technical differences among these terms, but the manifest point of their deployment here is the stylistic force of their synonymity: any manner or shape of image or icon will lead Israel on the path to ruin.
16–18. the form of male or of female . . . of any beast . . . on the earth . . . of any winged bird . . . in the heavens . . . of anything that crawls on the ground . . . of any fish that is in the waters under the earth. The ringing language of the sermon here is a grand evocation of the account of creation in Genesis 1, and the precise recapitulation of phrases compels the conclusion that that account, attributed to P, was familiar to the Deuteronomist in a textual form resembling the one we know. The hierarchy of creation was ordained by God for human’s use and dominion, and man in turn was to recognize the single divine source of all creation. The elevation of any component of the created world to an object of worship is thus seen as a perversion of the whole plan of cosmogonic harmony and hierarchy.
18. the waters under the earth. In keeping with the picture of the cosmos in Genesis 1, water is imagined to be under the earth (“the great abyss”), beyond the perimeters of the dry land (the sea), and erupting from within the dry land itself in rivers and lakes.
19. lest you raise your eyes to the heavens and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the array of the heavens. Once again, the language harks back to the first account of creation, which concludes with the completion of the earth and the heavens “and all their array.” In a historical period rife with religious syncretism and cultural assimilation, the writer stresses the dangerous enchantment of the beauty of the natural world, which could easily lead people to deify and worship the various manifestations of that beauty.
for the LORD your God allotted them to all the peoples under the heavens. This notion, which will be picked up again in the Song of Moses (chapter 32), is a curious one by the lights of later monotheism. To Israel the worship of the one overmastering God was assigned, whereas the other nations were entrusted to the supervision of lesser celestial beings, beney haʾelohim (“the sons of God”) and came to worship these intermediary beings as though they were autonomous deities. Polytheism, in this view, is a reflection of the fact that the sundry nations, unlike Israel, have not been chosen by the one God to serve Him.
20. But you did the LORD take and He brought you out from the iron’s forge. The argument of the sermon now moves another step back in time, from Sinai to the Exodus. The origins of Israel as a people subject to another people in whose land it dwelled, rescued from the crucible of slavery by God, are adduced as further evidence of God’s unique election of Israel.
a people in estate. Literally, a people-estate—God’s special property.
21. the LORD was incensed with me because of your words. Again, the barring of Moses from the promised land is attributed not to any act or gesture of his—for here he is the impeccable leader, God’s mouthpiece—but to the mistrustful words of the Israelites in the incident of the spies.
26. I have called to witness against you the heavens and the earth. It was conventional in ancient Near Eastern treaties to invoke heaven and earth as witnesses, but the word pair here also nicely echoes the allusions to the Creation story in previous verses. God’s heaven and earth are everlasting, but Israel will be all too ephemeral if it worships images of the natural world.
27. And the LORD will scatter you among the peoples. This dire prospect, which is not within the purview of the Book of Exodus, haunts the Deuteronomist, writing in a period after the Neo-Assyrian empire had instituted a policy of deporting substantial elements of subjugated populations in order to clear the conquered territory for colonization. Indeed, some sections of the book, including this one, may have been written in the Babylonian exile.
28. And you shall worship there their gods that are human handiwork. The ultimate catastrophe of exile is viewed as assimilation into the local pagan cults—the fate, one may reasonably surmise, of most of those exiled from the ten northern tribes after the Neo-Assyrian conquest in 721 B.C.E. and some of those exiled in 586 by the Babylonians.
wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. In the earlier books of the Torah, the gods worshipped by the other nations are imagined as lesser entities, impotent in the face of YHWH’s overwhelming superiority and bound to be reduced to nullity in any competition with the God of Israel. In the antipagan polemic of Deuteronomy, as in some of the contemporaneous and slightly later Prophets, polytheism is jeeringly represented as imbecile fetishism.
29. with all your heart and with all your being. This phrase, with its revivalist fervor, is a recurrent one in the rhetoric of Deuteronomy.
30. heed His voice. The primary meaning of the verb, which has already appeared several times in this sermon, is “hear,” but the preposition bE that follows it requires the specific sense of “heed.”
32–33. from the day God created a human on the earth . . . Has a people heard God’s voice speaking from the midst of the fire. These sentences bind together in a summarizing flourish the topics of creation and the Sinai epiphany that were underscored earlier in this speech.
33. still lived. The “still” is added in the translation for clarity. The obvious sense of the verb is “survived” but the level of diction of that English term would betray the monosyllabic plainness of the Hebrew. “Still lived,” it should be noted, takes us back to “so you may live” at the very beginning of the sermon.
34. to take Him a nation from within a nation. In the almost musical structure of this oratory, we now move back to the invocation of the Exodus as testimony in verse 20.
37. their seed after them. The Hebrew says literally “his seed after him,” but there is no real confusion because the usage has simply moved to a grammatical singular for a collective entity.
39. take to your heart. The literal sense of the verb before “heart” is “bring back,” aligning this usage with the references to turning back to God in exile.
41–43. This brief unit on the towns of asylum, repeating a regulation laid down in greater detail in Numbers, appears to be out of place here and may have originally belonged with the material on the apportioning of the land in chapter 3.
44. And this is the teaching. The preamble to Deuteronomy was completed at verse 40. Verses 44–49 are a formal introduction to the long discourse that follows, which will begin with a reiteration of the Decalogue, to be followed by exhortations to obey God’s teaching and then by a series of specific laws.