1“Hear, Israel, you are about to cross the Jordan to dispossess nations greater and mightier than you, great towns, and fortified to the heavens, 2a great and lofty people, sons of giants, as you yourself knew and you yourself heard: Who can stand up before the sons of giants? 3And you shall know today that the LORD your God, He it is crossing over before you, a consuming fire. He Himself will destroy them and He will lay them low before you, and you will dispossess them and make them perish swiftly as the LORD has spoken to you. 4Do not say in your heart when the LORD your God drives them back before you, saying, ‘Through my merit did the LORD bring me to take hold of this land and through the wickedness of these nations is the LORD dispossessing them’ before you. 5Not through your merit nor through your heart’s rightness do you come to take hold of their land but through the wickedness of these nations is the LORD your God dispossessing them before you and in order to fulfill the word that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. 6And you shall know that not through your merit is the LORD your God giving you this goodly land to take hold of it, for you are a stiff-necked people. 7Remember, do not forget, that you infuriated the LORD your God in the wilderness from the very day you came out of the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the LORD. 8And in Horeb you infuriated the LORD, and the LORD was incensed with you enough to destroy you. 9When I went up the mountain to take the stone tablets, the tablets of the Covenant that the LORD sealed with you, and I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights, no bread did I eat nor water did I drink. 10And the LORD gave me the two stone tablets, written with the finger of God, and on them all the words that the LORD spoke with you from the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly. 11And it happened at the end of forty days and forty nights, the LORD gave me the two stone tablets, the tablets of the Covenant. 12And the LORD said to me, ‘Arise, go down quickly from here, for your people that you brought out of Egypt has acted ruinously, they have quickly swerved from the way that I charged them, they have made them a molten image.’ 13And the LORD said to me, saying, ‘I have seen this people and, look, it is a stiff-necked people. 14Leave Me be, that I may destroy them and wipe out their name from under the heavens and make you into a greater and mightier nation than they.’ 15And I turned and came down from the mountain, the mountain burning in fire, and the two tablets of the Covenant in my two hands. 16And I saw and, look, you offended against the LORD your God, you made you a molten calf, you swerved quickly from the way that the LORD charged you. 17And I seized the two tablets and flung them from my two hands and smashed them before your eyes. 18And I threw myself before the LORD as at first, forty days and forty nights—no bread did I eat nor water did I drink—for all your offense which you committed, as you had offended, to do what was evil in the eyes of the LORD, to anger Him. 19For I was terrified of the blazing wrath with which the LORD was furious enough with you to destroy you, and the LORD listened to me that time as well. 20And the LORD was greatly enough incensed with Aaron to destroy him, and I interceded in behalf of Aaron, too, at that time. 21And your offense that you made, the calf, I had taken and burned it in the fire and crushed it, grinding it well, till it was fine, into dust, and I had flung its dust into the wadi that came down from the mountain. 22And at Taberah and at Massah and at Kibroth-Hattaavah you infuriated the LORD. 23And when the LORD sent you from Kadesh-Barnea, saying, ‘Go up and take hold of the land that I have given to you,’ you rebelled against the word of the LORD your God and you did not trust Him, and you did not heed His voice. 24You have been rebellious against the LORD from the day I knew you. 25And I threw myself before the LORD the forty days and the forty nights that I threw myself, for the LORD had intended to destroy you. 26And I interceded with the LORD and said, ‘My Master, LORD, do not bring ruin on Your people and on Your estate that you ransomed through Your greatness, that you brought out from Egypt with a strong hand. 27Remember your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Turn not to the stiffness of this people nor to its wickedness and its offense. 28Lest the peoples of the land to which you brought us out from there say, “From the LORD’s inability to bring them into the land of which He spoke to them or from His hatred of them He brought them out to put them to death in the wilderness.” 29And they are Your people and Your estate that you brought out with Your great power and Your outstretched arm.’”
CHAPTER 9 NOTES
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1. fortified to the heavens. Literally, “in the heavens.” The obvious force of this recurring phrase is that to the Israelite invaders these lofty fortified cities loom high as the sky.
3. a consuming fire. This epithet for God, which is coordinate with the repeated emphasis on the notion that at Sinai God spoke from the midst of the fire and that the mountain itself was continuously burning forty days and forty nights (a detail not part of Exodus), reflects the fiercely militant monotheism of Deuteronomy: the one God, Who is the God of Israel, will consume all adversaries.
4. before you. Logically this should read “before me,” and for that reason the two words are placed here outside the quotation marks, as a reversion to Moses’s perspective. One proposed emendation changes mipanekha, “before you” to mipanai ki, yielding “before me. For [not through your merit] the LORD did bring.”
5. merit . . . wickedness. Perhaps these antonyms are meant to be understood in their judicial sense, referring to the respective attributes of the person in the right and the person in the wrong in a legal conflict.
6. stiff-necked. This idiom for stubbornness is characteristically associated with the episode of the Golden Calf, which will follow here. Various proposals have been made about the origins of the idiom, but the simplest explanation is in its suggestion of rigid pride: instead of bowing the head when submission is appropriate, the stiff-necked person remains presumptuously, defiantly, erect.
8. enough to destroy you. “Enough” is merely implied in the Hebrew, as it is again in the recurrence of this idiom in verses 19 and 20.
9. the tablets of the Covenant. Of the two equivalent Hebrew terms for “covenant,” Exodus favors ʿedut and Deuteronomy berit. Perhaps the Deuteronomist prefers berit because it means only “covenant,” whereas ʿedut has other meanings as well, and Deuteronomy presents itself in the most explicit terms as the great text of the renewal of Israel’s Covenant with God.
10–21. This retelling of the story of the Golden Calf, as the Israeli Bible scholar Moshe Tzippor has justly observed, presupposes the audience’s familiarity with the more elaborate account in Exodus 32–33. It is not a consecutive report of the incident, and some significant details are elided. It is, moreover, Moses’s first-person account, reflecting what he is told by God on the mountain and then what he sees when he descends from the summit while not directly conveying information that he learns only afterward.
10. all the words. The Masoretic Text reads “as all the words” but several ancient versions lack the initial “as.”
12. for your people that you brought out of Egypt. As Jeffrey H. Tigay and others have noted, God here dissociates himself from Israel—indeed, attributes even the liberation from Egypt to Moses rather than to Himself.
13. And the LORD said to me. According to the biblical convention, this reiteration of the formula for introducing speech, with no indication of an intervening response by the interlocutor, suggests that Moses is dumbfounded by the devastating news God reports to him and doesn’t know what to say. Now God proceeds beyond announcing this one act of betrayal to a general condemnation of the character of Israel and to the proposal, as in Exodus, to annihilate the people and to begin again with Moses. In this first-person version, Moses does not immediately implore God to renounce the project of destruction as he does in Exodus. Instead, he must go down and see for himself; only afterward will he turn back to God and intercede for Israel.
16. a molten calf. God had given Moses the more general information that Israel had made a molten image, masekhah. Now, descending into the camp, Moses sees that it is the molten image of a calf, ʿegel masekhah, as the report continues to be faithful to his point of view.
18. threw myself before the LORD. This verb of prostration, hitnapel, is a technical term for supplication, both in biblical and rabbinic Hebrew.
19. the blazing wrath. This phrase reflects a hendiadys in the Hebrew, literally “the wrath and the hot-anger.”
20. incensed with Aaron to destroy him. In this elliptical version of the Golden Calf episode, there is no direct report that it was Aaron who presided over the making of the icon, though that narrative datum is clearly implied by the divine wrath directed against Aaron which is mentioned here. In the parallel account in Exodus, we hear nothing of Aaron’s being threatened with death for his complicity. It is likely that this detail is added here in keeping with the fervor of Deuteronomy’s polemic against idol worship: any leader of Israel who fostered even a semblance of such cultic defection was worthy of a death sentence.
21. your offense that you made, the calf. It is characteristic of Deuteronomy’s anti-iconic rhetoric to turn the negative terms “offense,” “abhorrence,” “abomination” into epithets for idols.
crushed it, grinding it well, till it was fine, into dust. Although the language of the parallel account in Exodus 32:20 is approximately repeated, this version is more thoroughgoing in detailing the process of pulverization and utter destruction—again, in accordance with the vehemence with which Deuteronomy in general conjures up the prospect of obliterating the paraphernalia of pagan worship. Moshe Weinfeld notes linguistic similarities to a Ugaritic account of the destruction of Mot, the god of death.
I had flung its dust into the wadi that came down from the mountain. This detail is a notable departure from the story in Exodus, which has the Israelites forced to drink the water into which the ashes of the burnt idol have been cast. Whatever the reason for that act—both medieval and modern commentators have proposed a trial by ordeal—the very notion of imbibing the residue of an object of wayward worship seems to be repugnant to the Deuteronomist, who prefers to have the residue swept away by a mountain freshet.
24. You have been rebellious. The “rebellious” here and the “rebellious” in verse 7 are not mere repetitions but a formal frame (inclusio) that defines Israel’s behavior from the Exodus down to the episode of the spies.
27. stiffness. The Hebrew qeshi could also be rendered “hardness,” but in all likelihood it is an elliptical form of qeshi ʿoref, the quality of being stiff-necked.
28. the peoples of the land. The Masoretic Text says only “the land,” which would normally require a singular feminine verb, whereas the verb “say” here is conjugated as a masculine plural. The Samaritan Bible, the Septuagint, and some other ancient versions have “the peoples of,” beney, which seems plausible.
From the LORD’s inability . . . or from His hatred of them. This sentence is a citation of the parallel story in Numbers 14:15–16, but no mention is made there of hatred. Since the two alternatives are mutually contradictory, it is best to construe the waw that introduces the second alternative not as “and” but as “or.”
29. Your people and Your estate. The conjunction of the two nouns, ʿam and naḥalah, which we have noted before in Deuteronomy, is probably a hendiadys, suggesting “Your very own people,” “the people that is Your special acquisition.”