1“When the LORD your God brings you to the land to which you are coming to take hold of it, He will cast off many nations from before you—the Hittite and the Girgashite and the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Perizzite and the Hivvite and the Jebusite, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you. 2And the LORD your God will give them before you and you shall strike them down. You shall surely put them under the ban. You shall not seal a covenant with them and shall show them no mercy. 3You shall not intermarry with them. You shall not give your daughter to his son, nor shall you take his daughter for your son. 4For he will make your son swerve from following Me, and they will worship other gods, and the LORD’s wrath will flare against you and He will swiftly destroy you. 5Rather, thus shall you do to them: their altars you shall smash and their cultic pillars you shall shatter and their sacred trees you shall chop down and their images you shall burn in fire. 6For you are a holy people to the LORD your God. You the LORD has chosen to become for Him a treasured people among all the peoples that are on the face of the earth. 7Not because you are more numerous than all the peoples did the LORD desire you and choose you, for you are the fewest of all the peoples. 8But because of the LORD’s love for you and because of His keeping the vow that He swore to your fathers He has brought you out with a strong hand and ransomed you from the house of slaves, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. 9And you shall know that the LORD your God, He is God, the steadfast god keeping the covenant and the faith for those who love Him and keeping His commands to the thousandth generation, 10but He pays back those who hate Him to their face to make them perish. He will not delay—him who hates Him to his face He will pay back. 11And you shall keep what is commanded and the statutes and the laws that I charge you today to do.
12“And it shall come about in consequence of your heeding these laws when you keep and do them, that the LORD your God will keep the covenant and the faith for you that he swore to your fathers. 13And He will love you and bless you and multiply you and bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your soil, your grain and your wine and your oil, the spawn of your herds and the calvings of your flock, upon the soil that He swore to your fathers to give to you. 14Blessed shall you be more than all the peoples. There shall be no sterile male nor female among you nor among your beasts. 15And the LORD shall turn away from you all illness, and all the evil ailments of Egypt which you knew He will not put upon you but will set them on all who hate you. 16And you shall devour all the peoples that the LORD your God is about to give to you. Your eye shall not pity them and you shall not worship their gods, for it is a snare to you. 17Should you say in your heart, ‘These nations are more numerous than I. How can I dispossess them?’ 18You shall not fear them. You shall surely remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh, and to all Egypt, 19the great trials that your own eyes saw, the signs and the portents and the strong hand and the outstretched arm with which the LORD your God brought you out. So will the LORD your God do to all the peoples whom you fear. 20And the hornet, too, will the LORD your God send against them, until those who remain and hide from you perish. 21You shall not be terrified by them, for the LORD your God is in your midst, a great and fearsome god. 22And the LORD your God will cast off these nations from before you little by little. You will not be able to put an end to them swiftly, lest the beasts of the field multiply against you. 23And the LORD your God will give them before you and panic them with a great panic until they are destroyed. 24And He will give their kings into your hand, and you shall make their name perish from under the heavens. No man will stand up before you, until you destroy them. 25The images of their gods you shall burn in fire. You shall not covet the silver and gold upon them and take it for yourself, lest you be snared by it, for it is an abhorrence to the LORD your God. 26And you shall bring no abhorrent thing into your house or you will be under the ban like it. You shall surely despise it and shall surely abhor it, for it is under the ban.”
CHAPTER 7 NOTES
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1. cast off. The verbal root n-sh-l is elsewhere used for slipping off one’s sandals or for an axehead slipping out of its haft.
nations more numerous and mightier than you. In earlier biblical accounts, the almost preternatural numerical growth of the Hebrew people is stressed. In the historical reality of the later seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., a writer would have been keenly aware that Israel was a tiny nation surrounded by large and powerful peoples.
2. You shall surely put them under the ban. The verb haḥarim implies both total destruction and a solemn vow to carry out that grim purpose without taking prisoners as slaves and with no secular exploitation of the booty. Moshe Weinfeld calls the emphasis on ḥerem (the ban) in Deuteronomy “utopian” and “wishful thinking.” There is, thankfully, no archaeological evidence that this program of annihilation was ever implemented, but the insistence on it here reflects an agenda of absolute separation of Israelite and Canaanite populations for the purpose of preserving cultic purity (compare verses 3–4).
3. You shall not give your daughter to his son. A moment before, the Canaanites were a plural, “them.” But this characteristic easy switch from plural to singular is a way of focusing on the specific act of the individual Israelite about to marry off his daughter to a Canaanite son. Marriages, of course, were arranged by the families, not by the bride and groom.
4. he will make your son swerve. The antecedent is ambiguous: it could be the just mentioned son who would marry your daughter, or it could be the singular, generic “Canaanite.”
from following Me. Literally, “from after me.”
5. their altars you shall smash. This string of short clauses is a vivid instance of the powerful rhetoric of iconoclastic theology that informs Deuteronomy. In quasipoetic semantic parallelism, the statement moves from one verb of violent destruction to another, more intense one, ending with the utter consummation by fire of all pagan icons.
6. a treasured people among all the peoples. This is a variant formulation of the phrase that appears in Exodus 19:5. The term for “treasure,” segulah, is one that is used in other ancient Semitic languages to designate a relationship of privileged vassalage.
7. Not because you are more numerous than all the peoples. See the comment on the related formulation in verse 1.
8. ransomed. This verb is chosen for the liberation from Egypt because it is what one does to free a captive. In the event, God pays for the liberation not with ransom money but with terrible acts of retribution.
9–10. These verses amount to a summarizing paraphrase of the revelation to Moses of the divine attributes in Exodus 34 and in Numbers 14.
12. in consequence of. The relatively unusual Hebrew preposition ʿeqev literally means “on the heel[s] of.”
13. multiply . . . bless the fruit. These terms hark back to the injunction in Genesis, here reinterpreted as a blessing actively initiated by God, to be fruitful and multiply.
grain . . . wine . . . oil . . . spawn . . . calvings. Each of these five terms is not the common one for the thing it designates. While redolent of the concrete reality of agriculture and animal husbandry, each of these words is also the name of a pagan deity associated with fertility. This usage is most evident in the exceptional ʿashterot tsoʾnekha, “the calvings of your flock,” for ʿashterot is transparently the plural form of Ashtoreth, the Canaanite fertility goddess. In the antipagan polemic impetus of the Deuteronomic oration, the God of Israel supersedes all these agricultural deities as the source of fertility, reducing them to mere common nouns.
18. You shall surely remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh. Again and again in Deuteronomy, the Exodus story of the founding of the nation through liberation from slavery is invoked in order to exhort the people to confront their own frightening historical reality: threatened by overwhelmingly greater powers—most urgently, by the Assyrian and then the Babylonian empire—they are enjoined to recall the great narrative in which God’s intervention enabled them to triumph over Egypt’s imperial might. Hence the contemporary relevance of “these nations are more numerous than I,” which surely goes beyond the immediate reference to the Canaanite peoples.
20. the hornet. The meaning of the Hebrew term tsirʿah is uncertain. See the philological comment on Exodus 23:28, where it is suggested that it might be a supernatural agency, the Smasher. Alternately, since the verb at the beginning of the next verse, “be terrified,” reflects the same three consonants in reversed order (ʿ-r-ts) and appears to play on the sound of tsirʿah, it might mean the Terror. Abraham ibn Ezra ingeniously identifies it as some kind of epidemic by relating it to tsaraʿat (which also has the root ts-r-ʿ), a contagious skin disease.
22. lest the beasts of the field multiply against you. The biblical writers had to confront the repeated contradiction between the promise of a grand conquest of the Canaanite peoples and the historical fact that the conquest was only partial and gradual. Various explanations are offered in Exodus and in Judges, but this is one of the most strained.
26. you shall bring no abhorrent thing into your house . . . for it is under the ban. Anything under the ban (ḥerem) is taboo and marked for utter destruction. The antipagan polemic of Deuteronomy here extends to a fear that the material allure of the gold and silver images may lead Israelites to appropriate them, an appropriation perhaps not initially intended for cultic purposes but that could lead to the worship of the images.