2. from the first yield of all the fruit of the soil. Neither the amount to be taken nor the kinds of produce are specified. The early rabbis understood this to refer to the seven kinds of agricultural produce (shivʿat haminim) for which the land of Israel was famous.

3. I have told today. “Told” (higid) here has the obvious sense of making a formal declaration. In keeping with the textualization of biblical culture that is one of the central innovations of Deuteronomy, these verses and the next group of verses in this chapter offer an actual liturgy, the first full-fledged liturgy in the Torah, to be recited by each Israelite farmer.

5. an Aramean about to perish. The two most likely candidates for the Aramean are Abraham, who came from Mesopotamia, and Jacob, who spent twenty years there after fleeing from Esau. The surprising use of “Aramean” as an epithet for a patriarch may reflect the antiquity of this recited formula, since the Arameans later chiefly figured as enemies. The precise meaning of the verb ʾoved has long been in dispute. Some understand it to mean “wandering,” though when it is used elsewhere in that sense, the meaning appears to be closer to “lost,” which would not fit here. Because the end of the sentence registers going down into Egypt, implicitly in a time of famine, which both Abraham and Jacob did, it is likely that the intended reference is to the patriarch’s being on the point of perishing. Thus the prosperous farmer, even as he brings to the sanctuary specimens of the first yield of his crop, recalls how his forefathers were close to dying from famine and were obliged to go down to Egypt, where in due course they were enslaved. As Jeffrey H. Tigay notes, this liturgy shifts the grounds of the ritual of first fruits from the agricultural cycle to a rehearsal of history. Some scholars have gone a step further in conjecturing that this emphasis on the God of history in the presentation of the first fruits is an implied polemic against pagan agricultural rites, in which the deities were invoked strictly in regard to their function in guaranteeing the fertility of the crops.

10. And you shall lay it down before the LORD your God. This appears to contradict verse 4, in which, with the same verb used, the priest is the one who lays down the basket. The explanation of the Mishnah, that both priest and layman laid down the basket at different points in the ceremony, may well reflect the actual biblical procedure: “With the basket still on his shoulder, he recites from ‘I have told today to the LORD your God’ as far as ‘My father was an Aramean about to perish.’ Then he puts down the basket from his shoulder and grasps it by its edges, and the priest sets his hand beneath it and elevates it, and then he recites from ‘My father was an Aramean about to perish’ until he finishes the entire passage, and then lays it down alongside the altar and bows and goes out” (Bikurim 3:6).

13. I have rooted out what is to be sanctified. The same verb, biʿer, that is repeatedly used for the uprooting of evil from the midst of Israel is employed here to suggest how rigorous one must be in setting aside and not appropriating the tithe dedicated to the poor (“what is to be sanctified”).

14. I have not eaten of it in mourning. The mourner, having been in recent contact with the dead, might impart ritual impurity to the foodstuffs that must be qodesh, “sanctified,” for the consumption of the needy.

I have not given of it for the dead. Food offerings intended to nourish the spirits of the dead were a common practice in both Canaanite religion and Israelite popular religion. It would be a violation of the tithe law to take any part of what is supposed to be consecrated to the needy and use it for an offering to the dead. Such an offering would also be proscribed because the person would become ritually impure (“unclean”) by entering into a burial site.

15. from Your holy dwelling place, from the heavens. This identification of the divine abode is important in the theology of Deuteronomy. The West Semitic peoples often thought of the gods dwelling on a high mountain (like Olympus among the Greeks). In Deuteronomy, God is to choose one place where He will make His name dwell (and the audience would have recognized that as a mountaintop, Mount Zion), but that place is not to be thought of as God’s actual abode.

17. you have proclaimed. The verb haʾamir occurs only here. The most convincing construction of its meaning is to see it as a hiphʿil form of ʾamar, “to say.” Since the hiphʿil conjugation often has a causative sense, “cause to say” would mean something like “to declare concerning,” “to make a solemn proclamation about.” The idea of solemn declarations on the part of both Israel and God fits nicely with the move toward liturgical confessions of principle and commitment that we encounter in this section of Deuteronomy.