The Covenant in Moab
These are the words of the covenant that the LORD commanded Moses to cut with the sons of Israel in the land of Moab, besides the covenant that he cut with them at Horeb.
And Moses called to all Israel and said to them: You yourselves have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt — to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land —
the great trials that your eyes saw, those great signs and wonders.
But the LORD has not given you a heart to know, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, to this day.
And I have led you forty years in the wilderness; your garments have not worn out on you, and your sandal has not worn out on your foot.
Bread you have not eaten, and wine and strong drink you have not drunk — so that you might know that I am the LORD your God.
And you came to this place; and Sihon king of Heshbon and Og king of Bashan came out to meet us for battle, and we struck them down.
And we took their land, and gave it as an inheritance to the Reubenite, and to the Gadite, and to the half-tribe of the Manassite.
So keep the words of this covenant, and do them, so that you may prosper in all that you do.
You are standing today, all of you, before the LORD your God — your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your officers, every man of Israel,
your little ones, your wives, and your sojourner who is in the midst of your camps, from the cutter of your wood to the drawer of your water —
to cross into the covenant of the LORD your God, and into his oath, which the LORD your God is cutting with you today,
in order to establish you today for himself as a people — and he will be your God, as he spoke to you and as he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
And not with you alone am I cutting this covenant and this oath,
but with the one who is standing here with us today before the LORD our God, and with the one who is not here with us today.
For you yourselves know how we lived in the land of Egypt, and how we passed through the midst of the nations you passed through;
and you saw their detestable things and their idols — wood and stone, silver and gold — that were with them.
Let there not be among you a man or a woman, or a family or a tribe, whose heart turns away today from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of those nations; let there not be among you a root bearing poisonous fruit and wormwood —
one who, when he hears the words of this oath, blesses himself in his heart, saying, “Peace will be mine, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart” — thus sweeping away the watered with the dry.
The LORD will not be willing to forgive him; for then the anger of the LORD and his jealousy will smoke against that man, and every oath written in this book will settle on him, and the LORD will wipe out his name from under the heavens.
And the LORD will single him out for calamity, out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the oaths of the covenant written in this book of the instruction.
And the latter generation — your sons who rise up after you, and the foreigner who comes from a far land — will say, when they see the plagues of that land and its sicknesses with which the LORD has made it sick:
“Sulfur and salt, a burning waste is all her land. It is not sown, and it does not sprout, and no plant comes up in it — like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the LORD overthrew in his anger and in his wrath.”
And all the nations will say, “Why has the LORD done thus to this land? What is this great burning of anger?”
And they will say, “Because they forsook the covenant of the LORD, the God of their fathers, which he cut with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt,
and went and served other gods and bowed down to them — gods that they had not known, and that he had not allotted to them.
And the anger of the LORD burned against that land, to bring on it every curse written in this book;
and the LORD uprooted them from their ground in anger, and in wrath, and in great fury, and threw them into another land, as it is this day.”
The hidden things belong to the LORD our God; but the revealed things belong to us and to our sons forever — to do all the words of this instruction.