2. You shall utterly destroy all the places. The noun maqom is a general term for “place,” both in biblical and postbiblical Hebrew, but it also has the more specialized sense in the ancient period of “cultic site,” and that is its meaning throughout this passage. There have been exhortations earlier in Deuteronomy to eradicate all vestiges of the local pagan cults, but here that imperative of iconoclasm is coupled with a revolutionary insistence on the centralization of the Israelite cult (verse 5 and repeatedly thereafter). In point of historical fact, what the Israelite religion did was to take over places of Canaanite worship and adapt them for the worship of the God of Israel. (Abraham in Genesis similarly is reported to have built altars at a series of sites that were old Canaanite places of worship.) Later, as Christianity spread through Europe and then to the New World, it would follow the same practice. For the Deuteronomist, the very existence of such local places of worship carries with it the danger of syncretism—the mingling of pagan rituals and concepts with the worship of the one God, and, especially, a leakage of the adoration of natural deities (“on the high mountains and in the valleys and under every lush tree”) into the cult of YHWH. Thus, the whole apparatus of the local cults must be utterly destroyed, and instead, one central, exclusive place is to be designated for the worship of Israel’s God.

4. You shall not do thus for the LORD your God. The preposition lE can mean either “for” or “to.” If it had the latter meaning here, it would refer to smashing idols and cultic pillars and poles, but in any case one is not supposed to use such appurtenances in the worship of YHWH. The reference, then, is to the idea that the LORD is not to be worshipped in local sites (and in dangerously seductive natural settings), as the Canaanites worshipped their gods, but rather in a single central sanctuary. Compare verse 31, where lE can mean only “for.”

5. to set His name there, to make it dwell. It is characteristic of Deuteronomy’s scrupulous avoidance of pagan concretizations of the deity that God is not said to dwell in the sanctuary He will choose, as He is represented repeatedly doing in Exodus, but rather an intermediary agency, God’s name, dwells there.

you shall seek it. For clarity’s sake, “it” is added.

7. And you shall eat there before the LORD. The burnt offerings were wholly consumed by fire on the altar, but in the case of other categories of sacrifice, only some sections of the animal were burned and the rest were reserved for the person bringing the sacrifice to be consumed in a sacred feast, after the sacrifice proper, “before the LORD.”

in all that your hand reaches. Still more literally, “all the reach of your hand.” The phrase mishlaḥ-yad clearly refers to “undertakings,” and to the material yield of the undertaking. Appropriately, the phrase has come to mean “vocation” in modern Hebrew.

9. the abiding estate. The Hebrew is a hendiadys, hamenuḥah wehanaḥalah, literally, “the haven [or the rest] and the estate,” meaning secure, permanent inheritance in the land.

10. grant you in estate . . . give you abiding haven. The writer now plays with the hendiadys introduced in the previous verse by breaking it apart and using each of the roots as a verb instead of the two nouns. “Abiding” is added in the translation to “give haven” (hiniaḥ) in order to preserve this play on the previous word pair.

12. the Levite . . . for he has no portion or estate with you. The Levites, as we are repeatedly reminded, had no tribal territory. As long as the countryside was dotted with local shrines, most Levites had a source of living close to hand, officiating at the local cult and taking their share of the offerings brought by the worshippers. One may infer that the centralization of the cult between the late eighth century B.C.E. (Hezekiah’s reform) and the late seventh century (Josiah’s reform) created a serious economic problem for Levites not employed in the Jerusalem temple, and so they are included here in the category of vulnerable people who need to be the object of benefaction. The phrase “within your gates” means “wherever you may live,” and so refers to Levites outside of Jerusalem.

15. wherever your appetite’s craving may be. The versatile Hebrew nefesh (“life,” “life-breath,” “person,” and also an intensive form of the personal pronoun) is most plausibly construed here as “appetite,” the sense it has in Psalms 107:9. The other problem in understanding this phrase turns on the meaning of the initial particle bE. Most translators understand it to refer to the degree of craving (Richard Elliott Friedman: “As much as your soul desires”) or to the frequency of the craving (New Jewish Publication Society: “whenever you desire”). But bE (primary meaning, “in”) is more naturally a locative, and for an indication of degree one would expect k^e, “as.” The noun phrase itself, ʾawat nefesh, suggests intense appetite, and the instructions that follow have to do chiefly with place—that henceforth the Israelites will be allowed to slaughter and eat meat wherever they happen to be, though sacrificial slaughter can take place only on the central altar.

you shall slaughter and eat meat. The verbal root z-b-ḥ means both “to slaughter” and “to sacrifice” because in ancient religion the two acts were inseparable. But now that sacrifice at local shrines has been abolished, some mechanism must be established to enable the Israelites to eat meat even when they cannot come to the central place of worship. What follows are innovative regulations for the practice that the rabbis called sheḥitat ḥulin, “secular slaughter.”

The unclean and the clean shall eat it. In the case of sacrificial meals, only the ritually clean are allowed to partake. For secular meals the restriction does not apply.

like the deer or like the gazelle. The one category of meat always permitted outside the cult was game, neither deer nor gazelle being among the animals specified for sacrificial use. Now, animals otherwise devoted to the cult (sheep, bulls, goats, rams) may be eaten without sacrifice, just as game is eaten.

16. On the earth you shall spill it like water. The draining of the blood on the ground stands in contrast to sacrificial slaughter, in which the blood, as part of the ritual, is splashed on the altar by the officiant. The reason for the draining of the blood is spelled out in verse 23.

23. Only be strong not to eat the blood. The use of the verb “be strong” in conjunction with the prohibition against the consumption of blood is unusual, something Rashi registers by offering two opposite interpretations (that it is tempting to consume blood, that it is necessary to make a special effort even for a prohibition of something altogether unappetizing). Given the repeated emphasis on strong appetite, one may infer that the writer assumed that the consumption of blood had some special attraction, either because of its appeal to the palate (as, say, in blood sausages) or because, as the end of this verse may suggest, there was a fetishistic belief that imbibing the blood meant imbibing the life-force of the slaughtered beast.

30. lest you be ensnared after them. The slightly odd preposition might simply mean “by them,” or it could suggest, as it sometimes does elsewhere, “following them,” taking up their practices.

31. You shall not do thus for the LORD your God. This echo of verse 4 marks a formal inclusio structure that frames this whole unit. It begins and now ends with an injunction to avoid all contact with the practices of the local pagan cults. To the paraphernalia of idol worship mentioned at the beginning the writer here adds a moral abomination of pagan religion—child sacrifice. There is at least some archaeological evidence that child sacrifice was practiced among the West Semites, and at the Phoenician colony of Carthage in North Africa large numbers of urns have been unearthed containing the charred bones of children.

13:1. This verse clearly belongs at the end of this unit as a concluding summary, a placement recognized in the New King James Version, which lists it as verse 32 of chapter 12. Most Hebrew Bibles, however, set it as the first verse of chapter 13.