2. a dreamer of dreams. This would be a designation for a person who claims to have received a revelation from the deity through the medium of a dream. The Hebrew phrase ḥolem ḥalom does not mean a “diviner” or “interpreter of dreams,” as some scholars have claimed. The term for someone with the special skill of deciphering the meaning of otherwise enigmatic dreams is poter ḥalom, as in the Joseph story.

3. and the sign and the portent which he speaks to you come about. This clause creates a certain theological problem because it suggests that the false prophet may have supernatural powers. Abraham ibn Ezra tries to solve the difficulty by proposing that the “sign” is merely a demonstrative gesture on the part of the prophet, as when Isaiah has his servants go naked and barefoot and gives his sons symbolic names. But the term “come about” argues for the fulfillment of some prediction. The idea stated in the next verse that God is “trying” Israel may intimate that He has allowed the fulfillment of the prediction as an element of the trial: even if the false prophet can show you a portent, the falsehood of his message should be evident in his urging you to worship other gods.

Let us go after other gods that you do not know. As Jeffrey H. Tigay aptly observes, this is “not a literal quotation of the prophet’s proposal but Moses’s pejorative paraphrase of it.” To generalize the underlying stylistic principle, in Deuteronomy the boundaries between quoted speech and the framing speech of Moses are fluid (much more so than the boundaries between quoted speech and narrator’s discourse elsewhere in the Bible) because everything here is thematically and structurally dominated by Moses’s oratory: he quotes others but readily bends the quotations to his own didactic purpose, quickly slipping from the words of others to his own words. The example here of verses 7–8 is even more extreme.

5. After the LORD your God . . . Him shall you fear and His commands shall you keep . . . Him shall you worship . . . to Him shall you cleave. This sentence is a vivid example of the vigorous hortatory style of Deuteronomy. God, or a personal pronoun standing in for God, is emphatically set at the head of each brief clause, and the clauses themselves are a series of overlapping interlocked imperatives.

6. spoken falsehood. This is the clear meaning of diber sarah, as parallel uses in Jeremiah 28:16, 29:32, and in Isaiah 59:13 demonstrate, two of them coupling the unusual sarah with the more common sheqer, “lie.”

10. But you shall surely kill him. Your hand shall be against him first. The vehemence of this is startling, especially because the Hebrew does not use the word for judicial execution, hamit, “put to death,” but harog, “kill.” No mention is made of a process of judicial review, as in the case of the town seduced into idolatry (verse 15). The impelling idea seems to be that in cases of incitement to idolatry, a person must overcome all natural feelings of compassion (verse 8), even for his own offspring, for a best friend, for a brother (who came out of the same womb), or for the woman who has shared his bed, and carry out justice at once. In the three successive instances here of incitement to idolatry, there is a progression in the enormity of the crime—from an individual who is a false prophet to the betrayal by close kin or beloved friend to the seduction by a paganizing group of an entire community.

11. And you shall stone him. The verb by itself, saqol, means “to stone,” but here added to it is baʾavanim, “with stones,” in a gesture of rhetorical emphasis.

16. strike down the inhabitants of that town . . . putting it under the ban. This command of implacable, total destruction made the sages of the Talmud (Sanhedrin 10:4–5 and elsewhere) sufficiently uneasy that they proposed a whole series of preconditions to the implementation of the injunction which rendered it nearly impossible to carry out. As in the case of the total destruction of the Canaanite peoples, there is no evidence that the Israelites went about wiping out their own cities when they discovered pagan practices, so this grim law, too, must be understood as “utopian.” It is, in other words, a legal expression of the unswerving antipagan polemic that animates Deuteronomy. The eighteenth-century North African Hebrew commentator Or Hayim shows sensitivity to the darkest aspect of this law: its human executors, he observes, are liable to become addicted to the frenzy of bloodthirstiness unleashed in the massacre, captive to the “power of cruelty.” (Or Hayim cites the murderous Islamic sect of Assassins as an example.) He then imaginatively cites the phrase “give you compassion” in the verse 18 to argue that God’s compassion for Israel will be to save them, even in these terrible circumstances, from the “power of cruelty” and to imbue them with compassion. This is scarcely a likely historical scenario of mob psychology, but it is at least an exegetical effort to conceive an ethos beyond bloodlust even in the midst of this theological militancy.

17. an everlasting mound. The Hebrew noun tell specifically designates the mound of piled-up earth under which the remnants of a destroyed city are buried. It has been appropriately adopted as a technical term by archaeologists.