1. cast off. The verbal root n-sh-l is elsewhere used for slipping off one’s sandals or for an axehead slipping out of its haft.

nations more numerous and mightier than you. In earlier biblical accounts, the almost preternatural numerical growth of the Hebrew people is stressed. In the historical reality of the later seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., a writer would have been keenly aware that Israel was a tiny nation surrounded by large and powerful peoples.

2. You shall surely put them under the ban. The verb haḥarim implies both total destruction and a solemn vow to carry out that grim purpose without taking prisoners as slaves and with no secular exploitation of the booty. Moshe Weinfeld calls the emphasis on ḥerem (the ban) in Deuteronomy “utopian” and “wishful thinking.” There is, thankfully, no archaeological evidence that this program of annihilation was ever implemented, but the insistence on it here reflects an agenda of absolute separation of Israelite and Canaanite populations for the purpose of preserving cultic purity (compare verses 3–4).

3. You shall not give your daughter to his son. A moment before, the Canaanites were a plural, “them.” But this characteristic easy switch from plural to singular is a way of focusing on the specific act of the individual Israelite about to marry off his daughter to a Canaanite son. Marriages, of course, were arranged by the families, not by the bride and groom.

4. he will make your son swerve. The antecedent is ambiguous: it could be the just mentioned son who would marry your daughter, or it could be the singular, generic “Canaanite.”

from following Me. Literally, “from after me.”

5. their altars you shall smash. This string of short clauses is a vivid instance of the powerful rhetoric of iconoclastic theology that informs Deuteronomy. In quasipoetic semantic parallelism, the statement moves from one verb of violent destruction to another, more intense one, ending with the utter consummation by fire of all pagan icons.

6. a treasured people among all the peoples. This is a variant formulation of the phrase that appears in Exodus 19:5. The term for “treasure,” segulah, is one that is used in other ancient Semitic languages to designate a relationship of privileged vassalage.

7. Not because you are more numerous than all the peoples. See the comment on the related formulation in verse 1.

8. ransomed. This verb is chosen for the liberation from Egypt because it is what one does to free a captive. In the event, God pays for the liberation not with ransom money but with terrible acts of retribution.

9–10. These verses amount to a summarizing paraphrase of the revelation to Moses of the divine attributes in Exodus 34 and in Numbers 14.

12. in consequence of. The relatively unusual Hebrew preposition ʿeqev literally means “on the heel[s] of.”

13. multiply . . . bless the fruit. These terms hark back to the injunction in Genesis, here reinterpreted as a blessing actively initiated by God, to be fruitful and multiply.

grain . . . wine . . . oil . . . spawn . . . calvings. Each of these five terms is not the common one for the thing it designates. While redolent of the concrete reality of agriculture and animal husbandry, each of these words is also the name of a pagan deity associated with fertility. This usage is most evident in the exceptional ʿashterot tsoʾnekha, “the calvings of your flock,” for ʿashterot is transparently the plural form of Ashtoreth, the Canaanite fertility goddess. In the antipagan polemic impetus of the Deuteronomic oration, the God of Israel supersedes all these agricultural deities as the source of fertility, reducing them to mere common nouns.

18. You shall surely remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh. Again and again in Deuteronomy, the Exodus story of the founding of the nation through liberation from slavery is invoked in order to exhort the people to confront their own frightening historical reality: threatened by overwhelmingly greater powers—most urgently, by the Assyrian and then the Babylonian empire—they are enjoined to recall the great narrative in which God’s intervention enabled them to triumph over Egypt’s imperial might. Hence the contemporary relevance of “these nations are more numerous than I,” which surely goes beyond the immediate reference to the Canaanite peoples.

20. the hornet. The meaning of the Hebrew term tsirʿah is uncertain. See the philological comment on Exodus 23:28, where it is suggested that it might be a supernatural agency, the Smasher. Alternately, since the verb at the beginning of the next verse, “be terrified,” reflects the same three consonants in reversed order (ʿ-r-ts) and appears to play on the sound of tsirʿah, it might mean the Terror. Abraham ibn Ezra ingeniously identifies it as some kind of epidemic by relating it to tsaraʿat (which also has the root ts-r-ʿ), a contagious skin disease.

22. lest the beasts of the field multiply against you. The biblical writers had to confront the repeated contradiction between the promise of a grand conquest of the Canaanite peoples and the historical fact that the conquest was only partial and gradual. Various explanations are offered in Exodus and in Judges, but this is one of the most strained.

26. you shall bring no abhorrent thing into your house . . . for it is under the ban. Anything under the ban (ḥerem) is taboo and marked for utter destruction. The antipagan polemic of Deuteronomy here extends to a fear that the material allure of the gold and silver images may lead Israelites to appropriate them, an appropriation perhaps not initially intended for cultic purposes but that could lead to the worship of the images.