Deuteronomy 29

¹Moses summoned all Israel and said to them, “You yourselves have seen everything the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, to all his officials and to his whole land,^{a 2}the great tests your own eyes saw, those great signs and wonders. ³Yet up to this day the LORD has not given you an understanding mind, seeing eyes or hearing ears. ⁴I led you for forty years in the wilderness. The clothes on your backs did not wear out, nor did the sandals on your feet. ⁵You ate no bread and drank no wine or beer, so that you would know that I am the LORD your God. ⁶Then you arrived at this place, and Sihon king of Heshbon and Og king of Bashan marched out to fight us, but we defeated them. ⁷We took their land and handed it over to the Reubenites, the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh as their inheritance. ⁸So keep the terms of this covenant and do them, so that you will succeed in everything you do.

Standing today before the LORD

⁹All of you are standing today before the LORD your God: the leaders of your tribes, your elders and your officials, all the men of Israel,^{b 10}your children, your wives, and the outsiders living in your camps, from those who cut your wood to those who draw your water, ¹¹so that you may pass into the covenant of the LORD your God, and into the oath he is making with you today, ¹²in order to confirm you today as his own people, so that he will be your God, as he told you and swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. ¹³It is not with you alone that I am making this covenant and this oath, ¹⁴but with those who are standing here with us today before the LORD our God, and also with those who are not with us here today. ¹⁵You yourselves know how we lived in Egypt and how we made our way through the nations along the route you took. ¹⁶You saw their detestable things and their idols of wood and stone, of silver and gold, that they had among them. ¹⁷Make sure there is no man or woman, no clan or tribe among you, whose heart turns away today from the LORD our God and goes off to serve the gods of those nations. Let no root grow among you that bears poison and bitter fruit. ¹⁸When such a person hears the words of this oath, they may congratulate themselves in their heart and think, ‘I will be safe, even though I follow my own stubborn heart.’ That would bring ruin on the watered land and the dry alike.^{c 19}The LORD will not be willing to forgive that person. Instead, the anger and jealousy of the LORD will burn like fire against them, and every curse written in this book will settle on them, and the LORD will wipe out their name from under heaven. ²⁰The LORD will single them out from all the tribes of Israel for disaster, in keeping with all the covenant curses written in this book of the law. ²¹In time to come your children, the generation who rise up after you, will speak of it, and so will foreigners who come from a distant land, when they see the plagues of that land and the sicknesses the LORD has struck it with, ²²the whole land burned out with sulfur and salt, nothing sown, nothing sprouting, no plant coming up in it, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, when the LORD overthrew them in his anger and fury, ²³and all the nations will ask, ‘Why has the LORD done this to this land? Why this fierce and terrible anger?’ ²⁴And the answer will be, ‘It is because they left the covenant of the LORD, the God of their ancestors, the covenant he made with them when he led them out of Egypt, ²⁵and they went and served other gods and bowed down to them, gods they had never known and that he had not given them. ²⁶So the anger of the LORD burned against that land, and he brought on it every curse written in this book. ²⁷The LORD uprooted them from their land in anger, fury and great wrath, and threw them into another land, as it is today.’ ²⁸The hidden things belong to the LORD our God, but what has been revealed belongs to us and to our children for all time, so that we may do all the words of this law.^de