Chapter 29
1These are the words of the covenant that AO commanded Moses to make with the Israelites in the land of Moab in addition to the covenant He had made with them at Horeb.
2Moses summoned all Israel and proclaimed to them, “You have seen everything AO did with your own eyes in Egypt to Pharaoh to all his officials and to all his land.
3You saw with your own eyes the great trials and those miraculous signs and wonders.
4Yet to this day AO has not given you a mind to understand, eyes to see or ears to hear.
5For forty years I led you in the wilderness, yet your clothes and sandals did not wear out.
6You ate no bread and drank [no] wine or strong drink so that you might know that I am AO your God.
7When you reached this place, Sihon king of Heshbon and Og king of Bashan came out against us in battle but we defeated them.
8We took their land and gave it as an inheritance to the Reubenites, the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh.
9So keep and follow the words of this covenant that you may prosper in all you do.
10All of you are standing today before AO your God—you leaders of tribes, elders, officials and all the men of Israel,
11your children and wives and the foreigners in your camps who cut your wood and draw your water—
12so that you may enter into the covenant of AO your God, which He is making with you today, and into His oath,
13and so that He may establish you today as His people and He may be your God as He promised you and as He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
14I am making this covenant and this oath not only with you,
15but also with those who are standing here with us today in the presence of AO our God as well as with those who are not here today.
16For you yourselves know how we lived in the land of Egypt and how we passed through the nations on the way [here].
17You saw the abominations and idols among them made of wood and stone, of silver and gold.
18Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you whose heart turns away today from AO our God to go and worship the gods of those nations. Make sure there is no root among you that bears such poisonous and bitter fruit,
19because when such a person hears the words of this oath, he invokes a blessing on himself, saying, ‘I will have peace even though I walk in the stubbornness of my own heart.’ This will bring disaster on the watered [land] as well as the dry.
20AO will never be willing to forgive him. Instead, [His] anger and jealousy will burn against that man and every curse written in this book will fall upon him. AO will blot out his name from under heaven
21and single him out from all the tribes of Israel for disaster, according to all the curses of the covenant written in this Book of the Law.
22Then the generation to come—your sons who follow you and the foreigner who comes from a distant land—will see the plagues of the land and the sickness AO has inflicted on it.
23All its soil will be a burning waste of sulfur and salt, unsown and unproductive, with no plant growing on it just like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which AO overthrew in His fierce anger.
24So all the nations will ask, ‘Why has AO done such a thing to this land? Why this great outburst of anger?’
25And [the people] will answer, ‘It is because they abandoned the covenant of AO, the God of their fathers, which He made with them when He brought them out of the land of Egypt.
26They went and served other gods and they worshiped gods they had not known—gods that [AO] had not given to them.
27Therefore the anger of AO burned against his land and He brought upon it every curse written in this book.
28AO uprooted them from their land in His anger, rage and great wrath and He cast them into another land, where they are today.’
29The secret [things belong] to AO our God but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, so that we may follow all the words of this law.[“]