1. And Moses finished speaking. The Masoretic Text reads, “And Moses went and spoke.” This translation follows the Deuteronomy text found at Qumran, which accords with the Septuagint. The third-person forms of the verb “went,” wayelekh, and the verb “finished,” wayekhal, have the same consonants, and the order of the last two consonants could easily have been reversed in a scribal transcription. The difference between the two versions is essential because the Qumran version makes this a proper introduction to the entire epilogue of Deuteronomy (chapters 31–34). Moses has completed his discourses—the monitory sermons, the Laws, the blessings and curses—and he is not “going” anywhere to speak further words. Rather, the epilogue will now concern itself with the following topics of closure: the transfer of authority to Joshua, Moses’s imminent death, the instructions for the public reading of “this teaching” (the Book of Deuteronomy or at least substantial portions of it), the recitation of the Song of Moses, which is to bear witness against Israel, and the poem blessing the twelve tribes.

2. I can no longer sally forth and come in. The idiom “go out and come in” (elsewhere, “bring out and bring in”) means to lead the forces in battle. It is an apt phrase for Moses to use because Joshua, whom he is about to designate as his successor, figures above all as the military commander of the conquest.

7. Be strong and stalwart. These words of encouragement, used in verse 6 in the plural for the Israelites, before the armed confrontation with the Canaanites are, as Abraham ibn Ezra properly notes, the same words Moses addresses now to Joshua (verses 7 and 23).

you will come with this people. Three ancient versions read here “you will bring this people” (the same verb in a different conjugation), which matches the use of the verb in verse 23.

8. the LORD, He it is Who goes before you. This is a recurring motif, picked up from Exodus: God is imagined as a celestial warrior headed out in front of the people against its enemies. The presence of that divine vanguard is the reassurance the people have when faced with adversaries superior in numbers.

9. And Moses wrote this teaching. As elsewhere in Deuteronomy, “this teaching,” torah, refers to Deuteronomy itself. In verse 24, Moses is said to have written “the words of this teaching in a book.” That last noun, sefer, refers in biblical Hebrew to anything recorded in writing, and it of course would not look physically like a book in our sense because the bound book or codex had not yet been invented. But the scroll, or series of scrolls, on which the text of Moses’s valedictory discourses was set down clearly constitutes a book. Indeed, it may well inaugurate the clear-cut concept of the book in ancient Israel.

10. in the set season of the sabbatical year at the Festival of Huts. In the sabbatical year the fields are allowed to lie fallow, and the Festival of Huts (Succoth), the fall harvest festival, would conclude all harvesting from the previous year, thus leaving the entire people, with its agriculturally based economy, free to come to the central sanctuary and listen to the public reading of the book of teaching. In later tradition, this reading of Deuteronomy once every seven years would be replaced by the practice of reading all Five Books of Moses annually, divided into weekly portions through the year. That practice has its roots in the institution of the public reading of the Torah by Ezra in the fifth century B.C.E.

11. in their hearing. Literally, “in their ears.”

12. Assemble the people. The assembly of the people to listen to the recitation of the Mosaic teaching is, as David Cohen-Zenach aptly observes, a reenactment of the hearing of the Law at Sinai, an event that Deuteronomy calls “the day of the assembly.”

13. your children who know not. That is, your children who have not known, have not witnessed, all these great signs and portents that you have seen with your own eyes.

14. Call Joshua . . . that I may charge him. Critical scholarship has identified a whole series of duplications, contradictions, interruptions, and shifts in terminology in this chapter and generally has attributed them to a collation of different literary sources. The transfer of authority to Joshua is probably the most salient of these contradictory repetitions. In verses 7–8, Moses confers authority on Joshua in a declaration made before the whole people and God plays no direct role. Here it is God Who charges Joshua, and the investment of leadership is enacted away from the eyes of the people, in the sacrosanct space of the Tent of Meeting. The intricacies of the interwoven sources in this chapter need not detain us. Suffice it to say that there appear to be four layers: an old source, well antedating the composition of Deuteronomy; a Deuteronomic source; some work by the presumably exilic editor of Deuteronomy; and, finally, the editorial intervention of the redactor of the Torah as a whole. An orchestration of different strands may have been deemed necessary to provide an adequate conclusion to the book. Modern readers must keep in mind that the notion that most books were composite, heterogeneous in both authorship and literary genre, the product of collage, was naturally assumed in ancient Hebrew literature.

16. and this people will rise and go whoring. Abraham ibn Ezra emphatically observes that “it could not possibly be connected with what precedes.” We might expect here a speech from God directed to Joshua, or to Joshua and Moses, in the Tent of Meeting. Instead, we have a divine prediction of Israel’s future idolatry, leading to the withdrawal of the divine presence from Israel, and cast in language reminiscent of the depiction of idolatry in Exodus and in Numbers rather than in the distinctive style of Deuteronomy.

they are coming. Throughout this passage, “people” is singular, but the repetition of “it” would be awkward in English.

17. they will become fodder. Literally, “food,” that is, easy prey for their enemies.

because our God is not in our midst. It is equally possible to understand this as “because our gods are not in our midst.” Jeffrey H. Tigay argues for this possibility, suggesting that the people persist in their idolatrous beliefs even after disaster occurs. It may be more plausible, however, to coordinate the people’s sense of God’s absence with His declaration that he will hide His face.

19. this song will be a witness. The sequence of verses from 18 to 22 are the first preface to the Song of Moses (traditionally called in Hebrew Shirat Haʾazinu, after the first word of the poem). But the text, instead of proceeding, as one might have anticipated, to the lead-in line of verse 30 and then the Song proper (chapter 32), will go on to two other topics first. Poetry is memorable and formally articulated (in the Hebrew, through semantic and syntactic parallelism between halves of the poetic line) in ways that facilitate actual memorization. Thus, Moses is enjoined to “put it in their mouths,” that is, to make them learn it by heart. (A similar idiom for memorization is attested in other ancient Semitic languages, and in postbiblical Hebrew, the idiom for “by heart” is beʿal peh, literally, “in/on the mouth.”) But there is a fail-safe second measure for permanence that Moses must take: he must not rely on memorization but must write the poem out, until the last word. The textual permanence of the poem thus makes it an eternal “witness” that will confront every generation of the people of Israel.

20. eat . . . grow sleek and turn to other gods . . . and despise Me. The language here abounds in terms that anticipate the actual language, not just the themes, of the Song.

21. I knew their devisings. This relatively unusual word, yetser, is surely a pointed allusion directing us to God’s bleak words about human nature after the Flood: “For the devisings of the human heart are evil from youth” (Genesis 8:21).

23. And he charged Joshua. This verse, which essentially repeats verse 8, appears to interrupt the narrative continuity at this point.

26. Take this book of teaching . . . and it shall be there as witness against you. First the Song is identified as witness; now it is the book of teaching, to be placed alongside the Ark, which is to be the witness. At least from the viewpoint of the editor, the aim is to suggest an equivalence between these two texts: the Song of Moses, culminating the Book of Deuteronomy, provides a powerful focus in the concentrated form of poetry for the book’s major themes, and so both the larger text and the text within the text serve the same function.

27. I myself have known your rebelliousness. The emphatic ʾanokhi, “I myself,” before the conjugated verb has autobiographical resonance for the speaker Moses, who through forty years has had to cope with the refractory nature of the people and to be the repeated target of their resentment.

28. that I may call to witness against you the heavens and the earth. This clause verbally anticipates the very beginning of the Song, “Give ear, O heavens, that I may speak, / and let the earth hear my mouth’s utterances.” Thus Moses segues from writing the book (verse 26) to declaiming the Song.