★ ‘Cut for yourself’ stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible and they are the same event told twice. Pesol-lekha is at Exodus 34:1 (already on these pages) and here, and nowhere else in all 929 archived chapters. It is a small phrase carrying a large change of hands: the first tablets were God’s own work, and the second pair Moses has to quarry himself. Only the writing stays God’s. Deuteronomy does not comment on the difference; it simply repeats the order it was given and then reports doing it.

⚠ The ark is the difference between the two tellings, and it is not a small one. Exodus 34:1 says nothing about an ark. Here the same command adds a clause — and make yourself an ark of wood — and at v3 Moses reports building it FIRST, before he cuts the stone and climbs. Exodus builds its ark on a different schedule and by a different hand: it is commanded at Exodus 25:10 in the plural, and THEY shall make an ark of acacia wood, with its measurements, and it is made at Exodus 37:1 by Bezalel — overlaid with gold inside and out, with a moulding, four rings, poles and two cherubim — after the second tablets, not before them. In this chapter it is a wooden box, made by Moses, in one clause, with no dimensions and no gold anywhere in the sentence. The readings differ, and this translation leaves them differing: aron etz, an ark of wood, is what the Hebrew says here, so that is what is printed here. ⚠ The shelf feels the plainness. NIV keeps the word and footnotes it, to explain that what is meant is a chest; TLB supplies a purpose the Hebrew withholds, ‘a wooden Ark to keep them in’; and Douay-Rheims follows the Vulgate into ‘setim wood’, a transliteration of the Hebrew tree-name where KJV has ‘shittim wood’ and the rest of the shelf simply says acacia.

★ ‘The ten WORDS’ — and the shelf divides exactly nine to four. The Hebrew is aseret ha-devarim, ten words, and this project has printed it that way since Deuteronomy 4:13. Four witnesses keep the noun: Douay-Rheims (‘the ten words’, following the Vulgate’s decem verba), NWT 1984 (‘the Ten Words’), TNM 1987 («las Diez Palabras») and RV 1909 («las diez palabras»). Nine replace it with a word for commandment. KJV, ASV and Geneva read ‘the ten commandments’; NIV, TLB and NWT 2013 ‘the Ten Commandments’. So do all four of the modern revisions in the two languages — TNM 2019 «los Diez Mandamientos», RV60 «los diez mandamientos» (against its own 1909), and NVI the same. The word matters because Hebrew has a perfectly good word for commandment and uses it nine verses later (mitzvot, v13); what is written on the stone is called something else.

⚠ Yom ha-qahal, the day of the ASSEMBLY, is the same phrase Deuteronomy 9:10 used one chapter ago for the same day; keeping the noun is what lets a reader hear the repetition. NVI dissolves it into a clause, «el día en que estábamos todos reunidos en asamblea». ★ And v5 ends on a present tense with a long reach: and there they are — not ‘there they were’. Whoever wrote the sentence expected the tablets to be in that box as he wrote it, and 1 Kings 8:9 (not yet on these pages) reports a temple dedication centuries later at which the ark was opened and held nothing but the two stones.

⚠ This is the clearest disagreement in the chapter, and it is about where Israel’s first high priest is buried. Here Aaron dies at Moserah, on the road from Beeroth-bene-jaakan. Numbers 20:22–29 (already on these pages) has the whole congregation come to mount Hor on the border of Edom, Aaron stripped of his garments in front of his son at the top of the mountain, and Israel weeping thirty days; Numbers 33:38 repeats mount Hor and supplies the only date in the wilderness itinerary tied to a death. ⚠ The itineraries also run in opposite directions. Numbers 33:30–31 goes Moseroth → Bene-jaakan; this verse goes Beeroth-bene-jaakan → Moserah. Same two stops, reversed. This translation does not choose between them, and does not quietly smooth either one: the Hebrew here says Moserah, so it prints Moserah, and the note says what the other book says.

★ The Geneva Bible of 1599 saw this and answered it in the margin, in one line. Its verse text is ordinary enough — Geneva reads ‘from Beeroth of the children of Jaakan, to Moserah’ — but against that place-name it hangs a marginal note, and the note is the interesting part: ‘This mountain was also called Hor, Num. 20:28.’ It is a harmonisation — one place under two names — and it is worth reading twice, because it shows a working Reformation study Bible doing exactly what a reader does today: noticing that two books put a death in two places, and reaching for the simplest fix. Nothing in either Hebrew text calls Moserah a mountain, and Numbers is emphatic that Aaron went UP; but the Geneva’s marginal note is a shelf witness admitting the problem exists, four centuries before the seam became a commonplace of scholarship.

⚠ Five versions handle it with punctuation instead. NIV, ASV, RV 1909, RV60 and NVI all wrap vv6–9 in parentheses, which silently reclassifies four verses as an aside inserted into Moses’ speech — a real interpretive decision, made with a bracket rather than a word. The Hebrew has no such mark. This translation leaves the verses unbracketed and lets the join stay visible, which is what it is: the first-person voice of v5 drops away, a third-person travel record runs for four verses, and the ‘I’ returns at v10 as though it had never stopped.

★ Levi’s job description is three infinitives and no noun. The tribe is set apart to carry the ark, to stand before Jehovah to minister to him, and to bless in his name. Not to own, not to farm, not to inherit — to carry something, to stand somewhere, and to say something. The first of the three is the reason the ark of v1 is in this chapter at all: the box needed carrying, and a tribe was separated to carry it.

⚠ What Numbers said to one man, Deuteronomy says of a whole tribe. Numbers 18:20 (already on these pages) is God speaking to Aaron personally: in their land you shall have no inheritance, nor shall you have any portion among them — I am your portion and your inheritance. Here the identical pair of nouns, chelek and nachalah, is denied to Levi at large and the same consolation is given in the third person: Jehovah is his inheritance. A nachalah is heritable ground, the piece of the world your descendants will still be standing on; the sentence withdraws that and puts a person in its place, which is either the best or the worst deal in the book depending on where you are standing. ★ The Geneva Bible reads the arrangement against Jacob’s deathbed and says so in its margin here: ‘So God turned the curse of Jacob, Gen. 49:7, unto blessing.’ The verse it points at is real and is as harsh as it says — Genesis 49:7 (already on these pages) curses the anger of Simeon and Levi and promises to divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel. Landlessness is the curse; carrying the ark is the same landlessness, given a job. Deuteronomy itself draws no such line, and the reading is the Geneva’s, not this translation’s.

⚠ The separating verb is hivdil, the ordinary Hebrew verb for dividing one thing off from another, and the shelf spreads out on it: KJV and Geneva read ‘separated’, ASV and NIV ‘set apart’, NVI «designó» (‘designated’), and Douay-Rheims drops the divine name from the clause altogether — ‘At that time he separated the tribe of Levi’ — leaving the subject to be inferred from the previous verse, which in the Douay is a travel note about Jotbathah.

⚠ The destruction Jehovah refuses here is not the one he threatened in the last chapter. Deuteronomy 9:14 and 9:8 use shamad, the annihilation verb that ran six times through that chapter. This verse uses shachat — to spoil, mar, ruin — a wider and less final word, the verb of the flood and of a spoiled garment. Nothing in the Hebrew forces the two to mean different things here, and this translation does not manufacture a distinction it cannot prove; but the change of verb is real, it happens at the moment the sentence turns from what God intended to what God declined to do, and four of the thirteen witnesses do mark it — all four from one family. Where they had ‘annihilate’ and «aniquilar» at 9:14, here NWT 1984 reads ‘bring you to ruin’, NWT 2013 ‘destroy you’, TNM 1987 «arruinarte» and TNM 2019 «acabar contigo». The other nine keep one destroy-word for both chapters: KJV, ASV, Geneva and Douay-Rheims all print ‘destroy thee’, and RV 1909 and RV60 both «destruirte», with NIV, TLB and NVI doing the same in their own words. ⚠ Worth being exact about what this is: it is the NWT/TNM family against the rest of the shelf, in BOTH of their editions, so it is not another instance of the 1984-versus-2013 split this book has been counting.

★ The verse opens on the long emphatic pronoun anokhi where the verb already carries its subject — and I, I stood on the mountain. NWT 1984 is the one English witness that reproduces the doubling (‘And I—I stayed in the mountain’), matched in Spanish by TNM 1987, «Y yo... yo me quedé»; both of their own revisions flatten it to a plain ‘I’, and so does everyone else. It is the second time in two chapters that this stress has been available and mostly declined.

★ Deuteronomy 10:12 and Micah 6:8 (not yet on these pages) are so often read as one sentence that it is worth saying plainly: the verbs are not the same. Micah asks what Jehovah doresh from you — seeks, requires, demands, the verb of an inquiry pressed. This verse asks what Jehovah sho'el from you, and sha'al is the plain Hebrew for asking: it is what you do at a door, what Israel does to the Egyptians for their silver, the verb behind requesting and borrowing. The phrase sho'el me'imakh stands once in the whole Hebrew Bible, checked across all 929 archived chapters, and this is it. ⚠ The English shelf mostly imports Micah’s force anyway: KJV, ASV, Geneva and Douay-Rheims all print ‘require’. Every modern witness on both shelves gets it right instead — NIV ‘ask’, NWT 1984 ‘asking’, RV 1909 and RV60 «pide», NVI «te pide» — which is worth recording as an instance of the older witnesses being the looser ones, against the general run of this book’s comparisons.

⚠ Le-tov lakh at the end of v13 is two words, ‘for good to you’, and it is doing something the shelf keeps enlarging. Geneva reads ‘for thy wealth’ — in 1599 that meant well-being, not money, and the word has since moved out from under the sentence. RV 1909 has the plain «para que hayas bien»; RV60 makes it «para que tengas prosperidad», prosperity, which is a promise the Hebrew does not make here.

★ ‘The heavens and the heavens of the heavens’ is a Hebrew superlative made by repeating a noun, and it occurs in four verses. Searched across the archive, u-shmei ha-shamayim stands here, at 1 Kings 8:27, and at 2 Chronicles 2:5 and 6:18 (none of the other three yet on these pages). All three of the others are Solomon — once before building the temple, and twice more in the one dedication prayer, which Kings and Chronicles each record — and all three say the same thing: the heavens and the heavens of the heavens cannot contain God, so what is a house? Only here is the phrase a statement of PROPERTY rather than a confession of inadequacy — not ‘they cannot hold you’ but ‘they belong to you’. NIV compresses it to ‘the highest heavens’ and NVI to «lo más alto de los cielos», which is the right sense and loses the doubling that produces it.

★ Chashaq is not a synonym for choosing. It means to be ATTACHED to, bound, fastened by desire — the same verb Deuteronomy 7:7 (already on these pages) used to say that Jehovah did not attach himself to Israel because Israel was numerous. Here it takes the fathers as its object and the choosing comes second, in a separate verb: he bound himself to them, and THEN chose their seed. NWT 1984 is the tightest English witness here — ‘did Jehovah get attached’ — and TNM 1987 matches it with «se apegó». Both of their own revisions replace attachment with approach: NWT 2013 ‘draw close’, TNM 2019 «se acercó». Drawing close is something you can undo by stepping back.

⚠ This verse is where the chapter changes grammatical number, mid-sentence. Everything from v12 has addressed a singular ‘you’ — your God, your heart, your soul, all singular in the Hebrew. This verse opens singular, ba-avotekha, ‘to YOUR fathers’, and then, five words later, turns plural: bakhem, ‘among YOU’, plural, and stays plural through v19 before returning to the singular at v20. English cannot show it and Spanish can, so the twins of this chapter deliberately diverge and this note explains it once: where the English reads ‘you’ throughout, the Spanish moves from tú to ustedes at exactly this word and back again at v20. What the shift is FOR is taken up in the closing note, because the answer this chapter gives is not the one the last chapter expected.

★ The verb is the ordinary one for circumcision, used on the ordinary organ’s ordinary noun, and then pointed at an internal organ. Mul is the covenant verb of Genesis 17, where it is cut into flesh at eight days old; orlah is the foreskin itself. Nothing here is softened into metaphor by the Hebrew — it simply attaches the two blunt words to levavkhem, your heart, and leaves the reader to do the work. The exact phrase orlat levavkhem stands once in the whole Hebrew Bible, and this is it.

★ Three passages ask for a circumcised heart and all three have a different grammar — which is the whole argument in miniature. Here, YOU do it: a plural imperative aimed at the people. At Jeremiah 4:4 (not yet on these pages) the people circumcise themselves to Jehovah and REMOVE the foreskins, plural, of their heart — a second verb doing the work, and the noun in the plural where this verse has it singular. And at Deuteronomy 30:6, twenty chapters ahead in this same book and not yet on these pages, the subject changes: and Jehovah your God will circumcise your heart, and the heart of your seed. The command here and the promise there are the same image with the knife in a different hand, and Deuteronomy holds both without deciding between them. Whether the book means the second as an answer to the failure of the first is a question these pages will be in a position to ask when chapter 30 arrives. ⚠ The Geneva Bible sends its reader to the middle one of the three, glossing this verse in the margin as ‘Cut off all your evil affections, Jer 4:4’ — the same cross-reference, reached independently in 1599.

★ And the neck finally comes apart from its adjective. For two chapters Israel has BEEN something: am qesheh-oref, a stiff-necked people, at Deuteronomy 9:6 and 9:13, and before that at Exodus 32:9 and Exodus 33:3, 5 and 34:9 — always a description, always a fixed pair of words, always what the people ARE. Here the pair is broken open: the neck becomes a possession (ve-orpekhem, ‘and your neck’, a form that stands once in the Bible) and the hardening becomes a verb they are told to stop doing. An identity turns into a habit, and a habit can be dropped. That move is the whole reason this verse sits where it does, between what God is owed and what God is like.

⚠⚠ This is the densest instance of the revision pattern these pages have tracked: both images, both languages, both modern editions. NWT 1984 keeps everything — ‘circumcise the foreskin of YOUR hearts and not harden YOUR necks any longer’ — and so does TNM 1987, «circuncidar el prepucio de sus corazones y no endurecer más su cerviz». Their revisions delete the circumcision AND the neck in a single sentence: NWT 2013 reads ‘You must now cleanse your hearts and stop being so stubborn’; TNM 2019 reads «purificar sus corazones y dejar de ser tan tercos». Cleansing is not cutting, and stubbornness is not a neck. ★ But the Reina-Valera does NOT follow, and that matters. The RV 1909 and the RV60 are word-for-word identical here — «Circuncidad pues el prepucio de vuestro corazón, y no endurezcáis más vuestra cerviz» — so the Spanish drift named one chapter ago does not appear at the verse most likely to attract it. KJV, ASV, Geneva and Douay-Rheims all keep both images too; NIV and NVI keep the verb and drop the foreskin.

★ Two superlatives stacked, and the pair stands together only here. Elohei ha-elohim va-adonei ha-adonim — God of gods and Lord of lords — is the same repeat-the-noun superlative v14 just used for the heavens, run twice. Searched across the archive, ‘God of gods’ occurs in two verses (here and Psalm 136:2, not yet on these pages) and this exact form of ‘and Lord of lords’ in one, this one; Psalm 136 has the two titles as well, but split across its verses 2 and 3 rather than joined in a single breath.

★ ‘Who does not lift the face’ is a courtroom picture, and half the shelf keeps the calque. Lo yissa panim is literally to not raise a face: the suppliant comes in bowed, and the judge who lifts that face to look at it has just registered WHO is in front of him. To lift no faces is to judge without knowing whose case it is. KJV and ASV print ‘regardeth not persons’, Geneva ‘accepteth no persons’, Douay-Rheims ‘accepteth no person’, RV 1909 «no acepta persona» and RV60 «no hace acepción de personas» — that family of renderings is where English got ‘respecter of persons’, an idiom carried into the language on the back of this construction. The moderns state the sense instead: NIV ‘shows no partiality’, NWT 1984 ‘treats none with partiality’, NVI «no actúa con parcialidad». This translation keeps the hand and the face, because the next clause is about money and the two belong to one scene.

⚠ ‘Nor taketh reward’ is a sentence the King James can no longer say. Shochad is a bribe — the payment that buys a verdict, banned outright at Exodus 23:8 and Deuteronomy 16:19 (neither yet on these pages) on the ground that it blinds the eyes of the wise. In 1611 ‘reward’ still covered exactly that, and KJV, ASV and Geneva all use it here. The word has since flipped. KJV and ASV print ‘nor taketh reward’ and Geneva the same; a reader who comes to that sentence today hears a God who accepts no payment for services, which is a fine sentiment and the opposite of the point. Douay-Rheims and NIV say ‘bribes’, and NWT 1984 ‘a bribe’. In Spanish RV 1909 and RV60 both say «cohecho», the legal term for judicial bribery specifically, which is the tightest word on either shelf; NVI and TNM 1987 use the ordinary «soborno». The whole clause stands once in the Hebrew Bible.

★ What follows the bribe is the proof of it, and it is not abstract. The God who lifts no faces is described by whose faces he does lift: the orphan, the widow, and the ger, the resident foreigner with no land and no citizenship. And what he gives the stranger is not status but lechem ve-simlah, bread and a garment — food and a coat, the two things a person without a household cannot produce. An unbribable judge is defined here by an act of provisioning. ⚠ Verse 19 then hands the sentence to Israel with the same reason attached: love the stranger, because you were strangers in Egypt. Leviticus 19:34 (already on these pages) gives the same command with the same reason and adds a measure Deuteronomy does not repeat — you shall love him AS YOURSELF. The comparison is gone here; the memory is what carries the command.

★ Davaq is the verb of Genesis 2:24 (already on these pages), where a man leaves his father and his mother and CLINGS to his wife and they become one flesh — sticking, adhering, not letting go. It is also what Ruth does to Naomi when Orpah lets go. Aimed at God it is a strong word and the shelf mostly keeps it: KJV, ASV and Geneva ‘cleave’, Douay-Rheims ‘adhere’, NIV ‘hold fast’, NWT 1984 ‘cling’, NVI «Aférrense». ⚠ The RV60 is the one witness that loses it. RV 1909 had «á él te allegarás», drawing near and attaching; the 1960 reads instead «a él seguirás» — you shall FOLLOW him, a different act entirely, since following is done at a distance. The same revision also inserts a word the Hebrew has not got, «a él solo servirás», him ONLY shall you serve. Two departures in one verse, both in the modern edition.

★ ‘He is your praise’ — and the RV60 makes the identical insertion it made one chapter ago. Hu tehillatekha is a bare identification: he IS your praise, with no verb of doing anywhere in it. Not the one you praise, not the object of your praise — your praise. KJV, ASV, Geneva and Douay-Rheims all keep it bare with ‘He is thy praise’, and so does RV 1909, «El es tu alabanza». RV60 reads «Él es el objeto de tu alabanza» — and those are the same three words it inserted one chapter ago at Deuteronomy 9:21, where the 1909’s plain vuestro pecado became el objeto de vuestro pecado. Twice now, on opposite subjects — a sin and a praise — the 1960 has met a bare Hebrew predicate and supplied a relationship for it. ⚠ It is not alone: NWT 1984 (‘He is the One for you to praise’) and TNM 1987 («A él corresponde tu alabanza») expand it too, which makes this one of the few verses where the older editions are the looser ones.

★ The number is exact and twice attested: Genesis 46:27 (already on these pages) counts the house of Jacob that came into Egypt at seventy, and Exodus 1:5 repeats the figure at the head of the story of the slavery. Set against ‘the stars of the heavens for multitude’, the sentence is a piece of arithmetic with four hundred years inside it.

★ And the stars are a quotation. Genesis 15:5 (already on these pages) is the night Abraham is brought outside and told to count the stars if he can — so shall your seed be. Deuteronomy 10 closes by reporting the promise kept, to a crowd standing on the far side of it, and the last word of the chapter is la-rov, ‘for multitude’. A chapter that began with a man cutting two stones by hand ends with a number nobody can count.

⚠ Nefesh here is the counting word for a person — seventy souls in the sense of seventy head, seventy lives. KJV and ASV print ‘threescore and ten persons’; NWT 1984, TNM 1987 and RV 1909 keep ‘souls’/«almas»; RV60 moves to «personas», and NWT 2013 to ‘70 people’. This translation keeps ‘souls’ for the same reason it keeps the foreskin at v16: the Hebrew is using a concrete noun, and the reader is better served by the noun plus a note than by a smoother word that has already made the decision.