1. Give ear, O heavens. The high stylistic solemnity of the poem is signaled by a formal beginning (verses 1–2) that calls attention to the poet’s own act of uttering sublime speech. This convention constitutes an approximate analogy to the invocation of the muse and the proclamation of the subject of the poem at the beginning of the Homeric epics. The address here to heaven and earth as witnesses is replicated, as many commentators have noted, by the opening lines of Isaiah 1. The Song of Moses (traditionally referred to in Hebrew, as we have noted, as Shirat [the song of] Haʾazinu) is certainly older than the body of Deuteronomy, though how much older is a matter of scholarly debate. Many (though not all) of the grammatical and morphological features of the language as well as certain aspects of the syntax are archaic, and numerous formulaic word pairs in the parallel members of the lines are ones that also occur in the prebiblical poetry of Ugarit. On stylistic grounds, then, the poem—or at least much of it—could be as early as the period of the Judges, that is, the eleventh century B.C.E. As with any archaic poem, one encounters rare terms of uncertain meaning and a number of points where the text appears to have been scrambled in scribal transmission, whether out of sheer confusion or through theological censorship of the ancient materials. The more salient instances of these lexical and textual difficulties will be noted below.

2. cloudbursts. The only thing certain about the unique Hebrew noun seʿirim is that it has to be some form of precipitation. If it is cognate with seʿarah, “storm,” then “cloudburst” would be a likely meaning.

4. The Rock. This epithet for God, with the obvious sense of bastion or stronghold, is common in Psalms. It is used seven times in the poem, which exhibits a predilection for repeating key terms a formulaic number of times.

5. Did He act ruinously? No, his sons’ the fault. The Hebrew syntax here is impacted and hence the meaning obscure. This translation—like all others, only a guess at the sense of the original—follows the sequence of Hebrew words fairly literally.

8. When Elyon gave estates to nations. Elyon (the High One) is the sky god of the Canaanite pantheon, who appears to have been assimilated into biblical monotheism as an epithet for the God of Israel (see the comment on Genesis 14:19–20). The use of this designation here probably reflects the antiquity of the poem.

by the number of the sundry gods. The Masoretic Text here reads lemispar beney yisraʾel, “by the number of the sons of Israel.” It is hard to make much sense of that reading, though traditional exegetes try to do that by noting that Israel/Jacob had seventy male descendants when he went down to Egypt and that there are, at least proverbially, seventy nations. This translation adopts the reading of the text found at Qumran (which seems close to the Hebrew text used by the Septuagint translators): lemispar beney ʾelohim. This phrase, which appears to reflect a very early stage in the evolution of biblical monotheism, caused later transmitters of the text theological discomfort and was probably deliberately changed in the interests of piety. In the older world-picture, registered in a variety of biblical texts, God is surrounded by a celestial entourage of divine beings or lesser deities, beney ʾelim or beney ’elohim, who are nevertheless subordinate to the supreme God. The Song of Moses assumes that God, in allotting portions of the earth to the various peoples, also allowed each people its own lesser deity. Compare Moses’s remark about the astral deities in Deuteronomy 4:19.

9. Yes, the LORD’s portion is His people. This affirmation stands in contrast to the preceding statement that God has allotted different deities to the sundry peoples. The LORD has made Israel His special possession through His acts of historical providence toward them, and thus Israel must worship the LORD alone.

11. who rouses his nest. “Rouses” is the usual sense of this Hebrew verb. But some scholars have pointed to a possible Ugaritic cognate that would yield the sense “guard over.”

13. He suckled him honey from the crag / and oil from the flinty stone. This line is a lovely illustration of the dynamic of intensification that characterizes much of the semantic parallelism in biblical poetry. Because the verb “suckled” does double duty for both clauses, the poet has extra rhythmic room in the second verset—a unit of one word, one accented syllable—that he can exploit by elaborating or heightening the parallel object of the verb, moving from the general term “crag” to a particularly hard kind of rock, “the flinty stone.” There is also a move from an image that can readily be understood in naturalistic terms, finding honeycombs in crevices, to one that seems more flatly miraculous, being suckled oil from flintstone. The effort of many commentators to “explain” the latter image as a reference to olive trees growing on crags may not be altogether beside the point but diminishes the striking immediacy of the image.

14. the fat of lambs . . . the fat of kernels of wheat. In both cases, “fat” may mean what it says or may be idiomatic for “the best of” (as in “the fat of the land”).

15. Jeshurun. An epithet for Israel. Since the etymology suggests “straight,” its use here is ironic, as the poem pointedly associates crookedness with Israel.

17. the ungods. The Hebrew is loʾ ʾeloha. One of the distinctive stylistic traits of this poem is the fondness it exhibits for such negative prefixes. Compare verse 21.

had not feared. The verb seʿarum is unique to this text and its meaning is disputed. One interesting suggestion is that it plays on the noun seʿirim, “demons” or perhaps “goat-gods,” an approximate synonym for shedim, “demons,” in this verse.

21. their empty things. Literally, “their mere vapors.” The Hebrew hevel is the same word that will be repeatedly used in Qohelet for insubstantiality, “mere breath” (“vanity of vanities,” King James Version), and here it glosses “ungod.”

unpeople. The Hebrew is loʾ-ʿam. Jeffrey H. Tigay thinks the reference may be to nomads, and hence would reflect the premonarchic period of nomadic marauders, but the term might simply be a self-evident pejorative for an alien people.

22. For fire has flared in My nostrils. This pyrotechnic representation of an angry warrior-god, drawing on polytheistic antecedents, occurs frequently in biblical poetry (compare, for example, 2 Samuel 22:8–16). Thus, God’s hiding His face from Israel (verse 20) is not merely a withdrawal of the divine presence but the opposite of showing favor (in biblical idiom, “lifting the face to”)—a wrathful God actively assaults Israel. The weapons of the warrior deity are lightning (God’s “arrows”), earthquake, a whole panoply of plagues and noxious beasts, and hostile nations.

26. I would have said. In this moment of fury, provoked by Israel’s betrayal of its obligation of loyalty to YHWH, God expresses no compassion for His people; it is only concern for the divine reputation (“lest they say, ‘Our hand was high, / and not the LORD has wrought all this’” [verse 27]) that prevents Him from utterly destroying Israel.

28. For a nation lost in counsel are they. As the following lines make clear, the reference is not to Israel but to its triumphant enemy. Had they real understanding, they would realize that such a spectacular defeat as they inflicted on Israel could only have been God’s doing.

30. one chase a thousand, / or two put ten thousand to flight. This paradigmatic line neatly illustrates the pattern of intensification that informs biblical poetic parallelism. Were the system based on actual synonymity, one would expect numerical equivalents in the two parallel versets, but the prevailing rule, precisely as with nonnumerical elements in poetic parallelism, is that something must be increased or heightened: from one to two, from a thousand to ten thousand.

31. our enemies’ would-be gods. The second of the two Hebrew words here, weʾoyveinu pelilim, is a notorious crux, evidently already a source of puzzlement to the ancient Greek translators. The ostensible verbal root of pelilim is related to the idea of judgment or assessment, but every attempt to construe the two words in light of that meaning seems strained. Tigay proposes an Akkadian cognate that means “leader” or “guardian” and serves as an epithet for deities. If one notes that pelilim rhymes richly with ʾelilim, “idols,” and if one recalls this poet’s verbal inventiveness in coining designations for the nonentity of the pagan gods, “would-be gods” is a distinct possibility.

32. death-bitter. The Hebrew merorot by itself suggests only bitterness, but in context the line is clearly referring to poison.

34. Look, it is concealed with Me, / sealed up in My stores. The poet picks up an idea current in ancient Near Eastern mythology, also reflected in Job 38:22–23, that the deity stores up weapons in a cosmic armory or storehouse (Hebrew ʾotsar) for a day of apocalyptic battle.

36. no ruler or helper. The Hebrew phrase ʿatsur weʿazuv has invited highly divergent interpretations, but its use elsewhere (compare 1 Kings 14:10 and 2 Kings 9:8) suggests a link with political leadership.

42. I will make My shafts drunk with blood. Now the warrior-god turns His ferocity from Israel to its enemies. It is a commonplace of biblical figurative language that arrows drink blood, the sword consumes flesh.

from the flesh of the long-haired foe. The Masoretic Text says, very literally, “from the head of the long hair [or unbound hair] of the foe.” This reading raises two problems: if the long hair is the object of the sword, not much blood would be involved; and “head” makes an odd parallel to “blood” in the preceding verset. This translation adopts a proposed emendation that simply reverses the order of consonants of “head,” roʾsh, yielding sheʾer, “flesh.”

43. Nations, O gladden His people. Although the formulation of the Hebrew is a little obscure, the sense seems to be something like “Nations, congratulate God’s people as He exacts vengeance from their enemies and restores them to their place in their land.” The Qumran text, again approximately confirming the Septuagint, has a partly divergent reading: “Gladden, O heavens, His people, / and let all divine beings bow before Him. / For His sons’ blood He will avenge / and vengeance turn back on His foes. / And His enemies He will requite / and purge His people’s soil.” There are grounds for thinking this reading might be more authentic than the Masoretic Text. The invocation of the heavens at the end of the poem would correspond neatly to the apostrophe to the heavens at the beginning, whereas turning to the nations at the end is a little odd. As in the probable substitution of “sons of Israel” for “sundry gods” in verse 8, later editors for reasons of monotheistic rigor might have been impelled to delete the reference that follows to all divine beings (kol ʾelohim) bowing before the triumphant LORD. Finally, “His people’s soil” (ʾadmat ʿamo, in the construct state) makes better idiomatic sense than “His soil, His people” (ʾadmato ʿamo in seeming apposition).

44. Hosea son of Nun. Hosea is a variant form of Joshua.

46. bear witness against you. The poem, as chapter 31 makes clear, is the eternal witness. The phrase could also mean “warn you” or even “impose upon you.”

50. And die on the mountain. This a rare, and shocking, use of the verb “to die” in the imperative.

51. because you two betrayed Me. The word “two” is added in the translation to make clear in English what is transparent in the Hebrew through the plural form of the verb—that both Moses and Aaron betrayed God at the waters of Meribah and thus each was doomed to die on his own mountain.