★ Moses states, without softening it, that understanding itself was withheld: Jehovah has not given you a heart to know, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, until this day (v3). Forty years after the plagues, the sea and Sinai, the man who watched it all still says his own listeners could not have understood what they watched. The KJV reads ‘an heart to perceive’, the ASV and NWT 1984 ‘a heart to know’, the NWT 2013 ‘a heart to understand’, the TNM 1987 «un corazón para conocer», the TNM 2019 «un corazón que entienda» — none of the shelf's English or Spanish witnesses tries to soften the blunt negative itself. ⚠ This is not a verse that resolves its own tension: three chapters later this same speech will tell the same audience, twice, that the word is ‘not too hard’ and ‘very near’ and end by commanding them to choose life (30:11–19) — a withheld understanding and a real choice, stated back to back, and this translation leaves the seam exactly where the Hebrew leaves it rather than smoothing one verse into the other.

⭐ Two physical claims, and this chapter's own version differs from an earlier one in exactly which part of the body is named. 8:4 (already on these pages) said the wilderness generation's foot did not swell; this verse says instead that the sandal itself — na’alkha lo-baltah, your sandal did not wear out — never gave way. Both claims can be true of the same forty years without either correcting the other: one chapter reports what did not happen to the skin, this one what did not happen to the leather. The verb balah, wear out, recurs at 8:4 of the garment and here of both garment and sandal; no shelf witness distinguishes the two verses' physical details from each other, all simply repeating ‘did not wear out’ at both.

★ The chapter closes its historical recap with the verb this project's own translation will later hand to Joshua at the moment of succession. Taskilu, v8's ‘act wisely’, is the identical root behind Jehovah's charge at Joshua 1:7–8 (already on these pages) — be careful to do according to all the instruction… so that you may act wisely wherever you go… for then you will make your way prosper, and then you will act wisely — paired there, as here, with keeping a written text rather than winning a war. The whole nation is charged with the same verb at the covenant's close that its next leader is charged with at his own commission.

★★ The parashah this verse opens is named for its own first word, and the word is a legal term for a party physically present to a transaction. Nitzavim, ‘standing’, is the same root that names a matzevah, a standing stone set up to fix something in place — and here it is not a stone but the whole camp, ranked from the top down: heads, tribes, elders, officers, every man, then the little ones, the wives, and the stranger down to the one who cuts wood and the one who draws water. The KJV and ASV read ‘ye stand’, the NIV ‘you are standing’, the NWT 1984 ‘YOU are all stationed’; the TNM 1987 «están de pie». No one present is too small to be counted into the list, and no one on it is exempted from what comes next.

★ Then the list is widened past everyone actually standing there. Whoever is standing here with us today… and also whoever is not here with us today (v14) extends the same oath to people who are not, by definition, part of the nine ranks v9–10 just finished naming — a generation not yet born signing a document it never saw drawn up. The shelf renders the absence differently: KJV and ASV ‘him that is not here with us’, NWT 1984 ‘the one who is not here’, NIV ‘those not present’, the TNM 1987 «el que no está aquí». ⚠ Nothing in the sentence itself explains HOW an absent, future party can be bound by an oath he cannot yet speak; the text simply asserts it and moves on, the same way Genesis simply asserts a covenant sign binds Abraham's descendants (17:7) without arguing the point.

Between the two verses the address itself shifts. Vv9–12 say Jehovah your God, second person, Moses speaking to Israel from outside; v14's Jehovah our God folds Moses into the same ‘we’ as everyone he is addressing, at the exact sentence that reaches past the crowd in front of him to people neither he nor they will ever meet.

★★ “A root bearing gall and wormwood” names a single apostate as a plant whose poison spreads through everything downstream of it — and the Greek Bible's own rendering of this exact clause is quoted almost word for word four centuries later. The Hebrew pairs two bitter plants, rosh and la’anah; the shelf splits on how literally to keep them. KJV, ASV and Geneva 1599 all keep both nouns, ‘a root that beareth gall and wormwood’; Douay-Rheims reads ‘gall and bitterness’; NWT 1984 ‘a root bearing the fruit of a poisonous plant and wormwood’; NIV collapses both into ‘bitter poison’ and drops the two named plants entirely; TLB paraphrases furthest, ‘a root will be planted that will grow bitter and poisonous fruit’. The Septuagint's Greek for this same clause is standardly identified as rhiza pikrias, ‘a root of bitterness’ — and Hebrews 12:15 (not yet on these pages; its own Greek, checked directly: mē tis rhiza pikrias anō phyousa enochlē, ‘lest any root of bitterness, springing up, cause trouble’) is the standard identification for where that Greek phrase resurfaces — a single man's secret apostasy in Moab becomes, in a very different letter written for a very different crisis, the picture for how one person's bitterness can poison a whole congregation.

★ The man's own words — “I will have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart” — give the Bible a phrase it will not use again until Jeremiah, who repeats it again and again and nowhere else. Checked against the whole archived Hebrew Bible: sherirut, ‘stubbornness’, stands in ten verses that contain the bare consonant string, but two of those — the ‘singers’ of Ezra 2:65 and Nehemiah 7:67 — are a wholly different word from a wholly different root (shir, to sing) caught only by shared letters, not the word itself. The real word, ‘the stubbornness of … heart’, stands in exactly eight verses — this one, Jeremiah 3:17, 7:24, 9:13, 13:10, 16:12, 18:12 and 23:17 (the last two already on these pages, the first five not yet) — and nowhere else. Jeremiah 23:17 pairs the identical accusation with the identical false comfort this verse puts in the apostate's own mouth: “Jehovah has spoken: you will have peace… and to everyone who walks in the stubbornness of his own heart they say, ‘No evil will come upon you’” — the false prophets of a whole doomed nation, four hundred years on, offering Israel collectively the identical ‘peace’ this verse lets one apostate offer himself.

⚠ The verse's closing idiom — rendered here “sweeping away the watered ground along with the dry” — is a genuine crux, and the shelf does not agree what it says. ASV reads ‘to destroy the moist with the dry’; NWT 1984 ‘sweeping away the well-watered one along with the thirsty ones’; the KJV instead reads ‘to add drunkenness to thirst’, following an older tradition that takes the same consonants a different way; NWT 2013 abandons the image outright, ‘to the ruin of everything in his path’. On the ASV/NWT 1984 reading the idiom is a merism for total, indiscriminate ruin — one man's hidden apostasy dragging down everyone near him, guilty and innocent alike — which is precisely the problem this chapter's own closing verse (v28 below) will draw a line around.

★ This verse and the next each promised themselves in advance, three chapters ago. 28:58 (already on these pages) counted in this book in four verses of the Hebrew Bible and named this chapter's own two by number before either was written: v19's every curse written in this book will lie down on him, and v26 below's to bring on it every curse written in this book — the fourth being Jeremiah 25:13 (already on these pages). And v20's this book of the instruction completes the same count that verse also gave in advance: sefer ha-torah stands in ten verses of the Hebrew Bible — 28:61, this one, 30:10, 31:26, Joshua 1:8 (already on these pages), 8:34, 2 Kings 22:8 and 11, 2 Chronicles 34:15, and Nehemiah 8:3 (the last four not yet). Twice in three chapters this book has told a reader exactly how often a phrase would recur before the reader could check.

The move from a NATIONAL curse (vv16–19) to an INDIVIDUAL one is made by a single verb: Jehovah will single him out for harm (v20) uses badal, the ordinary verb for SEPARATING clean from unclean, day from night, Israel from the nations — here turned against one man out of Israel's own tribes rather than against an outsider. The blessing side of this book already used the same idea in reverse: to be a people set high above every nation (28:1) and to be set apart for ruin from every tribe (here) are the same verb, aimed at opposite ends of the same covenant.

★ The word for these future “plagues” was named and promised forward from the previous chapter. 28:59 (already on these pages) called Israel's own coming disasters makkot, ‘blows’, the same noun 25:2–3 used for a judge's counted strokes, and named this verse by number as the word's second and last appearance in the book. So the word that once measured a guilty man's punishment in court, capped at forty so that a brother is not degraded (25:3), becomes here the generic term for a whole land's catastrophe — the same limiting instinct behind the earlier law now entirely absent from its national-scale namesake.

★★ “Like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah” is expected; the two extra names beside them are not. Genesis 19:24 (already on these pages) names only Sodom and Gomorrah in the destruction itself; this verse adds Admah and Zeboiim, the two lesser cities of the plain that Genesis 14:2 (already on these pages, not yet in Spanish) had already listed beside Sodom, Gomorrah and Zoar among the five kings Chedorlaomer's coalition fought — but that Genesis 19's own narrative of the actual destruction leaves unmentioned. Their location, like Sodom's own, is not settled by this project's own sources; see their entries on the atlas for what can and cannot be said about where they stood.

The shelf keeps the sulfur consistently: KJV, ASV and NWT 1984 all read ‘brimstone’ or ‘sulphur’ and ‘salt’ together, matching this translation's own choice at Genesis 19:24. Allotted (v25) renders chalaq, the verb behind a portion or share; the same idea, that the nations were themselves apportioned among lesser powers while Israel was kept for Jehovah directly, is Deuteronomy's own elsewhere (32:8–9, not yet on these pages) — a claim this translation notes but does not resolve here.

★★ “Jehovah uprooted them” hands the exile the identical verb a prophet will be commissioned with to describe his own life's work. Natash, ‘to uproot, pluck up’, is the first of the four destructive verbs (paired with two constructive ones) in Jehovah's charge to Jeremiah — “See, I have appointed you this day over the nations and over the kingdoms, to uproot and to tear down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10, already on these pages). What this verse reports as Israel's own history — a nation uprooted from its ground — becomes, in the very next book chronologically, the verb attached to the man sent to warn Judah it is about to happen to them too.

★★★ The chapter's last sentence — “the hidden things belong to Jehovah our God, but the revealed things belong to us” — is one of ten places in the whole Torah where a long-standing rabbinic tradition marks certain words with dots above the letters, and this project has no way to display it on the page. Mechon-Mamre's own printed Masoretic text, the archive this translation works from, carries no such mark; the tradition of the ten dotted passages is reported here (Talmud, Nedarim 37b and Sanhedrin 43b among the places it is discussed) as a documented rabbinic reading, not something visible in the source file itself. The dots traditionally fall over lanu u-levaneinu, ‘to us and to our children’, and one classic reading of what the dotting signals is a genuinely striking one: that those two words do not belong to the original oath, so that the CORPORATE curse of the chapter's opening — the ‘watered swept away with the dry’ of v18–19 — falls only on a sin made public, while a sin genuinely kept secret is Jehovah's business alone. Whatever the dots meant to the scribes who drew them, the sentence itself already draws that same line without any help from a diacritic: nistarot, hidden, against niglot, revealed — the last word of a chapter that opened by threatening a whole nation for what one man might do in the privacy of his own heart.

The chapter's own final petuchah and the earlier setumah after v19 fall exactly where the content turns: the first paragraph break closes the personal, individual curse (vv17–19); the second closes the whole chapter after this aphorism.

Echoes planted. The stubbornness of a wilful heart, promising itself a false peace, at Jeremiah 3:17, 7:24, 9:13, 13:10, 16:12 and 23:17 (the last already on these pages). Uprooting from the land at Jeremiah 1:10 (already on these pages) and the whole book of Jeremiah's own commission. A root of bitterness at Hebrews 12:15. The choice this chapter withholds — a heart to know — answered three chapters on by a command to choose (30:15–19). And the phrases this book and book of the instruction, both completed to their full counts here, waiting at 30:10, 31:26, Joshua 1:8 and 8:34 (none of these four yet on these pages).

Decisions. The Hebrew and English chapter boundary genuinely shifts here, not by a scribal accident but by design: this book's own Masoretic text keeps “these are the words of the covenant” as the closing verse of chapter 28 (28:69, already on these pages, flagged there with its own English cross-reference), so the Hebrew's chapter 29 runs 28 verses to the English shelf's 29 — every verse in this chapter one number behind its own common English citation, marked throughout with an EN badge rather than silently renumbered. The Masoretic text marks one setumah, after v19, closing the individual apostate's curse before the chapter turns to the nation's; and a petuchah closing the whole chapter after v28. The reading that begins at v9, Parashat Nitzavim, runs forty verses to the end of the next chapter and is combined with the next portion (Vayelekh) in most years, dropped back to a standalone reading only when the lunisolar calendar happens to supply an extra Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot. Elsewhere the established renderings hold: Jehovah for the divine name, covenant for brit, and instruction for torah rather than ‘law’.

Library. Nine new dictionary terms in both languages — masah, natsav, balah, alah-oath, rosh (poison), sherirut, natash, chalaq and gofrit — plus a new paired entry, nistarot / niglot. Existing entries extended rather than duplicated: sakal (its own root's earlier, canonical occurrence), torah (the ‘book of the instruction’ count completed), and la’anah (its own forward citation into this chapter turned into a working link). Two new encyclopedia entries in both languages: Admah and Zeboiim, the two cities of the plain Genesis 14 already named beside Sodom and Gomorrah but Genesis 19's own destruction narrative left unmentioned.

Next installment in this book: Deuteronomy 30 — the blessing and the curse both come true, and Israel remembers itself among the nations it has been driven to; Jehovah himself turns the captivity, gathers the scattered from the very ends of the heavens, and circumcises your heart, and the heart of your seed, to love Jehovah your God. Then the commandment that is not too hard for you and not far off — not in the heavens, that you should say, “who will go up for us to heaven and get it for us?”… but the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it. And the chapter's own close, life and death and the blessing and the curse set before the whole nation one more time, ending on two words: choose life.