1. fortified to the heavens. Literally, “in the heavens.” The obvious force of this recurring phrase is that to the Israelite invaders these lofty fortified cities loom high as the sky.

3. a consuming fire. This epithet for God, which is coordinate with the repeated emphasis on the notion that at Sinai God spoke from the midst of the fire and that the mountain itself was continuously burning forty days and forty nights (a detail not part of Exodus), reflects the fiercely militant monotheism of Deuteronomy: the one God, Who is the God of Israel, will consume all adversaries.

4. before you. Logically this should read “before me,” and for that reason the two words are placed here outside the quotation marks, as a reversion to Moses’s perspective. One proposed emendation changes mipanekha, “before you” to mipanai ki, yielding “before me. For [not through your merit] the LORD did bring.”

5. merit . . . wickedness. Perhaps these antonyms are meant to be understood in their judicial sense, referring to the respective attributes of the person in the right and the person in the wrong in a legal conflict.

6. stiff-necked. This idiom for stubbornness is characteristically associated with the episode of the Golden Calf, which will follow here. Various proposals have been made about the origins of the idiom, but the simplest explanation is in its suggestion of rigid pride: instead of bowing the head when submission is appropriate, the stiff-necked person remains presumptuously, defiantly, erect.

8. enough to destroy you. “Enough” is merely implied in the Hebrew, as it is again in the recurrence of this idiom in verses 19 and 20.

9. the tablets of the Covenant. Of the two equivalent Hebrew terms for “covenant,” Exodus favors ʿedut and Deuteronomy berit. Perhaps the Deuteronomist prefers berit because it means only “covenant,” whereas ʿedut has other meanings as well, and Deuteronomy presents itself in the most explicit terms as the great text of the renewal of Israel’s Covenant with God.

10. all the words. The Masoretic Text reads “as all the words” but several ancient versions lack the initial “as.”

12. for your people that you brought out of Egypt. As Jeffrey H. Tigay and others have noted, God here dissociates himself from Israel—indeed, attributes even the liberation from Egypt to Moses rather than to Himself.

13. And the LORD said to me. According to the biblical convention, this reiteration of the formula for introducing speech, with no indication of an intervening response by the interlocutor, suggests that Moses is dumbfounded by the devastating news God reports to him and doesn’t know what to say. Now God proceeds beyond announcing this one act of betrayal to a general condemnation of the character of Israel and to the proposal, as in Exodus, to annihilate the people and to begin again with Moses. In this first-person version, Moses does not immediately implore God to renounce the project of destruction as he does in Exodus. Instead, he must go down and see for himself; only afterward will he turn back to God and intercede for Israel.

16. a molten calf. God had given Moses the more general information that Israel had made a molten image, masekhah. Now, descending into the camp, Moses sees that it is the molten image of a calf, ʿegel masekhah, as the report continues to be faithful to his point of view.

18. threw myself before the LORD. This verb of prostration, hitnapel, is a technical term for supplication, both in biblical and rabbinic Hebrew.

19. the blazing wrath. This phrase reflects a hendiadys in the Hebrew, literally “the wrath and the hot-anger.”

20. incensed with Aaron to destroy him. In this elliptical version of the Golden Calf episode, there is no direct report that it was Aaron who presided over the making of the icon, though that narrative datum is clearly implied by the divine wrath directed against Aaron which is mentioned here. In the parallel account in Exodus, we hear nothing of Aaron’s being threatened with death for his complicity. It is likely that this detail is added here in keeping with the fervor of Deuteronomy’s polemic against idol worship: any leader of Israel who fostered even a semblance of such cultic defection was worthy of a death sentence.

21. your offense that you made, the calf. It is characteristic of Deuteronomy’s anti-iconic rhetoric to turn the negative terms “offense,” “abhorrence,” “abomination” into epithets for idols.

crushed it, grinding it well, till it was fine, into dust. Although the language of the parallel account in Exodus 32:20 is approximately repeated, this version is more thoroughgoing in detailing the process of pulverization and utter destruction—again, in accordance with the vehemence with which Deuteronomy in general conjures up the prospect of obliterating the paraphernalia of pagan worship. Moshe Weinfeld notes linguistic similarities to a Ugaritic account of the destruction of Mot, the god of death.

I had flung its dust into the wadi that came down from the mountain. This detail is a notable departure from the story in Exodus, which has the Israelites forced to drink the water into which the ashes of the burnt idol have been cast. Whatever the reason for that act—both medieval and modern commentators have proposed a trial by ordeal—the very notion of imbibing the residue of an object of wayward worship seems to be repugnant to the Deuteronomist, who prefers to have the residue swept away by a mountain freshet.

24. You have been rebellious. The “rebellious” here and the “rebellious” in verse 7 are not mere repetitions but a formal frame (inclusio) that defines Israel’s behavior from the Exodus down to the episode of the spies.

27. stiffness. The Hebrew qeshi could also be rendered “hardness,” but in all likelihood it is an elliptical form of qeshi ʿoref, the quality of being stiff-necked.

28. the peoples of the land. The Masoretic Text says only “the land,” which would normally require a singular feminine verb, whereas the verb “say” here is conjugated as a masculine plural. The Samaritan Bible, the Septuagint, and some other ancient versions have “the peoples of,” beney, which seems plausible.

From the LORD’s inability . . . or from His hatred of them. This sentence is a citation of the parallel story in Numbers 14:15–16, but no mention is made there of hatred. Since the two alternatives are mutually contradictory, it is best to construe the waw that introduces the second alternative not as “and” but as “or.”

29. Your people and Your estate. The conjunction of the two nouns, ʿam and naḥalah, which we have noted before in Deuteronomy, is probably a hendiadys, suggesting “Your very own people,” “the people that is Your special acquisition.”