2. you shall set up for yourself great stones. These would be steles, upright monumental stone slabs.

coat them with plaster. Writing on plaster, in order to make the letters stand out more distinctly (compare “very clearly” in verse 8), was a known procedure in the ancient Near East. The Balaam inscription found at Deir ʿAlla in Jordan is written on plaster (see the comment on Numbers 22:9). Inscriptions on plaster-coated steles of course would not have lasted too long under the assault of the elements, but since the Deuteronomist presumably did not have the actual inscriptions to display to his audience, that very fact of material transience would have served his purpose, allowing him to evoke the idea of monumental writing without the actual monuments.

3. write on them the words of this teaching. The most plausible reference of this phrase is to the code of laws (chapters 12–26) that has just been enunciated, although it could refer to the whole Book of Deuteronomy. Jeffrey H. Tigay notes that two steles of the size on which the Code of Hammurabi are inscribed could contain more than the entire text of Deuteronomy. In any case, inscribing “the words of this teaching [torah]” on stone is a powerfully concrete image of the idea of the text as the enduring source of authority, which is a central ideological innovation of Deuteronomy.

5. You shall not wield iron over them. This injunction to make the altar of whole stones is in keeping with Exodus 20:25. See the comment on that verse.

8. very clearly. The infinitive baʾer is the same verb used in Deuteronomy 1:5 in the perfect tense, where it refers to clear expounding. Here the reference is instead to clear writing.

9. This day you have become a people to the LORD. In Exodus, it is the Sinai epiphany that transforms the Israelites into the people of the LORD. Deuteronomy must insist on “this day”—repeated several times in close sequence here and frequently occurring elsewhere—as the transforming moment because it is here, as the people stand ready to cross the Jordan, that Deuteronomy’s authoritative rehearsal/revision of the Law is given to them.

12. These shall stand to bless. In this solemn ceremony, the twelve tribes are divided six and six on the two mountains, to pronounce respectively the blessing and the curse. Attempts to explain the division in terms of the genealogy of the tribes or the moral behavior of their eponymous founders in Genesis seem strained. Geography may be the best, if imperfect, explanation: all six tribes stationed on the northern mountain, Ebal, had territories in the north or east of the Jordan and became part of the northern kingdom of Israel; four of the six tribes stationed on the southern mountain, Gerizim, ended up in territory south of the Jezreel Valley.

13. stand over the curse. This phrase avoids the direct object (as in “to bless the people”), introducing a slight obliquity into the dire act of cursing. Moshe Weinfeld has shown that ceremonies of this sort, in which curses of just this nature were invoked against those who strayed from the dictates of the gods, were widely practiced by the Greeks when they established new colonies.

15. and sets it up in secret. Several commentators, medieval and modern, have taken this indication of clandestine idolatry as a clue that all the transgressions in this list that follows are acts performed in secret. (Compare the secret murderer in verse 24.) But one wonders whether secrecy is generally feasible in denying legal justice to the helpless (verse 19).

20. lies with his father’s wife. This would be either his father’s ex-wife or widow or, given the institution of polygamy, a wife of his father who was not the man’s mother.

22. Cursed be he who lies with his sister. The second half of the verse makes clear that even a half sister is taboo. Tamar’s attempt to ward off sexual assault from her half brother Amnon (2 Samuel 13) by saying that perhaps their father David might arrange a marriage between them either is an act of desperate stalling or reflects an earlier moment in biblical law when such unions were acceptable.

25. who takes payment to strike down a life. The word translated as “payment,” shoḥad, usually means “bribe,” and this has led most interpreters to understand this verse to refer to a judge’s taking a bribe in a case involving capital punishment. The problem with this view is that the idiom “strike down a life”—i.e., mortally strike—means to kill, by a violent act, and only by questionable conjecture could it be extended to judicial murder. Shoḥad, however, does not invariably mean “bribe.” See, for example, 1 Kings 15:19, where Asa, king of Judah, sends a message to the king of Aram, “I have sent you a payment [shoḥad] of silver and gold. Go, revoke your pact with Baasha king of Israel.” The most likely reference of our verse is to someone who takes payment in order to carry out a murder (a “contract”) on behalf of someone else. It may well be that the phrase “innocent blood,” which seems syntactically disjunct, was added as a kind of gloss by an editor who understood shoḥad in its judicial sense.

26. Cursed be he who does not fulfill the words of this teaching. The acts upon which curses are pronounced come to twelve, one for each tribe. They encompass idolatry and moral and sexual turpitude. This twelfth curse is clearly a summarizing one, which refers not to any specific transgression but to a general failure to uphold the words of the Law that Deuteronomy has conveyed.