1. the words. The prevalent Hebrew title for Deuteronomy, following the convention of using the first significant word in the text as title, is Devarim, “Words.” The title Deuteronomy, which is the Greek equivalent of an alternate ancient Hebrew name for the book, means “second law” or “repetition of the law” and is based on the Hebrew phrase in 17:18, mishneh hatorah hazoʾt, “a copy [or repetition] of this teaching [or, law, torah].” Since Deuteronomy is in fact a recapitulation of the law and narrative of the three preceding books (as well as in certain important respects a revision of them), the Greek title is perfectly apt. But Devarim as a title has the advantage of highlighting the preeminently rhetorical character of this book, which is structured as a series of long speeches delivered by Moses to Israel, and which also incorporates, as the opening chapter illustrates, prominent elements of dialogue—words of speech framed by words of oratory. More than any other biblical text, it is a book of words, as the Hebrew title suggests.

2. eleven days from Horeb. Horeb is the alternate name for Sinai. These introductory verses of Deuteronomy swiftly situate Moses’s discourse in time, place, and sequence of events: at the end of the forty years’ wandering, on the east bank of the Jordan, where the Israelites were seen encamped at the conclusion of the Book of Numbers, and after the military victories over the trans-Jordanian kings reported toward the end of Numbers.

5. to expound this teaching. The verb beʾer, “to expound” or “to explain,” provides a central rationale for the whole book. The teaching, torah, that has already been enunciated is represented as requiring further exposition or explaining, and hence the need for “the repetition of this teaching.” Torah here is still a verbal noun that means “teaching,” but the repeated stress of Deuteronomy on its own textual character begins to push Torah in the direction of the meaning it would subsequently have, the name not only of this book but of all the Five Books of Moses. The act of expounding and explaining, moreover, announces the intellectualist theme—in all likelihood, drawing on Hebrew Wisdom traditions—that sets off this book from the preceding four.

7. the Amorite. Deuteronomy uses this term to designate all the inhabitants of Canaan, perhaps because the Amorites, on the eastern perimeter of the country, were the first people encountered by the invading Israelites.

the Lebanon. This refers to the mountain range, not to a country.

as far as the Great River, the River Euphrates. Needless to say, this grandiose northeastern border does not correspond to the actual historical contours of any Israelite state.

8. See, I have given . . . you. Significantly, the very first speech of God in Moses’s initial discourse is a ringing confirmation of the promise of the land to the people. “I have given . . . you” has the legal force of a performative speech-act, as if to say, By these words I hereby confer to you.

9. And I said to you at that time. Although the adverbial phrase here does convey Moses’s retrospective viewpoint, looking back to an event that occurred four decades earlier, there is no connection, either narrative or thematic, between the preceding unit concerning the promise of the land and the unit now introduced, which reports the creation of a judiciary bureaucracy. It looks as though “at that time” is a rhetorical ploy used to camouflage a lack of transition.

10. and here you are today like the stars of the heavens in multitude. God’s reiterated promise to Abraham to make his seed a multitudinous people is now fully realized, and it confronts Moses with a grave practical problem of judicial oversight of these vast numbers.

11. May the LORD . . . add to you a thousand times. But Moses, not wanting to construe the blessing of national fecundity negatively, hastens to wish for Israel that it continue to proliferate in the spectacular fashion it already has done.

12. O, how can I carry. The Hebrew does not use the ordinary form for “how,” ʾeikh, but the elongated form ʾeikhah, which often marks the beginning of laments. The translation seeks to suggest this effect of threnody by adding “O.”

13. Get you wise and understanding and knowing men. This account of the establishment of a judicial bureaucracy differs from the one in Exodus 18 in several respects, all of which reflect the distinctive aims of Deuteronomy. Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law, who conceives the scheme in Exodus, is not mentioned here. Instead, the plan is entirely Moses’s idea, as this is the book of Moses. Having hit on the idea, he entrusts the choice of magistrates to the people, whereas in Exodus, he implements Jethro’s directive by choosing the judges himself. In Exodus the qualities to be sought in the judges are moral probity and piety, whereas here intellectual discernment is stressed. “Knowing” in the Hebrew is a passive form (“known”), which led both Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra to understand the term as “well-known,” but the word, given the immediate context, could well have an active sense here (or could be revocalized as an active verb), and it has been construed that way by many interpreters, from the Aramaic Targums to contemporary scholars.

16. Hear. The Hebrew uses an infinitive form of the verb to serve as an imperative—a well-attested idiomatic option in biblical Hebrew but also a form that nicely matches the impersonal rhetoric of authority in Deuteronomy, grammatically highlighting the action to be performed rather than those addressed.

17. You shall recognize no face in judgment. This vivid idiom, the meaning of which is illustrated in the next sentence of this verse, has the obvious sense of not showing partiality.

19. all that great and fearful wilderness which you have seen. This invocation of the terrors of the great wilderness, experienced firsthand by the wandering Israelites, emphatically recurs in Moses’s speech as the people camp at the edge of the wilderness at the end of the forty years looking into the land they are about to enter.

22. Let us send men before us. This version strikingly revises the story of the twelve scouts reported in Numbers 13–14. There, the sending out of the scouts was an order from God. Here, it is strictly the people’s idea, their hesitant response to Moses’s flat imperative, “Go up, take hold.”

that they probe the land. More literally, “that they dig out the land.” This verb, which does not occur in Numbers 13–14, is in keeping with the strictly strategic purpose of the expedition here (“the way on which we should go up and the towns into which we should come”). In Numbers, the scouts are especially enjoined to ascertain the prosperity of the land and its natural resources. This difference, however, is not strictly a “revision” on the part of Deuteronomy because the present version is also a drastic abridgement of the story in Numbers, and it concentrates on what is deemed the essential matter of the episode.

27. In the LORD’s hatred of us. The extreme vehemence of this phrase, which does not appear in Numbers, again reflects the writer’s tendency to incriminate the people in this book of admonishments that is Deuteronomy.

30. The LORD your God Who goes before you, He it is Who will battle for you. In the version of the story in Numbers, it is Joshua and Caleb who defiantly declare that they can successfully undertake an assault against the Canaanites, “for they are our bread” (Numbers 14:9). In the more theologically pitched account here, the language of God’s battling on behalf of Israel is borrowed from the victory at the Sea of Reeds (Exodus 14:14). This notion of God’s overwhelming power is extended by Moses’s reminder (verse 33) of the pillars of fire and cloud, an fearsome phenomenon that in Numbers 14:14 is attributed to the rumor that has reached the terrified Canaanites.

36. Caleb. Curiously, for reasons that have been explained by many scholars as a drawing together of different sources, Joshua is not mentioned at all here but only in verse 38, in his function as Moses’s personal attendant.

the land on which he has trod. This phrase focuses the physical act of Caleb’s walking through the land—evidently, only as far as Wadi Eshcol in the future tribal territory of Judah and not, as in Numbers, to the far north—on the espionage mission. Walking through territory was also an act of taking legal possession of it in a sale.

37. Against me, too, the LORD was incensed because of you. No mention is made here of the incident in which Moses struck the rock, and this appears to be an entirely new explanation of why Moses never entered the land. Once more, the change reflects the tendency of Deuteronomy to inculpate Israel. Moses is doomed to die east of the Jordan not because of his own unfortunate momentary impulse on which he acted but because he acceded to the people’s plan to send out spies and was thus implicated in their subsequent guilt. Elsewhere in Deuteronomy, a different explanation will be offered for Moses’s dying outside the land.

43. you were defiant and went up. The choice of the verb here, hazid, “to be defiant,” “to act wickedly or maliciously,” may reflect the fact that the present text is a response to the one in Numbers. The previous verse is essentially a quotation of Numbers 14:42. At this point in the version in Numbers (14:44), an otherwise unattested verb, haʿapil (“to strive upward”?) is used, and this writer appears to gloss that enigmatic term by substituting a more familiar word.

46. many days, as the days that you stayed. The apparent sense of this Hebrew idiom is: as many days as you ended up staying.

2:1. the Red Sea. The Hebrew yam suf in all likelihood refers to two different bodies of water. In the Exodus story, it seems to be a lake or marshland in the north of Egypt, the Sea of Reeds. Elsewhere, it does designate the Red Sea, and here the Israelites are clearly being sent south toward Aqabah and the Red Sea, not back to Egypt. This summarizing notation of the movements of the Israelites makes it the conclusion of this whole literary unit, though the conventional chapter division sets it at the beginning of chapter 2.