1. all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse. This opening clause pointedly refers to the great catalogue of blessings and curses laid out in chapter 28. In fact, the immediate reference is to the curses because the end of the verse assumes the condition of exile as an accomplished fact. The blessings and the curses, presented in chapter 28 as alternatives between which Israel is to choose by its future actions, here occur as a historical sequence: first the curse of exile, then the blessing of restoration.

that your heart shall turn back. Manifestly, the term “turn back” (shuv, reiterated in this chapter) is the thematic center of this passage, alternating between Israel and God in dialectic interplay.

2. And you shall turn back to the LORD your God and heed His voice as all that I charge you today. The grand exhortation of this whole speech, evoking the prospect of Israel’s return to God, exhorting Israel to choose life and good rather than death and evil, and reminding Israel that the divine word is intimately accessible, makes it a fitting peroration to the series of speeches or sermons that constitute the bulk of the Book of Deuteronomy. Appropriately, the closing of the frame here includes several verbal echoes of the frame at the beginning, especially chapter 4. After this speech, the book moves on to matters pertaining to Moses’s death and the transfer of authority and to the two poems that mark the book’s conclusion.

3. And the LORD your God shall turn back your former state. The meaning of shevut, here rendered as “former state,” has long been disputed. Many interpreters derive it from the root sh-b-h and hence understand it to mean “captivity.” The use of the same verb (shuv) with this noun shevut in Jeremiah 48:46 immediately after the term shivyah, which unambiguously means “captivity,” would seem to lend support to this understanding. But precisely this idiom is employed for the restoration of the fortunes of Job (42:10), where there is no question of Job’s having been in a prior state of captivity.

6. And the LORD your God shall circumcise your heart. A two-stage process is envisaged. First, the heart of Israel, in the depths of exile, will turn back to God. As a response to this spiritual renewal on the part of the people, God will restore them to their land and sensitize the heart that has already turned back to Him, endowing it with a heightened capacity to love Him and to cling to His teaching. This second stage seems to eliminate the prospect of another exile after the first.

7. all these imprecations. The noun invoked is ʾalah, the solemn oath mentioned at the ceremony of the blessings and the curses, which when violated becomes dire imprecation.

11. wondrous. The force of the Hebrew root p-l-ʾ is something hidden (as Abraham ibn Ezra says) or beyond human ken. The crucial theological point is that divine wisdom is in no way esoteric—it has been clearly set out in “this book of teaching” and is accessible to every man and woman in Israel.

12–13. It is not in the heavens . . . it is not beyond the sea. The Deuteronomist, having given God’s teaching a local place and habitation in a text available to all, proceeds to reject the older mythological notion of the secrets or wisdom of the gods. It is the daring hero of the pagan epic who, unlike ordinary men, makes bold to climb the sky or cross the great sea to bring back the hidden treasures of the divine realm—as Gilgamesh crosses the sea in an effort to bring back the secret of immortality. This mythological and heroic era, the Deuteronomist now proclaims, is at an end, for God’s word, inscribed in a book, has become the intimate property of every person.

15. life and good and death and evil. It is reductive to represent the primary terms “good” and “evil” as “prosperity” and “adversity” (New Jewish Publication Society). There is probably an echo here of “the tree of knowledge good and evil,” and the point is that good, which may lead to prosperity, is associated with life just as evil, which may lead to adversity, is associated with death. The Deuteronomic assumptions about historical causation may seem problematic or, indeed, untenable, but this powerful notion of the urgency of moral choice continues to resonate.

19. I call to witness for you today the heavens and the earth. These eternal witnesses will again be invoked at the beginning of the Song of Moses.