1. Moses called to all Israel. As is often the case, this verb has the force of “invoke” or “summon”—here, to a national assembly in which a solemn covenant between God and Israel will be ratified—but its primary sense of “calling out” is also important because, like the rest of Deuteronomy, this is very much a piece of oratory delivered by Moses.

all that the LORD did. The rapid rehearsal here of the narrative of the Wilderness experience corresponds to passages to the same effect in Moses’s discourse at the beginning of the book and is also similar to the mention of royal triumphs in the Assyrian treaty texts with which this entire passage has a generic kinship.

3. But the LORD has not given you a heart to know. This negative declaration is hardly surprising. Abraham ibn Ezra succinctly explains, “Because they had tried God ten times and never mentioned the signs they had seen.” Moses must balance the compelling importance of the idea that the Wilderness generation were eyewitnesses to God’s great acts with their repeated recalcitrance to follow God’s ways. The underlying justification for this grand covenantal ceremony, forty years after Sinai, is that now at last, on the verge of crossing into the land, the people is granted the discernment to see God’s real power.

4. Your cloaks . . . your sandal. This miraculous durability of clothing through forty years of desert treks is a new detail.

5. Bread you did not eat, and wine . . . you did not drink. These words are another reference to God’s miraculous provision of the people’s needs. They did not eat bread but manna. They did not drink wine but water that God brought forth from the rock. In the Song of Moses (chapter 32), this second detail will be hyperbolically elevated to “He suckled him honey from the crag / and oil from the flinty stone.”

9. your heads, your tribes. Some ancient versions have a smoother phrasing, “the heads of your tribes,” and the Septuagint reads “your heads, your judges” (a difference of one Hebrew consonant).

11. for you to pass into the Covenant. The relatively rare verb for concluding a covenant is probably a linguistic fossil, reflecting an early practice in which a covenant was sealed by cutting animals in two and, evidently, having the two parties pass between the cut parts. (See Genesis 15 and the comments there.) It is a reasonable guess that the old—perhaps archaic—idiom is used here to underscore the binding solemnity of this covenant.

14. but with him who is here standing with us this day . . . and with him who is not here with us this day. This idea is paramount for the whole theological-historical project of the Book of Deuteronomy. The awesome covenant, evoked through Moses’s strong rhetoric, whereby Israel binds itself to God, is a timeless model, to be reenacted scrupulously by all future generations. The force of the idea is nicely caught by the rabbinic notion that all unborn generations were already standing here at Sinai.

15. we passed . . . you passed. The Hebrew exercises considerable freedom in slipping from first person to second person, just as it does from Moses’s discourse (the beginning of this entire speech) to God’s discourse (e.g., verse 5, “so that you might know that I am the LORD your God”).

16. their abominations and their foulnesses. Deuteronomy, with its antipagan polemic, is rich in terms of invective for idols. The second word here, gilulim, may derive from a term that means “stele,” but Rashi and others, with some plausibility, link it to gelalim, “turds,” and it is vocalized in the Masoretic Text to mirror the vowels of shiqutsim, “abominations.”

wood and stone, silver and gold. As elsewhere, the Deuteronomist reduces the idols to their sheer materiality, turning them into fetishes.

17. a root bearing fruit of hemlock and wormwood. The image may correspond to the idea in the next verse of an act of idolatry committed in the secrecy of the heart: buried roots bear poisonous fruit; the secret idolator will end by having a pernicious effect on all around him. The metaphor of poison and wormwood will come back in the Song of Moses.

18. It will be well with me. Or: I shall have peace. That is, nothing will happen to me, despite my betrayal of the cult of YHWH.

in order to sweep away the moist with the parched. This sounds very much like the citation of a proverbial saying, but lacking the original colloquial context, later readers have not been able to determine the precise reference. One often-repeated guess, citing the use of the same verb, “sweep away,” in Abraham’s bargaining with God over the survival of Sodom (Genesis 18), is that “the moist” are the innocent and “the parched” the wicked. The idea would then be that the behavior of the clandestine idolators will bring down destruction on others as well, good and bad alike. This interpretation, however, is by no means certain.

19. oath. The Hebrew term ʾalah can mean either “solemn oath” or “imprecation.” In this case, the first sense leads to the second: if Israel takes upon itself this oath and then betrays the conditions to which it has committed itself, it will be the target of a terrible imprecation.

21. And a later generation will say. The sentence that begins with these words does not conclude until the end of verse 24, when the actual words of the later generation, together with the foreigners, are quoted. The fondness for long, breathless sentences, often employed to build up vehement rhetorical momentum, and with the syntactical ligaments somewhat slackened, is distinctive of the style of Deuteronomy.

this land. Technically, the demonstrative pronoun used would mean “that land,” but to translate it that way might give the impression that the reference is to the distant land from which the foreigners have come.

22. brimstone and salt, all the land a burning, it cannot be sown and it cannot flourish. This powerful image of the promised land turned into the Cities of the Plain, blasted and desiccated forever, is all the more shocking because this land is supposed to be the thematic and agricultural antithesis of Sodom and Gomorrah—a land flowing with milk and honey.

23. smouldering wrath. Though the link between wrath and burning or hot breath is idiomatic, it is also vividly apt for the scorched Sodom-like landscape that the speaker beholds.

25. And they went and worshipped. Repeatedly, the verb “to go” precedes the indication of worshipping other gods. This usage is not just a stylistic tic but serves to make a theological point: Israel, after having been made the object of God’s special favor and having been given God’s law, must pick up its feet and go off from the way upon which it has been set in order to serve alien gods.

and that He did not apportion to them. This is another recurring idea in Deuteronomy—that God, having chosen Israel as His people, has also shared out the worship of other gods to the sundry peoples all around. Why God would want them to serve what the Deuteronomist must have regarded as pseudo-gods is not entirely clear. Perhaps he is actually alluding here to a notion that appears in the Song of Moses, a considerably older text, and one that appears not to assume absolute monotheism.

27. tore them . . . in great fury and flung them. Onkelos represents the first of these two verbs by the Aramaic term that means “to shake,” “violently displace.” The uprooting of exile is clearly imagined as sudden, abrupt, and painful.

into another land as on this day. The temporal indicator here of course reflects the perspective of those who behold the devastation of Israel, and it is not strictly necessary to infer, as some critical scholars have done, that both the phrase and the whole evocation of exile reflect the fact that this textual unit was composed after 586 B.C.E. The entire Book of Deuteronomy was written in a period of ominous threats to national existence, after the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.E., and it took little effort of imagination to conjure up an imminent prospect of calamitous destruction and exile, as is done at several points in the book.

28. Things hidden . . . things revealed. This grim promise of future disasters if Israel betrays the Covenant ends—if indeed this sentence is in its proper place—with a gnomic declaration. What the declaration actually refers to is disputed, but if the relevant context is the preceding passage on idolatry (and, especially, its clandestine practice), then the consensus of the medieval Hebrew commentators is plausible: acts of betrayal hidden from the eyes of others will be visible to God, and He alone can exact retribution for them; when such acts are committed publicly rather than in secret, it is the obligation of the community to take steps against the perpetrators. One must grant that this construction of the verse is not assured, and the difficulty is compounded by the fact that the two Hebrew words which mean “for us and for our children” have a row of dots above them in the Masoretic Text, a device often used by ancient scribes to indicate erasure.