1“And you shall love the LORD your God and keep His watch and His statutes and His laws and His commands for all time. 2And you shall know today that it was not with your sons who did not know and did not see the LORD your God’s chastisement, His greatness, His strong hand and His outstretched arm, 3and His signs and His deeds that He did in the midst of Egypt to Pharaoh king of Egypt and to all his land, 4and that He did to Egypt’s force, its horses and its chariots, when He made the waters of the Sea of Reeds flood over their faces as they pursued after them, and the LORD made them perish to this day, 5and that He did for you in the wilderness until you came to this place, 6and that He did to Dathan and to Abiram, the sons of Eliab son of Reuben, when the earth gaped open with its mouth and swallowed them and their households and their tents and everything existing that was at their feet, in the midst of all Israel, 7for your own eyes have seen the LORD’s great deed that He has done. 8And you shall keep all the command which I charge you today, so that you may be strong and come and take hold of the land into which you are about to cross to take hold of it, 9and so that you may long endure on the soil that the LORD your God swore to your fathers to give to them and to their seed, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10For the land into which you are coming to take hold of it is not like the land of Egypt from which you went out, where you sow your seed and water it with your foot like a garden of greens. 11But the land into which you are crossing to take hold of it is a land of mountains and valleys. From the rain of the heavens you will drink water—12a land that the LORD your God seeks out perpetually, the eyes of the LORD your God are upon it from the year’s beginning to the year’s end.
13And it shall be, if you indeed heed My commands with which I charge you today to love the LORD your God and to worship Him with all your heart and with all your being, 14I will give the rain of your land in its season, early rains and late, and you shall gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. 15And I will give grass in your field to your beast, and you shall eat and be sated. 16Watch yourselves, lest your heart be seduced and you swerve and worship other gods and bow to them. 17And the LORD’s wrath flare against you, and He hold back the heavens and there be no rain and the soil give not its yield and you perish swiftly from the goodly land that the LORD is about to give to you. 18And you shall set these words on your heart and in your very being and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall become circlets between your eyes. 19And you shall teach them to your sons, to speak of them, when you sit in your house and when you walk on the way and when you lie down and when you arise. 20And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and in your gates. 21So that your days may be many, and the days of your sons, on the soil that the LORD swore to your fathers to give to them, as the days of the heavens over the earth. 22For if you indeed keep all this command which I charge you to do it, to love the LORD your God to walk in all His ways and to cleave to Him, 23the LORD will dispossess all these nations before you and you will dispossess nations greater and mightier than you. 24Every place where the sole of your foot treads, yours will be, from the wilderness and the Lebanon, from the River, the Euphrates River, and as far as the Hinder Sea, this will be your territory. 25No man will stand up before you. Your fear and your dread the LORD your God will set over the face of the land in which you tread, as He has spoken to you.
26“See, I set before you today blessing and curse: 27the blessing, when you heed the command of the LORD your God with which I charge you today; 28the curse, if you heed not the command of the LORD your God and swerve from the way that I charge you today, to go after other gods which you did not know. 29And it shall be, when the LORD your God brings you to the land into which you are coming to take hold of it, I shall set the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal. 30Are they not across the Jordan beyond the sunset way in the land of the Canaanite in the Arabah opposite the Gilgal beside the Terebinths of Moreh? 31For you are about to cross the Jordan to come to take hold of the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall take hold of it and dwell in it. 32And you shall keep to do all the statutes and the laws that I set before you today.”
CHAPTER 11 NOTES
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2. it was not with your sons. The particle ʾet that prefixes banim, “sons,” either is a sign of the accusative or means “with.” In either case, the verb that should go along with ʾet is absent. Rashi plausibly infers an ellipsis, the implied phrase being “I speak today.” The omission of the verb may well be because the writer has lost track of the verb as he is caught up in the grand sweep of this sentence, which is quite uncharacteristic of nonoratorical biblical prose and one of the longest sentences in the biblical corpus: the long chain of clauses, gathering in a headlong rush the whole story of the Exodus and the forty years of wandering, does not reach its period until the end of verse 7.
5. and that He did for you. The preposition lakhem could mean either “for you” or “to you.” Jeffrey H. Tigay argues for the latter alternative because the following clause mentions the rebels Dathan and Abiram (see Numbers 16), who were the target of God’s devastating punishment. But the phrase “until you came to this place” is a strong indication that the preposition refers chiefly to God’s benevolent preservation of Israel through its adversities in the wilderness. Perhaps the writer may have also wanted to exploit the ambiguity of the preposition, quickly indicating, in a manner quite in keeping with Deuteronomic theology, that the flip side of divine protection, if Israel rebels, is divine retribution: what God does for Israel can easily turn into what God does to Israel.
6. to Dathan and to Abiram. Korah is not mentioned, probably because the Deuteronomist is interested in the popular tradition of a rebellion of Reubenites for political power rather than in the priestly account of a rebellion of the Korahite clan for sacerdotal privilege. In Numbers 16–17 the two rebellions are intertwined. But the absence of Korah simply stems from the fact that the Deuteronomist seems to have been familiar with J and E but not P.
10. water it with your foot. It is not entirely certain what this phrase means. Some scholars have understood it as a reference to some sort of foot pedal used in the Egyptian system of irrigation. Because “foot water” is a biblical euphemism for urine, it has also been proposed that this might be a derisive reference to irrigation with urine, though it is unclear that the Egyptians actually did this. In any case, the lush Nile Valley is elsewhere figured in the Bible as a fertile garden. The fertility of the more rugged land of Israel is more precarious.
11. a land of mountains and valleys. It is thus quite unlike the flat terrain of Egypt, and not amenable to the sort of irrigation system used in Egypt.
12. the eyes of the LORD your God are upon it. Against the reiterated assertion that “your own eyes have seen” the LORD’s great acts, the eyes of the LORD will keep this land under constant watch. The phrase is double-edged: the LORD attends to this land in order to bestow special bounty on it, causing the fructifying rains to fall (verse 14), and the LORD scrutinizes the land, withholding the rains when the people is unfaithful (verse 17). The geographical fact, then, that the land of Israel is dependent on rainfall rather than on irrigation from a central river is both a blessing and a curse. Thus the reflections on divinely guided meteorology set the stage for the binary opposition of the mountain of the blessing and the mountain of the curse in verse 29.
24. the Hinder Sea. The reference is to the Mediterranean. The basic orientation—an English term which itself means facing the east—was toward the east, so one word for east was qedem, before, and a (relatively rare) term for west was ʾaḥaron, “hinder,” what is behind.
29. the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal. Moshe Weinfeld, ever attentive to Mediterranean parallels, notes that the Greeks as well had foundation ceremonies when they entered into new territories. These ceremonies included inscribing divine instructions on steles, building commemorative stone pillars, and offering sacrifices. All of these elements appear in the ceremony involving the two mountains that is elaborated in chapter 27. The invocations of the mountains of the blessing and of the curse here and in chapter 27 frame the code of laws that constitutes the long central section of Deuteronomy. Weinfeld proposes two reasons for the association of these mountains respectively with the blessing and with the curse: in keeping with the orientation to the east, Gerizim is on the favored right hand and Ebal on the suspect left, and Gerizim is covered with vegetation whereas Ebal is desolate. The theology of Deuteronomy is beautifully concretized in the stark opposition of these two mountains, for the book repeatedly stresses the forking alternatives of prosperity and disaster, depending on Israel’s faithfulness to God’s laws.
30. the sunset way. That is, the westward way, a road leading from trans-Jordan westward into Canaan.