The chapter opens on ve-ahavta, the same verb in the same form that opens the Shema at Deuteronomy 6:5 — second person SINGULAR — and then turns plural in the very next word of v2, vi-yda’tem. ★ That is the first of twelve such switches: counted form by form, these thirty-two verses fall into thirteen alternating blocks of singular and plural address, and five of the switches happen INSIDE a single verse (v8, v10, v14, v19 and v26). No previous chapter on these pages has come close to that rate. The phenomenon is treated on its own at vv18–21, where the reason for it finally shows.

★ Musar is the wisdom-literature word for correction, and it is the object of the sentence, not its subject. The noun is built on yasar, to chastise or correct, and the shelf divides on how hard to hit it: the KJV, the ASV and the Geneva 1599 all print ‘chastisement’, while the NWT 1984 softens to ‘discipline’ and the NWT 2013 keeps that. This translation keeps ‘discipline’ because English ‘chastisement’ has drifted toward the merely verbal, and what the verse then lists — a strong hand, an outstretched arm, an army drowned, a ground that opens — is not a scolding. ★ The dictionary entry notes that the VERB of this root is said of God directly at Deuteronomy 8:5, already on these pages; here the NOUN arrives, and its content is the whole of the last forty years.

⚠ The sentence has no main clause, and all eight versions fetched for it repair that silently. All eight versions fetched for this verse patch it, each in its own way. The Hebrew of v2 runs: and know today — for not your children who have not known and have not seen — the discipline of Jehovah your God, and then piles up five more objects across vv3–6, each introduced by and what he did, before the thought finally lands at v7. There is no verb governing the parenthesis about the children. The KJV supplies one — ‘for I speak not with your children’ — and the ASV and the Geneva 1599 do the same. On the Spanish shelf the RV 1909 supplies the identical verb. The NWT 1984 and the TNM 1987 bracket their supplied words visibly, which is the honest way to do it, and the NWT 2013 and TNM 2019 smooth the brackets away into a finished sentence. This translation leaves the gap open with dashes rather than filling it, because the piled-up objects are the effect: the list of things seen keeps going for six verses, which is the argument.

⚠ And the argument sits oddly next to two claims already on these pages. Deuteronomy 5:3 insists the covenant was made not with the fathers but with us, we, these here today, all of us alive — addressed to a generation that had not stood at Horeb. Deuteronomy 1:39 promised the land to the children who today have no knowledge of good and evil. Now the same speech tells the same audience that its children are the ones who did NOT see. Deuteronomy does not reconcile these; it keeps sliding the boundary of ‘you’ forward and backward across the generations, and the sliding is closer to the point than any one of the three statements.

★ The word for what the water did is a one-off. Hetsif — the causative of tsuf, to float or flow over — appears in exactly one verse in the whole Hebrew Bible, this one, checked consonantally against all 929 archived Old Testament chapters. The plain stem of the same root is what makes the axe-head float in 2 Kings 6:6 (not yet on these pages). So the sentence is not ‘he covered them’ and not ‘he drowned them’: it is he made the water flood over — a causative built on a verb of floating, used once, for this.

⚠ ‘Over their faces’ is what the Hebrew says, and it is kept. Al-peneihem is the ordinary idiom for ‘over the surface of’ — but the noun is face, and it is the busiest noun in the chapter after land: it stands seven times in six verses, and this is the only one of the seven where it is a face. The other six are all positional — from before you at v23, in front of you and on the face of all the land at v25, and before you at v26 and v32. Hebrew builds its prepositions of place out of the word for a face, which is why a drowning and a boundary line can be described with the same noun. The KJV and the ASV keep it visible here; the modern versions generally do not. ★ The Spanish shelf splits on it along the usual seam: the TNM 1987 keeps the faces and the TNM 2019 deletes them, having the waters simply swallow the army instead.

The Sea of Reeds keeps this project’s established rendering rather than ‘Red Sea’; the encyclopedia entry lays out the three candidate crossing zones and declines to choose among them.

⚠⚠ Korah is not here. Numbers 16:1 names him FIRST — Korah son of Izhar son of Kohath son of Levi, and Dathan and Abiram sons of Eliab, and On son of Peleth, sons of Reuben — and Numbers 26:10 says explicitly that the earth swallowed them together with Korah. Deuteronomy names the two Reubenites and stops. Nothing is denied; a name is simply not said. This project does not choose an explanation, but it is worth noticing what the omission does to the sermon: with Korah gone, the story is no longer about a Levite contesting the priesthood, and becomes purely about laymen contesting Moses — which is what an audience about to be handed a land needs to hear. ★ Numbers 26:11, already on these pages, adds the other half nobody expects: the sons of Korah did not die.

★ The verb for the opening ground is the PREDICTED one, not the narrated one, and it stands in only three verses in the Bible. Patsah with ‘its mouth’ — to gape, to open wide — is at Genesis 4:11, where the ground opens its mouth to take Abel’s blood; at Numbers 16:30, where Moses PREDICTS what will happen; and here. But the narration of the event itself, at Numbers 16:32 and again at Numbers 26:10, uses the ordinary verb patach, to open. Deuteronomy reaches back past the report to the prophecy and reuses Moses’ own word — which is defensible, since Moses is the one speaking. ⚠ No English reader can see any of this from the shelf, because seeing it would take a distinct word for the distinct verb: at this verse the KJV, the ASV, the Geneva 1599 and the Douay-Rheims all print simply that the earth opened its mouth — the same word they use for the ordinary verb in Numbers. This translation uses gaped here and reserves ‘opened’ for patach, so that the two Hebrew verbs stay two English verbs.

★ And what went down with them is a Flood word. Ha-yequm — the standing-things, everything that exists — is in exactly three verses: Genesis 7:4 and Genesis 7:23, both times for what the Flood wiped off the face of the ground, and here. Deuteronomy is describing a hole in the desert with the only noun the Bible otherwise reserves for the drowning of the world. The shelf mostly renders it as a quantity rather than a category — the KJV has ‘all the substance that was in their possession’, the Geneva and the Douay-Rheims both ‘substance’, and the NIV ‘every living thing that belonged to them’. The ASV alone keeps the word’s category-sense with ‘every living thing that followed them’. ⚠ The Hebrew adds at their feet, which is the first of this chapter’s three feet — see v10 and v24.

⚠ Verse 8 is plural from end to end — keep, you may be strong, go in, take possession, you are crossing, all of them plural — with a single exception buried in the middle: asher anokhi metzavvekha ha-yom, ‘that I am commanding YOU (singular) today.’ The same three-word formula recurs at v13, v22, v27 and v28 — and in every one of those it is PLURAL (metzavveh etkhem). So the singular here is not the chapter’s habit; it is one word out of step with the four other times the same phrase is said.

★ And it is exactly the wording of Deuteronomy 6:6, singular, in the chapter this one is about to quote outright. The suggestion is held until vv18–21, where it can be tested rather than asserted.

★ Only one version on the shelf catches it, and it is not the King James. Modern English has no singular/plural ‘you’, so every recent version is structurally blind here — but the KJV and the ASV still had thou and ye, and only the ASV uses them: it prints ‘which I command thee this day’ inside a verse that is otherwise all ‘ye’, and then correctly switches to ‘which I command you’ at v13 and v22 where the Hebrew is plural. The KJV had the same equipment and flattened all three to ‘you’. ⚠ The same verse shows the ASV winning a second time: the Hebrew has kol ha-mitzvah, all the commandment, SINGULAR — the collective noun this project has flagged since Deuteronomy 6:1 — and the ASV keeps it singular where the KJV prints ‘all the commandments’. Two literal wins in one verse for the version with the smaller reputation, which is the standing reason this project checks the ASV and the NWT before it trusts the familiar rendering.

★ ‘You would water it with your foot’ is the chapter’s most argued-over phrase, and the shelf splits three ways. The Hebrew is plain and the puzzle is agricultural, not lexical: what is a foot doing in an irrigation ditch? Three readings have long standing. (1) Foot-powered lifting gear — a treadle-driven water-wheel or shaduf worked by the feet. (2) Feet on the dykes — a farmer walking the channels of a Nile-flood basin, breaking and closing the earth walls with his heel to send water down one row and not another. (3) A euphemism, since ‘foot’ is used that way elsewhere in Hebrew. This translation keeps the plain words and does not choose, but reading (2) is the one that needs no machinery Egypt may or may not have had, and it fits the contrast being drawn: Egypt’s water is at ground level and has to be pushed, and the new land’s water falls out of the sky and cannot be.

⚠ The Douay-Rheims deletes the foot entirely — it has water simply brought in to the land ‘after the manner of gardens’ — and this is a Latin divergence rather than a Hebrew one, the pattern this project keeps finding in that version. The KJV, ASV and Geneva all keep the foot; so do the NWT 1984 (‘irrigating with your foot’) and both the RV 1909 and the RV60 («regabas con tu pie»). ⚠ The NVI reads «regarlas a pie», which in Spanish says the farmer went there ON foot — a different claim from watering WITH the foot, and the one place on either shelf where the image is not just softened but replaced.

★ The two verses reverse a word-pair from three chapters back, and move the water from underground to overhead. Deuteronomy 8:7, already on these pages, calls the same country a land of watercourses, springs and deeps, coming out in valley and in hill — ba-biq’ah u-va-har. Here at v11 it is eretz harim u-veqa’ot, a land of hills and valleys: the identical pair of nouns, in the opposite order, with the water no longer rising from below but falling from above. Same speaker, same land, three chapters apart. Deuteronomy 8’s land supplies itself; this one has to be given rain, and v17 is about to say what happens when it is not.

⚠ ‘Seeks after’ refuses eleven of the twelve versions fetched for this verse. All eleven render doresh otah as CARING for the land — the KJV and the ASV with ‘careth for’. The Geneva 1599 prints the same verb a beat plainer, and the NIV modernises it. The NWT 1984 and NWT 2013 both make it continuous. On the Spanish side the RV 1909, the RV60 and the NVI all use one verb of caring, and both editions of the TNM its progressive. ★ The twelfth is the interesting one. The Douay-Rheims, following the Vulgate, has God VISIT the land — and of all twelve it is the one that lands nearest the Hebrew, since visiting is something done TO a place by someone with a reason to check on it. But darash is the verb for seeking, inquiring after, requiring an account — the word behind midrash. It is the verb for consulting an oracle and for a judge demanding an answer. Applied to a piece of ground it is strange in Hebrew too, and ‘cares for’ makes it unstrange. The reading kept here is the one the next clause supports: a land God is watching, all year, the way one watches something one intends to ask about.

⚠ A scribal oddity worth flagging, since the eye slides over it. Verse 12 spells reshit, beginning, WITHOUT its aleph — me-reshit for the expected me-re’shit — and a consonantal search finds that this is the only verse in the Hebrew Bible that spells it that way; the other six write it full. Nothing turns on it, and no translation could show it. It is here because a defective spelling in a Torah verse is the sort of thing a Masoretic apparatus notices and a reader never does.

★ This is the first appearance of malqosh, the late rain, in the Bible — it stands in eight verses altogether, and the other seven are all later: Jeremiah 3:3 and 5:24, Hosea 6:3, Joel 2:23, Zechariah 10:1, Job 29:23 and Proverbs 16:15, none of them yet on these pages. Three of those seven pair it with yoreh exactly as this verse does, so the phrase Deuteronomy coins here becomes the standard way Hebrew names the agricultural year’s two ends: the autumn rain that softens the ground for ploughing, and the spring rain that fills the grain before harvest. Miss either and there is no crop, which is why they are named separately.

⚠ The shelf divides on whether to translate the seasons or the sequence. The KJV prints ‘the first rain and the latter rain’ and the ASV ‘the former rain and the latter rain’; the Geneva 1599 shortens to ‘the first rain and the latter’. The modern versions name the seasons instead — the NIV ‘autumn and spring rains’, the NWT 1984 the same pair. Both are defensible and each loses something: the seasonal rendering tells a reader what the words mean and hides that Hebrew names them by ORDER, not by month. This translation keeps early and late.

★ The triad dagan, tirosh, yitzhar is not a list of foods but the standard Hebrew shorthand for a whole harvest — grain, new wine, fresh oil. Each of the three is the RAW product rather than the finished one: tirosh is must, wine still in the vat, not yayin; yitzhar is oil fresh from the press, not shemen. The KJV’s ‘thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil’ is the familiar version of the phrase and flattens all three — and its ‘corn’ is the older English word for grain generally, not maize, which is a real trap for a modern reader. The ASV corrects to ‘grain’ and ‘new wine’.

⚠ The number changes in the middle of v14, and the seam runs between the rain and the barn. The rain is given to a plural — the rain of YOUR (pl.) land — and then, without a break, and YOU (sg.) will gather in YOUR (sg.) grain and YOUR (sg.) new wine and YOUR (sg.) fresh oil, singular through the end of v15, including your field and your cattle. Weather falls on a nation; a harvest is carried in by one household. It is the cleanest case in the chapter of what vv18–21 works out.

Pen yifteh levavkhem — the verb patah is not ‘be deceived’ in the sense of being handed false information; it is to be enticed, talked round, opened up. It is used of persuading someone into bed and of talking someone out of a decision. ‘Seduced’ is chosen here for that reason, and because the danger the sermon keeps naming is not an argument but an attraction. The KJV and Geneva print ‘deceived’; the ASV ‘deceived’ likewise. None of them is wrong; all of them make the heart a victim of a lie rather than of a preference.

★ Verse 17 is v14 played in reverse, item for item. Verse 14 gives rain in its season, so grain and wine and oil can be gathered; verse 17 shuts the heavens so there is no rain, and the ground gives nothing. The same two nouns govern both — shamayim and adamah, the sky above and the soil below — and the mechanism of the curse is not an invading army but the withdrawal of the one thing v11 said this land depends on and Egypt did not. The threat is agricultural because the argument has been agricultural since v10.

★★ This is the answer to the question Deuteronomy 9 opened and Deuteronomy 10 could not settle, and it is mechanical rather than thematic. Those two chapters found the grammatical number switching mid-verse and asked what governed it; chapter 10 tested the obvious explanation — that the singular carries one kind of content and the plural another — and reported it failed. This passage shows why it failed. The number changes where the text stops rewriting and starts copying.

Set the two side by side. Deuteronomy 6:6–9, already on these pages, is singular throughout. Here:

— v18 REPHRASES 6:6 and 6:8 (set these words on your heart AND ON YOUR SOUL, a clause 6:6 does not have) — and every word of it is plural.
— v19 opens with a rephrase, and you shall TEACH them to your children where 6:7 had and you shall repeat them to your sons, a different verb — plural. Then, mid-verse, it lifts 6:7’s four time-phrases word for word: when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, and when you lie down and when you get up. Those four are singular, exactly as they stand in chapter 6.
— v20 is singular, and it is Deuteronomy 6:9 reproduced letter for letter, the two verses differing in nothing but the spelling of mezuzot (chapter 6 writes it short, this chapter writes it full).

So the rule holds across the whole passage: what was rewritten was pluralised, and what was quoted verbatim kept the singular it was already in. That also retro-explains the stray singular at v8 — a three-word formula that is plural in this chapter’s own four other uses of it, and singular in 6:6. ⚠ Honest limits. This accounts for the seams inside vv14–15, 19–20 and v8, where a source is identifiable. It does NOT account for v1, v10, v12, v26 or v29, where the singular arrives with nothing obvious being quoted — though v10 and v15 share a feature worth watching, in that the singular turns up precisely where the text narrows to one man’s own seed, field, cattle and doorway. One chapter cannot establish that; it can only put it on the record to be checked.

★ Frontlets: a word nobody can translate, and a location the modern shelf quietly moves. Totafot stands in exactly three verses — Exodus 13:16, Deuteronomy 6:8 and here — and its origin is genuinely unknown; ‘frontlets’ is a placeholder the English tradition has kept since Tyndale rather than a translation. Read literally these verses are the basis of tefillin, the boxes of Torah text bound to arm and head in Jewish practice to this day. ⚠ The thing to watch on the shelf is not the untranslatable noun but the PLACE: the Hebrew says between your eyes, and the NIV moves it to the forehead, as do the NWT 2013 and the NVI — which is where the practice actually puts the box, and therefore a rendering of the custom rather than of the clause. The KJV, ASV, Geneva, Douay-Rheims, the NWT 1984, the RV 1909 and the RV60 all keep the eyes.

⚠ And the Living Bible does not render the word at all here, printing simply ‘commandments’ bound to hand and forehead — both the strange noun and the strange location gone in one stroke. That is the version behaving as it always does; it is noted rather than scolded.

★ Davaq is the verb of Genesis 2:24, where a man leaves his father and mother and CLINGS to his wife, and of Ruth 1:14, where Ruth clings to Naomi as Orpah lets go. Deuteronomy 10:20, last chapter, was the first place this project had reached where it is aimed at God. This is the second, one chapter later — and it is not a repetition but an escalation: at 10:20 clinging stood in a list of four things owed (fear, serve, cling, swear), while here it is the LAST of three infinitives that spell out what keeping the commandment means, and the whole conditional promise of v23 hangs off it. Whatever the word does elsewhere, in Deuteronomy it has become the summary term for the relationship.

⚠ The RV60 loses it in the same way it lost it last chapter, printing a verb of following where the RV 1909 had a verb of joining — a second instance of the pattern flagged at 10:20, in the very next chapter.

★ ‘The sea at your back’ is this chapter’s flagship departure, and it is a compass, not a description. The Hebrew is ha-yam ha-acharon, literally the hindmost sea — from the root that also gives ‘afterward’ and ‘the end’. Biblical Hebrew orients a speaker FACING EAST, toward the sunrise: so qedem, in front, means east and also ‘long ago’, and achor, behind, means west and also ‘later’. The Mediterranean is therefore the sea behind you. All thirteen versions on the shelf give a direction or a name, and none keeps the body it is measured from: the KJV has ‘the uttermost sea’, the NWT 1984, the NWT 2013, the RV60 and both editions of the TNM the western sea, the Douay-Rheims the same. ★ Two get closest without arriving: the ASV’s ‘the hinder sea’ and the RV 1909’s «la mar postrera» both keep the root’s backward sense, but neither says whose back — and the NIV, the TLB and the NVI all name it the Mediterranean outright, which is certainly the body of water and certainly not what the sentence says. This rendering keeps the body facing east, because the compass it implies is a real feature of the language and a reader who meets it once will find it everywhere.

★ The same root does that work three times in this chapter, and a reader can watch it turn: acharit ha-shanah, the after-part of the year, at v12; the hindmost sea here; and acharei derekh mevo ha-shemesh, behind the road of the sun’s going-in, at v30. ⚠ And it is the same three letters that give elohim acherim, OTHER gods, at v16 and v28 — the ‘other’ that is simply the one behind. The two families are related in Hebrew and cannot be joined in English; the note is the only place the connection can be shown.

★ Joshua inherits this promise and changes its tense. Joshua 1:3–5, already on these pages, repeats v24 almost word for word — every place the sole of your foot treads on — but where Deuteronomy says shall BE yours, a future, Joshua says I HAVE GIVEN it to you, a perfect, and adds as I spoke to Moses. Three other things move with it: Joshua calls the Euphrates the GREAT river and inserts all the land of the Hittites, renames this verse’s hindmost sea the GREAT sea toward the going-down of the sun, and — the change that matters most — turns v25’s plural no one will stand up in front of YOU (pl.) into a singular addressed to one man, no one will stand before YOU (sg.) all the days of your life. A promise made to a nation on the far bank is handed, on the day Moses dies, to its commander.

⚠ This chapter’s third and last foot: v6’s living things at the feet of the swallowed, v10’s foot in the Egyptian irrigation ditch, and here the sole of a foot measuring out a country. The same noun each time.

Re’eh — ‘Look’ — opens the weekly Torah portion that takes its name from this word, and it is worth noticing what it does NOT do: it does not explain. The blessing and the curse are set out with a bare condition attached to each and no content given to either. Deuteronomy 28 will fill them in at devastating length; here they are two named alternatives and a today.

⚠ The verse changes number inside four words. Re’eh is a SINGULAR imperative, and its object is immediately plural: I am setting before YOU (pl.) today. One person is told to look at something laid in front of everybody. The KJV and ASV can show this and do — ‘Behold, I set before you’ — but only in the Hebrew is the singular audible, and no modern English version can carry it at all.

★ The curse is defined by a preposition, not by a deity. What earns it, at v28, is turning aside from the way to go after other gods THAT YOU HAVE NOT KNOWN — and the relative clause is doing real work. It is not that the gods are false; it is that they are strangers. That is the same argument the chapter opened with at v2, where knowing and seeing were what separated this generation from its children, and it closes the frame: Israel is being asked to prefer the God whose record it has watched over gods with no record at all.

★ Two mountains, no reason given. Gerizim and Ebal face each other across the valley where Shechem sits, and the blessing goes on the southern one and the curse on the northern. Deuteronomy does not say why that way round, does not say what the ceremony consists of, and does not say when. Deuteronomy 27 will give the liturgy and Joshua 8 will perform it, neither yet on these pages. What this chapter supplies is only the pairing — and the pairing outlived the book: Gerizim is the Samaritan holy mountain to this day, and the Samaritan Pentateuch reads Gerizim where the Masoretic Text of Deuteronomy 27:4 reads Ebal. This project follows the Masoretic Text and notes the variant rather than adopting it.

★ The great trees of Moreh, and a pun the chapter has already used. Moreh is where Abram stopped first in the land, at the great tree of Moreh by Shechem — already on these pages, and there it is singular where here it is plural. ⚠ The name is built on the root yarah, to throw or shoot and hence to point out, to teach: a moreh is a teacher or an oracle-giver, so this is plausibly the divination tree. And the same root gives yoreh, the early rain of v14 — the rain that is ‘thrown down’. The chapter names its first rain and its last landmark with the same three letters, sixteen verses apart. Joel 2:23 (not yet on these pages) plays on exactly this ambiguity, which is why that verse has been read both as an early rain and as a teacher of righteousness.

⚠⚠ The Douay-Rheims does not have these trees. Where the Hebrew ends beside the great trees of Moreh, it, following the Vulgate, ends with a valley that stretches and reaches far. The name is gone and a landform stands in its place. This is the clearest example in the chapter of the pattern this project keeps flagging in that version: its divergences usually trace to the Latin rather than to the Hebrew, and a reader comparing it against the others here would conclude the Hebrew was uncertain when it is not. The KJV has ‘the plains of Moreh’, the Geneva 1599 ‘the grove of Moreh’, the ASV ‘the oaks of Moreh’, the NIV ‘great trees of Moreh’ and the RV60 «encinar de More» — five different trees and a plain, from one Hebrew word (elon) whose species has never been settled.

⚠ Gilgal is a problem of its own: v30 locates the mountains ‘opposite Gilgal’, but the Gilgal of Joshua 4 is down by Jericho, some thirty miles south of Shechem, from which no mountain near Shechem is visible. Either a second Gilgal is meant or the verse is orienting a reader from far off. The encyclopedia entry sets out both and marks its coordinates approximate.

The chapter ends where the whole book stands: you are crossing, a participle, an action in progress on the wrong side of a river. Verse 32 closes on shemartem la’asot, keep-in-order-to-do, the pairing Deuteronomy uses to insist that keeping is not remembering.

★ A small structural point worth recording: the formula which I am commanding you today / which I am setting before you today stands six times with the today attached (v8, 13, 26, 27, 28, 32) and a seventh time without it at v22. Ha-yom itself is in the chapter eight times, though one of the eight is a different sense — v4’s to this day, looking back at the drowned army rather than forward at the audience. It is the most insistent single word in the sermon, and it is doing the same work as the argument from eyewitness at v2: nothing here is being reported about the past, it is being handed over in the present.