★★ This chapter's first ten verses use the root shuv, ‘to return, turn back’, SEVEN times. Read straight through the Hebrew: v1's hashevota, ‘you take to heart’ (literally, ‘you bring back’); v2's ve-shavta, ‘and you return’; v3's ve-shav…shevutkha, ‘he will turn your captivity’, itself doubling the root inside one clause, and then ve-shav again a few words later, ‘he will AGAIN gather you’; v8's tashuv, ‘you yourself will return’; v9's yashuv, ‘Jehovah will again [rejoice]’; and v10's tashuv, ‘you will return’. A chapter about Israel's return is built, at the level of its own vocabulary, out of the word for returning — see the dictionary entry for where the idiom in v3 recurs, centuries later, in Jeremiah's own mouth.

★ The chapter doubles a second root the same way, in the same ten verses, for the opposite reason. V9 closes with lasus alekha le-tov, ka'asher-sas al-avotekha — ‘Jehovah will AGAIN REJOICE over you for good, just as he REJOICED over your fathers’ — an infinitive and a perfect of the identical verb, sus/sas, ‘to exult’, stacked the same way v3 stacks shuv. Between them, verses 3 and 9 spend two of the chapter's own doubled roots on saying that what God did once for the fathers he is doing again, now, for their children — the repetition performing the very thing it describes.

★★ Verse 6 answers a question this book asked twenty chapters earlier and left open. Deuteronomy 10:16 (already on these pages) commanded Israel to circumcise its own heart's foreskin; this verse hands the same knife to Jehovah — u-mal Jehovah Elohekha et-levavkha, ‘and Jehovah your God will circumcise your heart’. The two passages never say which comes first, the command or the gift, and this translation leaves that order undecided — but it is hard to read this verse beside 29:4 (already on these pages) — where Moses told this same audience that Jehovah had ‘not given’ them a heart to know — without hearing v6 as that withholding's own remedy: the heart nobody could reach by trying is the heart Jehovah himself now says he will open.

⚠ ‘At the very end of the heavens’ (v4) is the same edge Moses' own farewell speech promised this book's readers three chapters ago — no matter how far the exile reaches, there is no outer boundary past which the gathering does not follow.

The shelf splits on how literally to keep v1's idiom ‘bring it back to your heart’: ASV and KJV both print ‘call them to mind’, NWT 2013 ‘call them to mind’ as well, while NIV keeps the same English this translation uses at 4:39, ‘take them to heart’. ⭐ With this verse, sefer ha-torah ha-zeh, ‘this book of the instruction’, reaches its tenth and final Hebrew-Bible occurrence — four of the ten now stand on these pages (28:61, 29:20, this verse, and Joshua 1:8), with 31:26, 8:34, 2 Kings 22:8 and 11, 2 Chronicles 34:15 and Nehemiah 8:3 still ahead.

★★ ‘Not too hard’ puts to work, negated, the very root this project has already met naming God's own astonishments. Lo-nifle'at hi mimekha, v11's Hebrew, is a niphal participle of pala, wonder — the same root behind niflaot, the ‘wondrous works’ of the Exodus this project has already glossed at Jeremiah 21:2. Moses is saying, in effect, that reaching this commandment requires no pele at all — no miracle, no wonder on the scale of the sea or the plagues. ⚠ The shelf splits on the word, matching the wonder-root's sense on one side: ASV reads ‘too hard’, and NIV and NWT both read ‘too difficult’; KJV and Geneva 1599 instead read ‘hidden’ (‘it is not hidden from thee’), which is not obviously what the Hebrew word means; Douay-Rheims reads ‘is not above thee’, and TLB paraphrases furthest, ‘not something beyond your strength and reach’.

★ Two rhetorical questions, built as a matched pair, rule out the two directions a person might go looking. ‘Who will go up for us to the heavens’ (v12) and ‘who will cross over for us to the other side of the sea’ (v13) are the same sentence twice, up and then across, and both end the identical way — ve-na'asenah, ‘that we may do it’. V14 closes the unit with the same infinitive a third time, la'asotoh: three verses in a row insisting on DOING, not merely knowing where to find the thing.

⚠⚠ This is the passage Paul quotes at Romans 10:6–9 (not yet on these pages) — and he does not simply apply it, he rewrites one of its two questions. His Greek keeps v12's ascent nearly verbatim (tís anabḗsetai eis ton ouranón, ‘who will ascend into heaven’) and glosses it ‘that is, to bring Christ down’ — but for v13's crossing of the sea he substitutes an entirely different question, tís katabḗsetai eis tḗn ábysson, ‘who will descend into the abyss’, glossed ‘that is, to bring Christ up from the dead’. Nothing about an abyss or the dead is in this chapter's Hebrew; Paul has kept the chiastic SHAPE of Moses' two questions — up, then down — while replacing what each one asks about, sea for depths, so that the pair becomes ascension and resurrection rather than heaven and the Mediterranean. He then quotes v14 closely, ‘the word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart’, and glosses ‘the word’ itself as ‘the word of faith that we preach’. This translation reports what Paul's Greek does without adopting his reading back into Moses' own text.

⚠ The printed Masoretic text has no conditional clause at the head of v16; one shelf witness prints one in brackets anyway. Mechon-Mamre's Hebrew reads simply ‘which I command you today, to love Jehovah your God…’; NWT 1984 prints ‘[If you will listen to the commandments of Jehovah your God,] which I am commanding you today’, and the NWT 2013 revision keeps the sense without the brackets, ‘If you listen to the commandments of Jehovah your God that I am commanding you today…’. This translation follows the printed Hebrew, which has no such clause, and simply notes that one shelf witness, in both its editions, reads one in.

★★ Verses 18 and 19 use two different Hebrew verbs for what looks, in most English Bibles, like the same sentence — and the shelf, in both languages, keeps the two apart. V18's higadti lakhem hayom, ‘I declare to you today’, is the ordinary verb for TELLING (nagad); v19's ha'idoti vakhem hayom, ‘I call … to witness against you today’, is a different root entirely, the verb behind ed, a legal witness. Not one of the seven English witnesses on this project's own shelf renders v18 with any form of ‘witness’ — NIV and TLB both ‘I declare’, Geneva 1599 ‘I pronounce’, Douay-Rheims ‘I foretell’ — while at v19 five of the seven print ‘witness’ or ‘witnesses’ outright (NIV, ASV, Douay-Rheims, TLB, NWT), and only KJV and Geneva 1599 hold out with an older synonym for the same act, ‘record’. The Spanish shelf draws the identical line independently: at v18 RV 1909 reads «protéstoos hoy» and RV60 reads «yo os protesto hoy» — the same verb, ‘protestar’, ‘to protest, declare’ — and at v19 both read «llamo por testigos», ‘I call as witnesses’. Two languages and two shelves that never consulted each other agree that this chapter changes verbs mid-paragraph, and this translation keeps ‘declare’ and ‘call … to witness’ apart for the same reason. ⭐ V19's own formula — heaven and earth called to witness — recurs from 4:26 and 8:19 (both already on these pages); see the dictionary entry for how this verse alone breaks the pattern the other two share, ending not in doom but in a choice.

★★ ‘Choose life’ (v19) is set directly beside a claim, three chapters back, that the choosing itself was once out of reach. U-vacharta ba-chayim is the most famous imperative in the whole book, and it is offered here as a genuinely open choice — life and death, blessing and curse, laid out as two real roads. 29:4 (already on these pages) had already told this same audience that a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear were ‘not given’ to them ‘until this day’. This translation leaves the two statements standing side by side rather than resolving one into the other — a withheld understanding, and a real command to choose, in the same speech.

The chapter's last word before its close is davaq, ‘cling’ — the book's eighth and final use of a verb this project has tracked since 4:4: a state there, a first command at 10:20, an escalation at 11:22, a chapter's own frame at 13:5 and 13:18, and the pestilence itself clinging to a broken people at 28:21 and 28:60 (all already on these pages). Here, at the very end of Moses' own farewell, it is aimed at God once more, in the last of the three infinitives — love him, listen to his voice, cling to him — that closes the whole covenant ceremony that opened three chapters ago.

Echoes planted. The word shuv, sounded seven times in this chapter's first ten verses, has already recurred through this book from Deuteronomy 4 on and will keep recurring past it. The verb bachar, ‘choose’, set beside 29:4's withheld heart, without either one explained away. Davaq's own progression, now complete within this book at eight occurrences.

Decisions. Hebrew and English verse numbers align through this whole chapter — the offset that ran through chapter 29 does not carry forward. The Masoretic text marks a setumah after v10, closing the promise of restoration before the commandment's own nearness is argued (vv11–14), and a second setumah after v14, before the chapter's closing choice (vv15–20); a petuchah then closes the whole chapter after v20. Jehovah for the divine name, cling (never ‘cleave’) for davaq, and book of the instruction for sefer ha-torah all continue this project's own established renderings.

Library. One new dictionary term in both languages — bachar. Existing entries extended: mul and davaq (both forward citations from Deuteronomy 10 now turned into working links, davaq's own eight-verse count completed), shuv (the sevenfold passage this idiom belongs to), niflaot (the negated form at v11, now added in Spanish as well), torah (the sefer-ha-torah count) and ed (the cognate witness-verb, tying this chapter to 4:26 and 8:19).

Next installment in this book: Deuteronomy 31 — Moses, a hundred and twenty years old and told he will not cross the Jordan, commissions Joshua in front of the whole nation — be strong and of good courage — and hands the finished instruction to the priests, to be read aloud to all Israel every seventh year.