★★ The charge chazaq ve-ematz, ‘be strong and resolute’, is said three times in this chapter, and the Hebrew changes number each time. V6 is plural, chizqu ve-imtzu, spoken to the whole nation; v7 is singular, chazaq ve-ematz, spoken to Joshua in front of that nation; v23 is the same singular a third time, and the mouth it comes out of is God’s. The plural pair stands in three verses of the Hebrew Bible — this one, and then two later commanders who say it in turn, Joshua over five defeated kings (Joshua 10:25) and Hezekiah before Sennacherib (2 Chronicles 32:7). The singular pair stands in nine verses of the Hebrew Bible: eight of them are the command — v7 and v23 here, four times over in Joshua 1 (already on these pages), and twice from David to Solomon — and the ninth is Isaiah 28:2, where the identical two words are not a command at all but a pair of adjectives, strong and mighty, describing the one who comes like a storm of hail.

★★ The promise attached to the charge is not that God will not fail; it is that he will not let go. Lo yarpekha ve-lo ya'azvekka (vv6 and 8) puts raphah in the causative, the verb for a hand going slack and releasing what it was holding. The sentence stands in three verses of the Hebrew Bible: these two, and 1 Chronicles 28:20, where David hands Solomon the charge and this promise together. ⚠ The shelf hears reliability rather than grip: KJV, ASV and Geneva 1599 all read ‘he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee’, TLB ‘He will neither fail you nor forsake you’, NIV ‘he will never leave you nor forsake you’, Douay-Rheims ‘will not leave thee nor forsake thee’; only the NWT 1984 reaches for something stranger, ‘He will neither desert you nor leave you entirely’, which its own NWT 2013 revision smooths back to ‘desert you nor abandon you’. The Spanish shelf does the same thing in its own words: RV 1909 and RV60 both close on «ni te desamparará», NVI reads «nunca los dejará ni los abandonará», and TNM 1987 tracks its English twin, «No te desamparará ni te dejará enteramente». This translation keeps the hand in it.

⚠⚠ Hebrews 13:5 (not yet on these pages) quotes this sentence in Greek, and changes two things about it. Its wording is ou mē se anō oud’ ou mē se enkatalipō, ‘I will never let you go, nor will I ever forsake you’ — built on aniēmi, the Greek verb for slackening or releasing, which is the picture raphah carries and the one most of the English shelf spends. But the Greek stands in the FIRST person, where both Hebrew verses are third: Moses says he will not let go of you, about God, and the letter has God saying I will not let go of you. And it names no source at all, only ‘for he himself has said’. This translation reports what the Greek does without reading it back into Moses’ own sentence.

⚠ Moses does not say he is too old; he says he can no longer ‘go out and come in’ (v2), which is not a phrase about walking. Latzet ve-lavo stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible, and the other one contradicts this one head-on: at Joshua 14:11 (not yet on these pages) Caleb, eighty-five years old, says his strength is what it always was, for war, and to go out and to come in. The idiom is about leading a nation out and back, which is exactly how Numbers 27:17 (already on these pages) used it when Moses asked for a successor — a man who will go out before them and who will come in before them — and the man he was given was Joshua. ⚠ Five witnesses read the leadership straight out of the idiom and drop the two verbs: NIV reads ‘I am no longer able to lead you’, TLB the same, ‘I am no longer able to lead you’, NWT 2013 ‘I can no longer lead you’, TNM 2019 «ya no puedo guiarlos» and NVI «no puedo seguir siendo su líder». The older shelf keeps them: KJV and ASV read ‘I can no more go out and come in’, Geneva 1599 trims one verb to ‘I can no more go out and in’, Douay-Rheims reads ‘I can no longer go out and come in’, and RV 1909 and RV60 both read «no puedo más salir ni entrar». This translation keeps the idiom and sends the reader here for what it means.

⚠ The chapter opens on a verb of going that never says where. Va-yelekh Mosheh — ‘and Moses went’ — and the Hebrew supplies no destination, no direction and no reason, then turns straight to speech. The word is prominent enough that the weekly synagogue portion is named after it, Vayelekh; counted verse by verse across the whole Torah, its thirty verses make it the shortest of the fifty-four portions, against 176 for the longest, Nasso. ⚠ The shelf splits four ways on this one word. KJV, ASV and Douay-Rheims keep the bare going, ‘Moses went’, and so do Geneva 1599 and the NWT 1984, both with ‘Then Moses went’; RV 1909 reads «Y FUÉ Moisés» and RV60 «Fue Moisés»; NIV supplies a direction, ‘Then Moses went out’, and the NWT 2013 prints the same, ‘Then Moses went out’; NVI replaces the going with a repetition, «De nuevo habló Moisés»; and TLB removes it altogether, ‘After Moses had said all these things’.

⚠ V7 gives Joshua the land to hand out, and Douay-Rheims alone tells him how: ‘thou shalt divide it by lot’. Nothing in this verse’s Hebrew mentions a lot — tanchilennah is simply ‘you will make them inherit it’ — and the reading comes down the Latin rather than the Hebrew, which is this version’s usual reason for standing alone.

★★ The law of the seven-yearly reading is built out of the vocabulary of one particular day, and the borrowing is verbal, not merely thematic. Deuteronomy 4:10 (already on these pages) describes Horeb as the day God said haqhel-li et-ha-am, ‘assemble the people to me’, so that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live on the earth, and may teach their children. This verse says haqhel et-ha-am, and v13 finishes the sentence with the same Hebrew: the children shall hear and learn to fear Jehovah your God all the days that you are living on the ground — three words, al ha-adamah, that this translation has rendered ‘on the earth’ there and ‘on the ground’ here. That last clause stands in three verses of the Hebrew Bible — 4:10, 12:1 and this one, all three of them in this book and all three now on these pages. The reading every seventh year is not a memorial of Horeb; it is Horeb, put on a calendar.

★ What the law of the king asked of one man, this law asks of everybody. Deuteronomy 17:19 (already on these pages) requires the king to keep the scroll beside him and read in it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to fear Jehovah his God, to keep all the words of this instruction. Here the same pair of verbs — learn, fear — is aimed at the men, the women, the little ones and the ger inside the gates, and what they are to keep is named with the same phrase, all the words of this instruction. Deuteronomy has one reading requirement for its monarch and one hearing requirement for its nation, and it writes them in the same words.

⚠ The reading is dated to the year of the release (v10), which this book has already defined, and the shelf translates that noun four different ways. Deuteronomy 15:1–2 (already on these pages) makes the seventh year cancel debts; this verse hangs the public reading on the same clock, at the Feast of Booths, so that the year a man’s debts are let go is the year the whole instruction is read aloud over him. KJV and ASV read ‘the year of release’, Douay-Rheims ‘the year of remission’, Geneva 1599 ‘the year of freedom’, and NIV prints the effect instead of the word, ‘in the year for canceling debts’. On the Spanish shelf RV 1909 and RV60 both read «el año de la remisión», while NVI takes the same explanatory route as the English version just quoted, «el año del perdón de deudas».

⚠ The audience list in v12 is the whole point of the law, and only two versions on the English shelf keep it intact. The Hebrew names four parties and puts the article on each — ha-anashim ve-ha-nashim ve-ha-taf, the men and the women and the little ones, then gerkha, your resident foreigner. ASV keeps every article, ‘the men and the women and the little ones’, and so does the NWT 1984, ‘the men and the women and the little ones and your alien resident’. The other five thin it out: KJV drops the articles altogether, ‘men, and women, and children’, Geneva 1599 prints the identical phrase, ‘men, and women, and children’, NIV the same in modern spelling, ‘men, women and children’, Douay-Rheims reads ‘both men and women, children and strangers’, and TLB ‘men, women, children, and foreigners living among you’. It is a small loss with a real cost: the Hebrew is not describing a crowd, it is listing the categories that may not be left out, and a resident foreigner with no land and no vote is the last of the four.

V9 is the quietest sentence in the chapter and the one that changes the most. Moses writes the instruction down and GIVES it — to the priests who carry the ark, and to the elders. From here on the torah in this book is an object with custodians, and the rest of the chapter is about where it is kept and when it is read.

★★ Deuteronomy mentions the tent of meeting exactly once, and this is it. Ohel mo’ed stands in 140 verses of the Hebrew Bible — it is the ordinary name of the sanctuary right through Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. In this book it stands in one verse: v14, where it appears twice inside a single sentence. A book preoccupied from chapter 12 onward with the place that Jehovah will choose has had no use for the tent at all; it surfaces, for one verse, on the day Moses is told to bring his successor and stand in it.

★★ V18’s ‘I will surely hide my face’ is a doubled verb that stands in one verse of the Bible, and a whole biblical book is named on the pun. The infinitive absolute with its imperfect, haster astir, stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, this one. The hiding of the face — hester panim — became the standing Jewish name for the condition itself, and the pun lands on Esther (already on these pages), the book in which the divine name never once appears and the word Elohim never appears either. Checked against the archived Hebrew, the Song of Songs has neither of them in it too — the two books have always been named together on this point — but its last chapter ends a line on shalhevetyah, a flame-word whose tail many readers hear as a shortened form of the name, and Esther has nothing of the kind anywhere. The heroine’s own name is most likely Persian; but an old Jewish reading — reported here rather than verified — hears in it satar, to hide, asks where Esther is to be found in the Torah, and answers with this verse.

★ V19 changes grammatical number in the middle of a sentence, and exactly one shelf version prints both halves of the seam. Kitvu lakhem, ‘write for yourselves’, is plural — Moses and Joshua are both standing in the tent — and then ve-lamdah, ‘and teach it’, and simah, ‘put it’, are singular. The ASV is the only version on this shelf that shows the whole switch, using the archaic English pronouns for it: ‘write ye this song for you, and teach thou it the children of Israel’. KJV and Geneva 1599 get the plural and then lose the singular, ‘write ye this song for you, and teach it the children of Israel’; Douay-Rheims has ‘write you this canticle, and teach the children of Israel’. The modern versions have no pronoun left to do it with, so the NWT 1984 falls back on its own typography, capitalising plural address: ‘WRITE for yourselves this song and teach it’ — and its NWT 2013 revision drops the convention and the seam with it, ‘Now write down this song for yourselves’. Spanish, which still has a plural you, has it easy: RV60 writes «escribíos este cántico» in the plural and «enséñalo a los hijos de Israel» in the singular, exactly as the Hebrew does. The same seam runs twice more in this chapter: v6 gives the charge in the plural, chizqu ve-imtzu, and then turns singular for the promise under it — Jehovah your God … he will not let go of you — and v26 hands the book over in the plural, take … and put, then names the witness against a singular you. This translation’s Spanish prints all three switches; its English can print none of them.

⚠ The song God dictates is given a legal job, not a liturgical one. V19 says the song is to be le-ed, a witness; v21 has it answer before them as a witness, the verb for a witness responding in court. Ha-shirah ha-zot, ‘this song’, stands in nine verses of the Hebrew Bible, and four of the nine are in this chapter (vv19, 21, 22 and 30). The earlier two are the Song of the Sea at Exodus 15:1 and the well-song at Numbers 21:17 (both already on these pages), each introduced by az yashir, ‘then sang’. Those are sung because something has happened. This one is filed in advance, against something that has not.

⚠ V20 quotes this book’s own blessing formula back as the mechanism of apostasy, and adds one verb to it. Ve-akhalta ve-savata, ‘and you will eat and be satisfied’, stands in three verses of the Hebrew Bible — 6:11, 8:10 and 11:15, all already on these pages, and in every one of them it is the good outcome. Here God says it in the third person and puts a third verb on the end, ve-dashen, and grow fat — and the turning to other gods follows in the same breath. 8:12–14 had put that sequence as a danger to be guarded against (lest you eat and be satisfied … then your heart grows high, and you forget Jehovah your God); here it is not a warning but a forecast.

⚠ V23’s Hebrew never says who commissions Joshua, and three of the seven English versions decide for it. Va-yetzav is a bare third-person singular with no subject named; the previous verse’s subject is Moses, but the speech that follows says I myself will be with you, which Moses cannot say. KJV and ASV keep the ambiguity, ‘And he gave Joshua the son of Nun a charge’; so do TLB ‘Then he charged Joshua’, the NWT 1984 ‘And he proceeded to commission Joshua the son of Nun’, and, on the Spanish shelf, RV 1909 with «Y dió orden á Josué» and RV60 with «Y dio orden a Josué». Three English versions supply a subject the Hebrew does not name: Geneva 1599 prints ‘And God gave Joshua the son of Nun a charge’, while Douay-Rheims puts the divine name in the slot — ‘commanded Josue the son of Nun’ — and so does NIV, ‘gave this command to Joshua son of Nun’. One Spanish version does the same, NVI «dio a Josué, hijo de Nun, esta orden». This translation keeps the bare verb.

⚠ The verb for Israel’s coming apostasy (v16) is the blunt one, and the shelf ranges across four centuries of discomfort with it. Zanah is the ordinary word for selling sex. KJV reads ‘go a whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land’, Geneva 1599 ‘go a whoring after the gods of a strange land’, Douay-Rheims ‘go a fornicating after strange gods’, ASV softens to ‘play the harlot’, NIV reads ‘prostitute themselves’, the NWT 1984 turns clinical with ‘have immoral intercourse with foreign gods’ and its NWT 2013 revision interprets instead, ‘commit spiritual prostitution’, while TLB removes the metaphor entirely, ‘will begin worshiping foreign gods’. On the Spanish shelf RV 1909 and RV60 both keep it crude, «fornicará tras los dioses ajenos», and NVI is the gentlest reading on either shelf, «me será infiel».

⚠ From v16 to v21 the Hebrew treats the nation as ONE person and keeps slipping out of it. This people is grammatically masculine singular, so it rises, prostitutes ITSELF, is devoured, eats and is satisfied and grows fat, and speaks in the first person singular — my God is not in my midst — while ‘I will forsake them and hide my face from them’ (v17) and ‘they will serve them and spurn me’ (v20) go plural inside the same sentences. Most English Bibles level the whole speech to ‘they’. This translation keeps the singular where the Hebrew has it, which is why a nation is an it through most of these verses.

★★ The book goes BESIDE the ark; the tablets went inside it, and one Hebrew preposition is the whole distinction. V26 says mi-tzad aron brit-Jehovah, at the SIDE of the ark, where Deuteronomy 10:2–5 (already on these pages) has Moses put the two stone tablets IN the ark. Two documents, two places, and a difference of standing that the text never comments on: what God wrote goes in the chest, what Moses wrote sits next to it. ⚠ Three versions blur it by choosing the English preposition they would use for the inside: KJV reads ‘put it in the side of the ark’, Geneva 1599 ‘put ye it in the side of the Ark’, and Douay-Rheims ‘put it in the side of the ark’. ASV repairs it with one word, ‘by the side of the ark’, NIV with another, ‘place it beside the ark’, and the NWT 1984 reads ‘at the side of the ark’; on the Spanish shelf RV 1909 and RV60 read «al lado del arca» and NVI «junto al arca».

★★ This chapter appoints three different witnesses against Israel, and two of the three are not people. The song is a witness (vv19 and 21), the book laid beside the ark is a witness (v26), and heaven and earth are summoned as witnesses (v28) — the same summons 4:26 and 30:19 already made (both already on these pages). A text people carry in their mouths and a scroll lying in the sanctuary are each given the legal standing that 17:6 (already on these pages) reserves for a person who saw. ⚠ At v28 KJV and Geneva 1599 both reach for an older synonym, ‘call heaven and earth to record against them’, where ASV, Douay-Rheims and TLB all print ‘heaven and earth to witness against them’ outright and NIV reaches for the courtroom verb instead, ‘to testify against them’.

★★ With v26 the phrase sefer ha-torah, ‘the book of the instruction’, reaches its fourth occurrence, and five of the ten now stand on these pages. The phrase stands in ten verses of the Hebrew Bible: 28:61, 29:20, 30:10, this verse and Joshua 1:8 — all five now on these pages — then Joshua 8:34, the scroll Hilkiah finds in the temple (2 Kings 22:8 and 11; 2 Chronicles 34:15), and the one Ezra reads aloud from dawn to noon (Nehemiah 8:3). ⚠ Of the four that fall in Deuteronomy, this verse alone has the book taken IN HAND rather than written IN: the other three all read be-sefer ha-torah, written in the book of the instruction, and this one reads laqoach et sefer ha-torah ha-zeh, take this book of the instruction.

⚠ V27’s ‘stiff neck’ is the charge this book already laid on the generation that died in the wilderness, now laid on their children. Qesheh oref — a hard nape, the picture of an ox that will not turn under the yoke — is what Deuteronomy 9:6 and 9:13 (both already on these pages) call the people, twice, in the chapter that retells the golden calf. Moses is not predicting a new failing here. He is telling the new generation that he already knows this about them, while he is still standing in front of them.

⚠ The chapter’s last verse carries a scroll-layout mark that turns up at the edges of the Bible’s set-piece songs. The printed Hebrew closes v30 with {ש} where its own English column prints a petuchah. The sign is not new to these pages: it stands at Exodus 14:31 (already on these pages), which carries a note of its own on what it is — a Masoretic layout mark rather than a letter of the text — and in the Mechon-Mamre printing this translation works from it also closes most books of the scroll. What is worth seeing here is where else it falls. In that printing it stands at Exodus 14:31 and again at 15:19, on either side of the Song of the Sea; at Judges 4:24 and 5:31, on either side of the Song of Deborah; and, its partner to this one, at 32:43, the last verse of the Song of Moses. Here and at Judges 4:24 it stands alone; at the other four it is paired with {ר}, the sign that runs down the short brick-like lines of a song set out as verse rather than as prose. What follows this verse is the longest of those songs.

Echoes paid. Bachar, ‘choose’, planted one chapter ago on the most famous imperative in the book, returns at v11 with the subject changed: the people were told to choose life, and here it is God who chooses — the place. Chazaq, flagged at 12:23 with the note that its real home was a commander’s charge, arrives at that charge here, three times in one chapter. Shemittah, defined in chapter 15, keeps its appointment at v10. And sefer ha-torah, counted at 30:10, takes the fourth of its ten at v26.

Echoes planted. Ematz, the second half of the charge, is already waiting in Joshua 1, where the same two words are said four more times. Raphah, the hand that does not go slack, is handed on to Solomon and then, in Greek, into a letter. Yetzer, the inclination God says he already knows, is the word Genesis used twice before the flood and the one the rest of this literature will argue over. And the song written down at v22 and recited at v30 is the next chapter.

Decisions. Hebrew and English verse numbers align through this whole chapter, as they did in chapter 30. The Masoretic text marks a setumah after v6, closing the address to the nation before Moses turns to Joshua, and a petuchah after v13, closing the law of the reading; v30 carries Mechon-Mamre’s own {ש}, discussed above. Instruction for torah, book of the instruction for sefer ha-torah, be strong and resolute for chazaq ve-ematz, resident foreigner for ger, Feast of Booths for chag ha-sukkot and assemble for the causative of qahal all continue this project’s established renderings. The collective singular of verses 16–21 is kept rather than levelled to a plural.

Library. Three new dictionary terms in both languages — ematz, raphah and yetzer. Six existing dictionary entries extended: chazaq (its forward promise paid, with both counts), shemittah (its Deuteronomy 31:10 citation now a working link), ed (this chapter’s three witnesses), torah (the fourth sefer ha-torah), qahal (the book’s three causative imperatives, 4:10, v12 and v28) and sefer (the scroll now handed over). Two encyclopedia entries extended in both languages — Joshua and the ark of the covenant. And one entry that had existed only in English now has its Spanish twin, acharit ha-yamim, which this chapter’s v29 needs.

Next installment in this book: Deuteronomy 32 — the Song of Moses itself, the song this chapter had him write down and teach. Fifty-two verses of poetry opening give ear, heavens, and let me speak; rain and dew for doctrine, an eagle stirring up its nest, and Israel under a name it is given nowhere in the prose — Jeshurun, who grew fat and kicked; gods the fathers never dreaded; a closing sentence that sends Moses up Mount Nebo to see, from a distance, a land he will not enter.