1. And now, Israel, hear. The first Hebrew word here, weʿatah, “and now,” is often used in a logical rather than a temporal sense, to introduce a conclusion or mark a transition in the stages of a discourse. At this point, it introduces the grand sermon that concludes this whole preamble to the main body of the Book of Deuteronomy (chapters 5–31). The verb “to hear,” often, as here, in the imperative (shemaʿ), is one of the signature terms of Deuteronomy. The Hebrew verb means “to hear,” “to listen,” “to heed,” and “to understand,” and quite frequently all those meanings come into play. In this preeminently didactic book, the Israelites are repeatedly enjoined to devote careful attention to the exhortations and the laws that Moses delivers to them—to listen, absorb, understand, and obey.

so you may live. This is another verbal refrain that punctuates the sermon. For the Deuteronomist, with deportations and the destruction of nations vividly on the political horizon, history has become a very dangerous realm, and Moses repeatedly urges Israel to follow the only path that, according to the Deuteronomic view, will avert impending disaster.

2. You shall not add . . . you shall not subtract. Jeffrey H. Tigay proposes that this strict-constructionist view of the Mosaic teaching is intended to be limited to the injunction to worship a single God: one is not free to add other objects of worship nor to remove YHWH as the object of worship. But such a cultic sense of “subtract” is rather strained, and it is more likely that Moses here is represented enjoining strict construction precisely in order to diminish any impression (in fact, an abundantly warranted impression) that Deuteronomy is effecting a revision of a good many earlier laws and traditions.

4. you, the ones clinging to the LORD your God, are all of you alive today. The very physical existence of the audience for Moses’s sermon is palpable proof of the principle he announced at the beginning of the sermon, “so you may live.”

6. Only a wise and understanding people is this great nation. The primacy of wisdom in the worldview of Deuteronomy is sharply reflected here. Israel’s greatness as the other nations come to recognize it is not in its fecundity and military might (as, for example, in Balaam’s oracles in Numbers) but in its wisdom, demonstrated by its adherence to a set of just statutes and laws. The next lines (verses 7–8) are testimony to God’s decision to be close to Israel through the statutes and teachings He reveals to them.

10. the day that you stood before the LORD. “The day” or “on the day” is an epic locution for “when.” Having begun with a general exhortation to cling to God’s laws, the sermon now focuses in on the defining moment four decades earlier when Israel stood at the foot of Mount Sinai and God revealed to them his law in thunder and lightning.

12. The sound of words you did hear but no image did you see. The account of the Sinai epiphany in Exodus is less rigorous about excluding the aspect of sight. The Israelites there are enjoined to keep their distance precisely in order that they will see nothing, and then the seventy elders in the sacred feast on the mountain are vouchsafed a vision of the effulgence surrounding God. The Deuteronomist, by contrast, is sternly aniconic, in keeping with his steady polemic against all cults of divine images; he is a writer who insists on hearing the divine, and seeing only God’s portentous acts in history.

except the sound. Abraham ibn Ezra ingeniously connects this slightly odd turn of phrase with the synesthetic “and all the people were seeing the sounds [i.e., the thunder]” (Exodus 20:18).

15. be very watchful of yourselves. It should be noted that the Hebrew freely swings between second-person plural and second-person singular, an oscillation perfectly idiomatic in biblical Hebrew and by no means to be attributed to a collation of different sources. It may be that the speaker on occasion switches to the singular form in order to emphasize the effect of imperative address to each individual, but that is not certain.

16. a sculpted image of any likeness, the form. Philologists have sought to draw technical differences among these terms, but the manifest point of their deployment here is the stylistic force of their synonymity: any manner or shape of image or icon will lead Israel on the path to ruin.

18. the waters under the earth. In keeping with the picture of the cosmos in Genesis 1, water is imagined to be under the earth (“the great abyss”), beyond the perimeters of the dry land (the sea), and erupting from within the dry land itself in rivers and lakes.

19. lest you raise your eyes to the heavens and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the array of the heavens. Once again, the language harks back to the first account of creation, which concludes with the completion of the earth and the heavens “and all their array.” In a historical period rife with religious syncretism and cultural assimilation, the writer stresses the dangerous enchantment of the beauty of the natural world, which could easily lead people to deify and worship the various manifestations of that beauty.

for the LORD your God allotted them to all the peoples under the heavens. This notion, which will be picked up again in the Song of Moses (chapter 32), is a curious one by the lights of later monotheism. To Israel the worship of the one overmastering God was assigned, whereas the other nations were entrusted to the supervision of lesser celestial beings, beney haʾelohim (“the sons of God”) and came to worship these intermediary beings as though they were autonomous deities. Polytheism, in this view, is a reflection of the fact that the sundry nations, unlike Israel, have not been chosen by the one God to serve Him.

20. But you did the LORD take and He brought you out from the iron’s forge. The argument of the sermon now moves another step back in time, from Sinai to the Exodus. The origins of Israel as a people subject to another people in whose land it dwelled, rescued from the crucible of slavery by God, are adduced as further evidence of God’s unique election of Israel.

a people in estate. Literally, a people-estate—God’s special property.

21. the LORD was incensed with me because of your words. Again, the barring of Moses from the promised land is attributed not to any act or gesture of his—for here he is the impeccable leader, God’s mouthpiece—but to the mistrustful words of the Israelites in the incident of the spies.

26. I have called to witness against you the heavens and the earth. It was conventional in ancient Near Eastern treaties to invoke heaven and earth as witnesses, but the word pair here also nicely echoes the allusions to the Creation story in previous verses. God’s heaven and earth are everlasting, but Israel will be all too ephemeral if it worships images of the natural world.

27. And the LORD will scatter you among the peoples. This dire prospect, which is not within the purview of the Book of Exodus, haunts the Deuteronomist, writing in a period after the Neo-Assyrian empire had instituted a policy of deporting substantial elements of subjugated populations in order to clear the conquered territory for colonization. Indeed, some sections of the book, including this one, may have been written in the Babylonian exile.

28. And you shall worship there their gods that are human handiwork. The ultimate catastrophe of exile is viewed as assimilation into the local pagan cults—the fate, one may reasonably surmise, of most of those exiled from the ten northern tribes after the Neo-Assyrian conquest in 721 B.C.E. and some of those exiled in 586 by the Babylonians.

wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. In the earlier books of the Torah, the gods worshipped by the other nations are imagined as lesser entities, impotent in the face of YHWH’s overwhelming superiority and bound to be reduced to nullity in any competition with the God of Israel. In the antipagan polemic of Deuteronomy, as in some of the contemporaneous and slightly later Prophets, polytheism is jeeringly represented as imbecile fetishism.

29. with all your heart and with all your being. This phrase, with its revivalist fervor, is a recurrent one in the rhetoric of Deuteronomy.

30. heed His voice. The primary meaning of the verb, which has already appeared several times in this sermon, is “hear,” but the preposition bE that follows it requires the specific sense of “heed.”

32–33. from the day God created a human on the earth . . . Has a people heard God’s voice speaking from the midst of the fire. These sentences bind together in a summarizing flourish the topics of creation and the Sinai epiphany that were underscored earlier in this speech.

33. still lived. The “still” is added in the translation for clarity. The obvious sense of the verb is “survived” but the level of diction of that English term would betray the monosyllabic plainness of the Hebrew. “Still lived,” it should be noted, takes us back to “so you may live” at the very beginning of the sermon.

34. to take Him a nation from within a nation. In the almost musical structure of this oratory, we now move back to the invocation of the Exodus as testimony in verse 20.

37. their seed after them. The Hebrew says literally “his seed after him,” but there is no real confusion because the usage has simply moved to a grammatical singular for a collective entity.

39. take to your heart. The literal sense of the verb before “heart” is “bring back,” aligning this usage with the references to turning back to God in exile.

41–43. This brief unit on the towns of asylum, repeating a regulation laid down in greater detail in Numbers, appears to be out of place here and may have originally belonged with the material on the apportioning of the land in chapter 3.

44. And this is the teaching. The preamble to Deuteronomy was completed at verse 40. Verses 44–49 are a formal introduction to the long discourse that follows, which will begin with a reiteration of the Decalogue, to be followed by exhortations to obey God’s teaching and then by a series of specific laws.