2. these forty years in the wilderness. As in many previous passages, the deictic “these” (Hebrew zeh) positions Moses’s audience as the group that has just undergone the long trial of wandering in the wilderness and has witnessed God’s providential power. By implication, the writer’s seventh-century B.C.E. audience is invited to imagine itself vicariously in the same position.

in order to afflict you, to try you. “To afflict” (ʿinah) is a verb that in other contexts means “to debase” or “to abuse.” “To try’’ is precisely what the Israelites were warned not to do to God (6:16). It is also the verb used for what God does to Abraham in the story of the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1). In both cases, either this is a God lacking the absolute foreknowledge ascribed to the deity by later theology, or the trial is essentially a means for man to show his mettle.

3. the human. The Hebrew haʾadam (literally, “the human”) is grammatically masculine but refers to both sexes. (See the comment on Genesis 1:26.) “Man,” ʾish, in verse 5, is unambiguously masculine because in this society it is the father’s role to discipline his son.

4. Your cloak. The Hebrew simlah is not the general term for “garment,” as many English versions render it, but the very outer garment that the fleeing Hebrews “borrowed” from their Egyptian neighbors and laundered before the Sinai epiphany. Thus, the concreteness of the recollected experience of the Exodus is sustained through the precise choice of terms.

7. a goodly land, a land of brooks of water. As a complement to the insistent rhetoric of admonition in Deuteronomy (“watch yourself,” “and you shall keep the commands,” etc.), one also finds a rhetoric of fulfillment, grandly evoking the abundance of the rich land that God is giving to Israel. This long sentence, which some scholars have characterized as “hymnic,” rolls on resonantly all the way to the end of verse 9, punctuating its catalogue of the bounty of Canaan with an anaphoric reiteration of “land.” The Israelites have been wandering through a parched wilderness “where there is no water” (verse 15), so the catalogue strategically begins with “brooks of water, springs and deeps” before going on to enumerate the agricultural produce and mineral resources of the land.

9. not in penury. The term misken (“poor man,” here with the ut suffix of abstraction) is an Akkadian loanword that is quite rare in the Bible, occurring only here and in the late Ecclesiastes. Hence the choice in the translation of a relatively uncommon word for poverty.

10. And you will eat and be sated and bless the LORD. This verse became the kernel for the grace after meals in later Jewish tradition, a practice, as the Qumran scrolls reveal, that goes back as far as the late Second Temple period. But from the Deuteronomic viewpoint, the pleasure of eating one’s fill carries with it the danger of forgetting one’s dependence on God—hence the quick transition to “watch yourself” at the beginning of the next verse.

12. build goodly houses. In the related passage in 6:10–14, the houses and all the other material benefits are the work of others, taken over by the Israelites. As Moshe Weinfeld notes, the emphasis in the earlier passage is on forgetting God through sheer effortless affluence, whereas here it is rather the Israelites’ satisfaction in the abundance achieved through their own effort that leads them to imagine (verse 17), “My power and the might of my hand made me all this wealth.”

15. viper-serpent. For a catastrophic episode involving these creatures, see Numbers 21:6–9, and note the comment on Numbers 21:6 for an explanation of this term.

16. manna in the wilderness . . . in order to afflict you and in order to try you. These phrases of course mirror verse 3. The rhetorical structure of this whole chapter, as several modern commentators have noted, is carefully contrived in a large chiasm: a: injunction to observe God’s commands and live (verse 1); b: trial in the wilderness and the gift of manna (verses 2–5); a': injunction to keep God’s commands; c: prospering in the land and thanking God (verses 7–10); c': danger of forgetting God through prosperity (verses 11–14); b': gift of manna and trial in the wilderness (verses 15–16); a": danger of forgetting God’s commands and perishing (verses 17–20).