Deuteronomy 29

¹ Moses called the whole of Israel together and said to them: ‘You have seen all that Yahweh did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, to his servants and to his whole land,

² the great ordeals your own eyes witnessed, the signs and those great wonders.

³ But until today Yahweh has given you no heart to understand, no eyes to see, no ears to hear.

⁴ ‘For forty years I led you in the wilderness; the clothes on your back did not wear out and your sandals did not wear off your feet.

⁵ You had no bread to eat, you drank no wine, no strong drink, learning thus that I, Yahweh, am your God.

⁶ When you reached this place, Sihon king of Heshbon and Og king of Bashan came out against us to do battle, but we defeated them.

⁷ We conquered their land and gave it as an inheritance to Reuben, Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh.

⁸ ‘Keep the words of this covenant and observe them and you will thrive in all you do.

⁹ All of you stand here today in the presence of Yahweh your God: your heads of tribes, your elders, your scribes, all the men of Israel,

¹⁰ with your children and your wives (and the stranger too who is in your camp, whether he cuts wood or draws water for you),

¹¹ and you are about to enter into the covenant of Yahweh your God, a covenant ratified with dire sanctions, which he has made with you today,

¹² and by which, today, he makes a nation of you and he himself becomes a God to you, as he has promised and as he has sworn to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

¹³ ‘Not with you alone do I make this covenant today and pronounce these sanctions,

¹⁴ but with him also who is not here today, as well as with him who stands with us here in the presence of Yahweh our God.

¹⁵ ‘Yes, you know those among whom we lived in Egypt, those through whose lands we journeyed, the nations through whom we have passed.

¹⁶ You have seen their abominations and their idols, the wood, the stone, the silver and gold they have in their countries.

¹⁷ ‘Let there be no man or woman among you, no clan or tribe, whose heart turns away from Yahweh your God today to go and serve the gods of those nations. Let there be no root among you bearing fruit that is poisonous and bitter.

¹⁸ If, after hearing these sanctions, such a man should bless himself in his heart and say, “I may follow the dictates of my own heart and still lack nothing; much water drives away thirst”,

¹⁹ Yahweh will not pardon him. The wrath and jealousy of Yahweh will blaze against such a man; every curse written in this book will fall on him, and Yahweh will blot out his name from under heaven.

²⁰ Yahweh will single him out from all the tribes of Israel to his destruction, in accordance with all the curses of the covenant written in the Book of this Law.

²¹ ‘The future generation, your children who are to come after you, as also the stranger from a distant country, will see the plagues of that land and the diseases Yahweh will inflict on it, and will exclaim,

²² “Sulphur, salt, scorched earth, the whole land through! No one will sow, nothing grow, no grass spring ever again. Like this, Sodom and Gomorrah were overthrown, Admah and Zeboiim, which Yahweh overthrew in his anger and his wrath.”

²³ And all the nations will exclaim, “Why has Yahweh treated this land like this? Why this great blaze of anger?”

²⁴ And people will say, “Because they deserted the covenant of Yahweh, the God of their fathers, the covenant he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt;

²⁵ because they went and served other gods and worshipped them, gods they had not known, gods that were no part of their heritage from him,

²⁶ for this the anger of Yahweh has blazed against this land, bringing on it all the curses written in this book.

²⁷ In anger, in fury, in fierce wrath Yahweh has torn them from their country and flung them into another land where they are today.”

²⁸ ‘Things hidden belong to Yahweh our God but things revealed are ours and our children’s for all time, so that we may observe all the words of this Law.