★ In the Hebrew this chapter opens with the sentence most English Bibles have just printed as the last verse of chapter 12. The Masoretic text numbers it 13:1. All thirteen witnesses on this project’s shelf number it 12:32 — checked by fetching that verse from every one of them, and by confirming that each one’s 13:1 is the prophet of our v2 — so from here to the end of the chapter every verse number on these pages runs one ahead of the number on the shelf: our v6 is their 13:5, our v19 their 13:18. Deuteronomy 12 flagged this verse on its way past as the one it would lose to the next chapter by an accident of numbering. This is that accident, and it is worth a moment, because neither tradition is guessing.

★ The scribal tradition marks the verse off from both sides — which is exactly why the two traditions could split over it. Four paragraph breaks fall in this chapter. The one after this verse is {פ}, an OPEN break, the stronger of the two the Masoretes use; the other three, after v6, v12 and v19, are all {ס}, closed. So the heaviest division in the chapter is the line immediately after v1: the scribes attached this sentence neither to what precedes it nor to what follows. Set that beside the previous chapter, where the breaks pointedly did NOT fall on that chapter’s loudest seam. Here they fall on every one — the remaining three land precisely at the three case boundaries below.

★★ Deuteronomy 4:2 has already given this command, and the two stand in different grammatical numbers. There it is lo tosifu … ve-lo tigre’u, plural. Here it is lo tosef … ve-lo tigra, singular. Same two verbs, same order, same object; only the number moves — which makes this the cleanest single datum yet for the question this book has carried since chapter 9. And this verse switches inside itself: the opening clause, ‘that is what you shall keep’ (tishmeru), is plural, and the two prohibitions after it are singular.

★ Four of the thirteen see the mid-verse switch, and the one that shows it most plainly is Spanish. The ASV prints ‘that shall ye observe to do: thou shalt not add thereto’, and the KJV and Geneva mark it with the same pair of pronouns. But English thou has been dead four centuries, and the RV 1909 catches it in a language that still has a living plural ‘you’: «Cuidaréis de hacer todo lo que yo os mando: no añadirás á ello» — plural, then singular, in one sentence, where at 4:2 it was wholly plural. ⚠ The RV60 loses it, flattening the verse to the singular throughout — «Cuidarás de hacer todo lo que yo te mando» — which is the Reina-Valera gap chapters 10, 11 and 12 have each measured, moving once more.

⚠ Here the NWT’s own apparatus fails where the old English succeeds, which is the reverse of this project’s usual finding. The NWT 1984 marks a plural ‘you’ with small capitals, and used that device all through Deuteronomy 12 to show precisely this kind of seam. At this verse it prints ‘YOU must not add to it nor take away from it’ — small capitals, plural — where the Hebrew has gone singular. The one witness purpose-built to display the switch is among those that miss it; and the NWT in its revision of 2013 drops the small capitals altogether, so it cannot mark it either way.

⚠ One of the two verbs is a brick-quota word. Gara, to diminish or subtract, stands in the negated plural lo tigre’u in exactly three verses of the Hebrew Bible: Exodus 5:8, 5:19, and Deuteronomy 4:2. The first two are Pharaoh’s, about the tally of bricks. This is not a quotation and the note does not claim one — it is an ordinary verb doing ordinary work in both places. But the phrase Israel is given for the handling of its own law is one an Israelite had last heard from a foreman.

★ The chapter’s hardest case is its first, and the hard part is that the sign comes true. V3 does not say ‘if the sign fails’. It says u-va ha-ot ve-ha-mofet — and the sign or the portent COMES. The law concedes the miracle and then rules it beside the point, which is a different test from the one Deuteronomy will give at 18:22, where a prophet is judged by whether his word happens. Here it happened, and he is still refused. What decides is not the power but the direction of the sentence attached to it: ‘let us go after other gods’.

The reason given is a test. Ki menasseh YHVH eloheikhem etkhem — Jehovah your God is putting you to the proof. It is the verb used of Abraham at Genesis 22:1 and of the wilderness at Deuteronomy 8:2, where what tested Israel was hunger. Here the instrument of the test is a miracle that worked, which makes the successful sign not a problem for the system but a part of it.

★★ Three times in this chapter somebody is quoted saying ‘let us go and serve other gods, which you have not known’ — and the number of that ‘you’ is not the same in all three. At v3 the prophet says it to one person: yeda’tam, singular. At v7 the relative says it to one person: yada’ta, singular. At v14 the scoundrels say it to a whole town: yeda’tem, plural. The number inside the quotation marks tracks the size of the audience being enticed, not the person Moses is addressing. That is Deuteronomy 11’s reading arriving from a new direction: that chapter found the number seam explicable as a quotation mark, and here the seam sits inside a quotation and behaves as a quotation should.

★ Four witnesses confirm it independently, because they still mark number. The ASV reads ‘which thou hast not known’ at their 13:2 and ‘which ye have not known’ at their 13:13; the KJV and Geneva print the identical pair; and the Douay, following the Latin, has ‘which thou knowest not’ against ‘which you know not’. Four translators working centuries apart all read the two clauses as differing, which is better corroboration than a lexicon.

★ Counted form by form, this is the chapter’s one wholly plural verse. Thirteen of the nineteen are wholly singular; five switch inside themselves (vv1, 4, 6, 8 and 14); and this one alone carries no singular form at all. It also holds the chapter’s densest verb-list — you shall walk, you shall fear, you shall keep, you shall listen, you shall serve, you shall cling — six of them, each with its object thrown in front, which is why the English above reads ‘him you shall fear’ rather than ‘you shall fear him’.

★ The last of the six is the verb this book has been escalating. Davaq, to cling, is the marriage word of Genesis 2:24. ⚠ Deuteronomy 4:4 already aims it at God — ‘you who cling to Jehovah your God are alive’ — but as a PARTICIPLE describing a state, not as an order. Where it is COMMANDED, this is the third: 10:20, one duty among four; 11:22, with a conditional promise hanging from it; and here, standing last in a list of six — the position a list gives the thing it has been building toward. ⚠ It also returns at the very end of the chapter, at v18, pointed the other way; see the note there.

On the shelf this is a verse about how much repetition a translator will tolerate. The ASV keeps all six and nearly all the fronting — ‘Ye shall walk after Jehovah your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments’; the NWT 1984 keeps the fronting hardest of any, ‘After Jehovah YOUR God YOU should walk, and him YOU should fear’; and the NIV breaks the chain into short imperatives — ‘Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him’ — which reads better and turns a six-fold drumbeat into ordinary prose.

★ The charge is two words, and they become case law. Sarah is a noun from the root for turning aside — defection, revolt — and dibber sarah, ‘he has spoken revolt’, is the formal indictment. Read against the whole Hebrew Bible, the noun stands in only two verses of the Torah, this one and Deuteronomy 19:16, both in this book. ★ And the two prophets convicted in those exact words are both in Jeremiah, and both are already on these pages: Hananiah at Jeremiah 28:16 — ‘this year you die, because sarah you have spoken against Jehovah’ — and Shemaiah at 29:32, ‘because sarah he has spoken against Jehovah’. This chapter is the statute; those two are the only prosecutions under it that name a defendant.

★ The verb running through all three of the chapter’s cases appears here first. Nadach in the causative is to drive or thrust someone off a road. It is what the prophet does (v6, le-hadichacha), what the relative does (v11, the same word again), and what the scoundrels do (v14, va-yadichu) — one verb, once per case, and the three cases share nothing else but their object. The town of the third case is the one later tradition names from this verb: the ir ha-niddachat, the driven-away city.

‘Burn out the evil from your midst’ begins here. U-viarta ha-ra mi-kirbecha is a formula. It stands in nine verses of the Hebrew Bible, every one of them in Deuteronomy, and this is the first. ⚠ The verb is the ordinary one for a fire consuming something, which is why this translation prints ‘burn out’ where the KJV and ASV have ‘put away’ and the NWT 1984 ‘clear out’. The lexicons are genuinely divided over whether a second root meaning ‘graze, sweep bare’ is also in play, so the fire is not certain and is not claimed to be.

★★ The verse switches number in the middle of a single relative clause, and only three of the thirteen put the seam where the Hebrew puts it. The Hebrew runs ‘Jehovah your[PL] God, who brought you[PL] out of the land of Egypt and redeemed you[SG] from the house of slaves’ — the switch falling between the bringing out and the redeeming. Exactly there: the ASV (‘brought you out … and redeemed thee out of the house of bondage’), the NWT 1984 (‘has brought YOU out … and has redeemed you’, small capitals and then none), and the TNM 1987 («que los ha sacado … y te ha redimido»). One clause late: the KJV and Geneva, which hold the plural through the redeeming and turn singular only at ‘to thrust thee out of the way’, and the Douay, which does the same at the same clause in its own words, ‘to make thee go out of the way’. One clause early: the RV 1909 and RV60, both «Jehová vuestro Dios, que te sacó». And five do not mark it at all: the NIV, The Living Bible, the NVI, and the two later revisions.

⚠ Those two revisions flatten it in OPPOSITE directions, which is new. The NWT in its revision of 2013 drops the small capitals and reads a plain ‘you’ throughout; the TNM in its own revision of 2019 goes the other way and makes the whole verse plural — «los sacó … los rescató … apartarlos». Same publisher, same decade, same verse, and the information is lost twice over by moving in contrary directions. ★ The same thing happens at two more verses in this chapter, in both languages, so the count here is six. At v4 the Hebrew opens singular (‘you shall not listen’) and turns plural at ‘Jehovah your God is testing you’: the 1984 prints a lowercase ‘you must not listen’ and then small capitals, and the 1987 «no debes escuchar» and then «ustedes», while the 2013 flattens to one ‘you’ and the 2019 flattens the whole verse to the plural. At v8 the one plural word sits among singulars — ‘the peoples around YOU, the ones near you’ in the 1984, «en derredor de ustedes, los cercanos a ti» in the 1987 — and both revisions level it, the 2013 to a single ‘you’, the 2019 to «tu alrededor … cerca de ti». Six places, one cause: the apparatus that marked number was retired. The running tally this project has kept since Deuteronomy 6 stood at thirty-three; with this chapter’s six it is thirty-nine.

★ The list is assembled for maximum difficulty, and it is not simply a family tree. Brother, son, daughter, wife, friend — but the brother is specified as ben immecha, the son of your mother, which in a household where one father might have several wives names the closest brother available rather than the merely legal one. Then eshet cheikecha, the wife of your bosom — that phrase with that suffix stands in no other verse of the Hebrew Bible — and re’acha asher ke-nafshecha, your friend who is as your own soul. ⚠ The list also has a hole in it that is easy to read past: neither parent is on it. A mother is named, but only to specify which brother is meant; no father and no mother appears as somebody who might do the enticing. Whatever the reason, the law as written does not ask a child to lay the first hand on a parent.

The friendship phrase is the one Samuel uses for Jonathan. ‘As his own soul’ is how 1 Samuel describes Jonathan’s love for David, three separate times in chapters 18 and 20 — not yet on these pages. Here the same measure of closeness works as a legal aggravation: the nearer the tempter, the more exactly the procedure is spelled out.

⚠ Four verbs of refusal, and the fourth is what makes the verse hard to read as merely ancient. Do not consent, do not listen, let your eye not pity, do not spare — and lo techasseh alav, do not cover for him. The thing being legislated at v9 is concealment: the case begins from somebody who would rather protect a brother than report him, and the law names that impulse before it forbids it.

‘Your hand shall be first against him.’ V10 puts the informer at the head of the execution. That is a procedural rule rather than a rhetorical flourish, and its effect is to make an accusation expensive to the accuser. ⚠ The same formula returns at Deuteronomy 17:7 with one word changed, and the change is the point: there the first hand belongs to the witnesses, here to the person who was solicited. Chapter 13 gives the job to whoever was closest to the tempter. ⚠ This is among the passages later Jewish law worked hardest to make unusable in practice; that is a fact about the tradition’s reception of the text, not about the text, and this note does not put the tradition’s reluctance into Deuteronomy’s mouth.

On the shelf the divergence here is about how much of the family to spell out. The ASV and KJV keep every apposition — ‘thy brother, the son of thy mother’ — while the NIV compresses to ‘your very own brother’ and The Living Bible dissolves the list into ‘your nearest relative or closest friend’. ⚠ The Living Bible also runs vv7–8 together and vv13–15 together, printing one sentence under several verse numbers — so any count of what ‘the versions’ say at a given verse of this chapter has to allow for one witness that has stopped keeping its verses apart.

★ This is the first occurrence of beliyaal in the Hebrew Bible. Searched across the whole text, the word stands in twenty-six verses, and only two of them are in the Torah: here and Deuteronomy 15:9. The other twenty-four are spread over ten books — six in 1 Samuel, four in 2 Samuel, three each in the Psalms and Proverbs, two each in Judges, 1 Kings and Nahum, and one each in Job and 2 Chronicles — so the word enters the Bible in this verse and does its real work later, in the Gibeah chapters of Judges and in the mouths of Nabal’s household and Sheba son of Bichri.

The word is most likely a compound, and this translation renders it rather than transliterating it. Beli-ya’al reads most naturally as ‘without profit’, worthlessness, and the shelf splits cleanly along that line: the KJV keeps it as a name, ‘Certain men, the children of Belial’, and so does the Douay, ‘Children of Belial’ — while the ASV gives the sense as ‘certain base fellows’, the NWT 1984 as ‘good-for-nothing men’, and Geneva plainly as ‘wicked men’. ⚠ Treating it as a proper name is a later development, reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, where Belial is a figure; nothing in this verse requires it, and the honest position is that the personification is real, later, and not yet present here.

★★ Before the town is touched, three verbs of enquiry — and the first of them is the verb the previous chapter both commanded and forbade. Ve-darashta ve-chaqarta ve-sha’alta heitev: you shall inquire, and investigate, and ask — thoroughly. Deuteronomy 12 closed by observing that darash is commanded at its v5 (seek out his dwelling) and forbidden at its v30 (do not inquire after their gods), and said the next chapter would take it up again. It does, and in a third sense: here the verb is neither worship nor apostasy but judicial fact-finding — the same word, its third distinct object in three appearances.

The middle verb is a courtroom word elsewhere. Chaqar is to prospect, to reconnoitre, to get to the bottom of a case; the noun formed from it means the bottom of a thing. Setting three near-synonyms in a row and then adding heitev, ‘well, thoroughly’, is this chapter’s way of saying that what reaches you in v13 is a rumour, and that nothing may follow from it while it is still only that. ⚠ The severity of what comes next is exactly why the sentence before it is about evidence.

★★ The word used on this town is the word used on the Canaanites. Cherem, the ban — devoting a thing to destruction so that it cannot be owned by anyone — is what Deuteronomy 7:2 commands against the nations of the land. Here it is turned on one of Israel’s own cities. That is the chapter’s severest move, and it is made in vocabulary rather than in argument: nothing is said about the town having become Canaanite. The law simply reaches for the Canaanite word.

★★ ‘It shall be a tel forever’ — and that phrase stands in exactly two verses of the Hebrew Bible. This one, and Joshua 8:28, of Ai: ‘and Joshua burned Ai and made it a tel olam, a desolation, to this day.’ Searched consonantally across the whole text, there is no third. So the sentence Deuteronomy passes on an apostate Israelite town is, word for word, the sentence Joshua carries out on a Canaanite one. ★ Tel is also, and not by coincidence, the ordinary modern word for the layered mound a dead city becomes — it is the Tel of Tel Megiddo and of Tel Aviv. The chapter is sentencing a town to become an archaeological site, which is what the photograph at the head of this page shows.

★ The chapter’s first and last commands are the same verb, pointed opposite ways. V5: u-vo tidbaqun, and to him you shall cling. V18: ve-lo yidbaq be-yadcha me’umah, and nothing shall cling to your hand. Cling to Jehovah; let nothing of the banned thing cling to you. Those are the only two occurrences of the verb in the chapter, so the frame is the chapter’s own and not a pattern imposed on it.

★ The last line pays the debt chapter 12 left open — and catches two witnesses changing their minds. The formula ha-yashar be-einei YHVH, what is right in the eyes of Jehovah, was coined at 12:25 and 12:28 as the answer to ‘each man whatever is right in his own eyes’. Here it closes a whole law. ⚠ Chapter 12 reported that the KJV and Geneva keep the eyes in the diagnosis and lose them in the cure, printing ‘in the sight of the LORD’ at 12:25. At this verse both print the eyes — ‘that which is right in the eyes of the LORD thy God’ — so what looked like a policy fifteen verses ago turns out to have been an inconsistency. The NVI does the reverse, keeping «a los ojos del Señor» at 12:25 and flattening to «ante el Señor» here. ★ The Douay is the only one of the thirteen consistent in losing them, printing ‘in the sight’ at both — which is the Vulgate’s quod placitum est showing through, and the kind of divergence that usually traces to the Latin rather than to a decision about English.

⚠ What the chapter does not do. It gives no procedure for a town that repents, no appeal and no court — the investigation at v15 is the only check written into it. It is worth saying plainly that this is one of the passages in the Hebrew Bible most often cited, then and since, to authorise killing people over religion, and that the text supplies the citation without the qualifications later readers have brought to it. Cataloguing that is this project’s job; explaining it away is not.