1And it shall be, when you come into the land that the LORD your God is about to give you in estate, and you take hold of it and dwell in it, 2you shall take from the first yield of all the fruit of the soil that you will bring from your land which the LORD your God is about to give you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God chooses to make His name dwell there. 3And you shall come to the priest who will be in those days, and you shall say to him, “I have told today to the LORD your God that I have come into the land which the LORD swore to our fathers to give to us.” 4And the priest shall take the basket from your hand and lay it down before the altar of the LORD your God. 5And you shall speak out and say before the LORD your God: “My father was an Aramean about to perish, and he went down to Egypt, and he sojourned there with a few people, and he became there a great and mighty and multitudinous nation. 6And the Egyptians did evil to us and abused us and set upon us hard labor. 7And we cried out to the LORD God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our abuse and our trouble and our oppression. 8And the LORD brought us out from Egypt with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm and with great terror and with signs and with portents. 9And He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10And now, look, I have brought the first yield of the fruit of the soil that You gave me, LORD.” And you shall lay it down before the LORD your God, and you shall bow before the LORD your God. 11And you shall rejoice in all the bounty that the LORD your God has given you and your household, you and the Levite and the sojourner who is in your midst.
12When you finish tithing all the tithe of your produce in the third year, the year of tithing, you shall give it to the Levite, to the sojourner, to the orphan, and to the widow, and they shall eat within your gates and be sated. 13And you shall say before the LORD your God, “I have rooted out what is to be sanctified from the house and, what’s more, I have given it to the Levite and to the sojourner, to the orphan, and to the widow, according to all Your command that You charged me. I have not transgressed Your command and I have not forgotten. 14I have not eaten of it in mourning, and I have not rooted it out while unclean, and I have not given of it for the dead. I have heeded the voice of the LORD my God according to all that you charged me. 15Look down from Your holy dwelling place, from the heavens, and bless your people Israel and the soil that You have given us as You swore to our fathers, a land flowing with milk and honey.”
16This day the LORD your God charges you to do these statutes and these laws, and you shall keep and do them with all your heart and with all your being. 17The LORD you have proclaimed today to be your God, and to go in His ways and to keep His statutes and His commands and His laws and to heed His voice. 18And the LORD has proclaimed you today to be to Him a treasured people, as He has spoken to you, and to keep all His commands, 19and to set you high above all the nations that He made, for praise and for acclaim and for glory, and for you to be a holy people to the LORD your God, as He has spoken.
CHAPTER 26 NOTES
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2. from the first yield of all the fruit of the soil. Neither the amount to be taken nor the kinds of produce are specified. The early rabbis understood this to refer to the seven kinds of agricultural produce (shivʿat haminim) for which the land of Israel was famous.
3. I have told today. “Told” (higid) here has the obvious sense of making a formal declaration. In keeping with the textualization of biblical culture that is one of the central innovations of Deuteronomy, these verses and the next group of verses in this chapter offer an actual liturgy, the first full-fledged liturgy in the Torah, to be recited by each Israelite farmer.
5. an Aramean about to perish. The two most likely candidates for the Aramean are Abraham, who came from Mesopotamia, and Jacob, who spent twenty years there after fleeing from Esau. The surprising use of “Aramean” as an epithet for a patriarch may reflect the antiquity of this recited formula, since the Arameans later chiefly figured as enemies. The precise meaning of the verb ʾoved has long been in dispute. Some understand it to mean “wandering,” though when it is used elsewhere in that sense, the meaning appears to be closer to “lost,” which would not fit here. Because the end of the sentence registers going down into Egypt, implicitly in a time of famine, which both Abraham and Jacob did, it is likely that the intended reference is to the patriarch’s being on the point of perishing. Thus the prosperous farmer, even as he brings to the sanctuary specimens of the first yield of his crop, recalls how his forefathers were close to dying from famine and were obliged to go down to Egypt, where in due course they were enslaved. As Jeffrey H. Tigay notes, this liturgy shifts the grounds of the ritual of first fruits from the agricultural cycle to a rehearsal of history. Some scholars have gone a step further in conjecturing that this emphasis on the God of history in the presentation of the first fruits is an implied polemic against pagan agricultural rites, in which the deities were invoked strictly in regard to their function in guaranteeing the fertility of the crops.
10. And you shall lay it down before the LORD your God. This appears to contradict verse 4, in which, with the same verb used, the priest is the one who lays down the basket. The explanation of the Mishnah, that both priest and layman laid down the basket at different points in the ceremony, may well reflect the actual biblical procedure: “With the basket still on his shoulder, he recites from ‘I have told today to the LORD your God’ as far as ‘My father was an Aramean about to perish.’ Then he puts down the basket from his shoulder and grasps it by its edges, and the priest sets his hand beneath it and elevates it, and then he recites from ‘My father was an Aramean about to perish’ until he finishes the entire passage, and then lays it down alongside the altar and bows and goes out” (Bikurim 3:6).
13. I have rooted out what is to be sanctified. The same verb, biʿer, that is repeatedly used for the uprooting of evil from the midst of Israel is employed here to suggest how rigorous one must be in setting aside and not appropriating the tithe dedicated to the poor (“what is to be sanctified”).
14. I have not eaten of it in mourning. The mourner, having been in recent contact with the dead, might impart ritual impurity to the foodstuffs that must be qodesh, “sanctified,” for the consumption of the needy.
I have not given of it for the dead. Food offerings intended to nourish the spirits of the dead were a common practice in both Canaanite religion and Israelite popular religion. It would be a violation of the tithe law to take any part of what is supposed to be consecrated to the needy and use it for an offering to the dead. Such an offering would also be proscribed because the person would become ritually impure (“unclean”) by entering into a burial site.
15. from Your holy dwelling place, from the heavens. This identification of the divine abode is important in the theology of Deuteronomy. The West Semitic peoples often thought of the gods dwelling on a high mountain (like Olympus among the Greeks). In Deuteronomy, God is to choose one place where He will make His name dwell (and the audience would have recognized that as a mountaintop, Mount Zion), but that place is not to be thought of as God’s actual abode.
17. you have proclaimed. The verb haʾamir occurs only here. The most convincing construction of its meaning is to see it as a hiphʿil form of ʾamar, “to say.” Since the hiphʿil conjugation often has a causative sense, “cause to say” would mean something like “to declare concerning,” “to make a solemn proclamation about.” The idea of solemn declarations on the part of both Israel and God fits nicely with the move toward liturgical confessions of principle and commitment that we encounter in this section of Deuteronomy.