★ The two words that open this verse’s command — shema Yisrael, ‘Hear, O Israel’ — are the identical two words, in the identical order, that become Judaism’s central declaration one chapter later: “Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God, Jehovah is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4, not yet on these pages). Deuteronomy 4’s own closing note, checking this chapter’s forward boundary, had already flagged the shema ROOT as building toward that declaration; searching the whole archived Hebrew Bible for the exact two-word phrase turns up only four candidates, and the other three are all later in this same book (9:1; 20:3) or a false match on unrelated grammar (Genesis 35:22, where the same letters mean ‘and Israel heard,’ not an imperative addressed to the nation). So this is the FIRST time the vocative ‘Hear, O Israel’ is spoken in the Bible, in the order this project is translating — one chapter earlier than the verse that made the phrase famous, and here addressed not to a confession of God’s oneness but to a set of statutes and ordinances Moses is about to repeat.

Moses calls “all Israel” together to address them directly, in his own first-person voice (“that I am speaking”) — the frame for the whole recitation that follows, in which Moses himself, not a narrator, reports the Ten Words a second time.

★ Moses makes a striking, almost paradoxical claim: the Horeb covenant was made “not with our fathers, but with us — we who are here, all of us, alive today” (v3). Strictly, most of this audience were children or not yet born at Horeb, thirty-eight years earlier; the generation that stood at the mountain has largely died in the wilderness (a fact this book has already reckoned with at length). Moses collapses that gap deliberately — the covenant is not a historical curiosity inherited from dead ancestors, but a live obligation resting on the people standing in front of him right now.

“Made” (v2, karat) is literally ‘cut’ — see the new dictionary entry for why that verb is not decorative. V5 gives Moses his role for the first time in these exact terms: he “stood between Jehovah and you,” because the people themselves were too afraid of the fire to go up the mountain (developed fully at vv23–27 below) — the origin, inside this chapter’s own narrative, of Moses as mediator.

These four verses restate the first two of the Ten Words almost exactly as Exodus 20:2–6 (already on these pages) gives them — the same self-introduction, the same ban on carved images, the same warning about a jealous God visiting guilt on children while showing loyal-love to thousands. The wording is close enough, verse for verse, that a reader can lay the two chapters side by side and see a covenant document being read back rather than paraphrased.

⚠ The Hebrew of v9 carries a genuine textual oddity Exodus 20’s parallel does not: the text as WRITTEN spells ‘his commandments’ (mitzvato), and a marginal note tells the reader to SAY ‘my commandments’ (mitzvotai) instead — a kethiv/qere pair, confirmed directly against the archived Masoretic text. Exodus 20’s own version of this clause has no such split; the scribal tradition preserved a written slip at exactly the point in the Decalogue’s SECOND recitation where a copyist’s eye might most easily drift from first person to third. Every translation checked, on both shelves, follows the qere and prints ‘my commandments’ without comment.

Qanna, ‘jealous,’ makes its THIRD appearance on these pages at v8 — after Exodus 34:14 and Deuteronomy 4:24 — here inside the very legal text Deuteronomy 4 was paraphrasing when it first quoted the phrase.

The third Word forbids lifting up Jehovah’s name la-shav, ‘for emptiness’ — matching Exodus 20:6–7 (already on these pages) almost letter for letter. What is worth flagging here, before it pays off, is the word itself: shav recurs in this very chapter, at v16, in a place Exodus 20 does NOT use it — see that note for the echo in full.

★ This is the sharpest verified difference between the two Decalogues, and the Hebrew makes it visible in the very first word: Exodus 20:7 opens the sabbath command with zakhor, ‘Remember’; this verse opens it with a different verb, shamor, ‘Keep.’ The two verbs are not interchangeable placeholders — the existing zakhor dictionary entry already flagged this exact pair while discussing Exodus 20, and this chapter is where the promise is paid off. This translation renders the difference visibly: ‘Remember the day of the sabbath’ at Exodus 20:7, ‘Keep the day of the sabbath’ here.

The reason clause attached to the command differs too, and not by accident. Exodus 20:11 grounds the sabbath in CREATION — ‘for in six days Jehovah made the heavens and the earth… and he rested on the seventh day.’ This chapter grounds it in the EXODUS instead (v14) — ‘you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and Jehovah your God brought you out from there… therefore Jehovah your God has commanded you to keep the day of the sabbath.’ Notice that zakhor, ‘remember,’ has not vanished from this version at all — it has simply been redirected, from remembering the sabbath itself to remembering slavery in Egypt as the sabbath’s reason. Jewish tradition holds that both words, shamor and zakhor, were spoken by God in a single utterance at Sinai — a theological answer to what is, textually, two different verses.

V13’s list of who must rest is also more specific than Exodus 20’s (which names ‘your beast’ in general): here it is ‘your ox, or your donkey, or any of your cattle’, three terms where Exodus has one. And this verse alone adds an explicit social purpose the creation-based version never states — ‘so that your male slave and your female slave may rest, as you do’ — a motive with no equivalent at Exodus 20:10–11.

Checked directly against the fetched shelf (all ten English and Spanish witnesses this project tracks), zero of the ten print ‘Remember’ at this verse — every witness agrees the two Decalogues open the fourth Word with different verbs, even where they render the difference differently. NIV and the NWT’s 2013 revision both contain ‘Observe the Sabbath day’ verbatim, matching this translation’s own choice of a KEEP-family verb over REMEMBER; KJV and the Geneva Bible both read ‘Keep the sabbath day to sanctify it’ — a near-tautology in English (keep…to sanctify) this translation avoids by pairing ‘Keep’ with ‘hallow’ instead; ASV alone reaches for ‘Observe the sabbath day, to keep it holy’ — the reverse pairing from this translation’s own; and Douay-Rheims differs from all of them, ‘Observe the day of the sabbath, to sanctify it’ — the noun phrase reordered (‘day of the sabbath,’ not ‘sabbath day’) on top of a third verb pairing. On the Spanish shelf, RV60 prints ‘Guardarás el día de reposo’ and the RV 1909 the closely related ‘Guardarás el día DEL reposo’ (the definite article added) — both matching this translation’s ‘Keep’ family; the NVI chooses ‘Observa el día sábado’ instead; and only the TNM’s 2019 revision reaches for ‘Celebra el sábado,’ ‘Celebrate the sabbath,’ a genuinely different verb again.

★ Checked directly against Exodus 20:11’s own wording (already on these pages), this verse adds two clauses to the command to honor father and mother that Exodus does not have: ‘just as Jehovah your God commanded you’ and ‘and so that it may go well with you.’ Exodus gives one motive — long days on the land. Deuteronomy gives two, doubling the promise attached to the single command the New Testament quotes as carrying a promise at all (Ephesians 6:2–3, not yet on these pages).

⚠ That NT citation is itself a small piece of textual evidence worth stating plainly, confirmed directly against the archived Greek: Ephesians 6:3 reads hina eu soi genētai kai esē makrochronios epi tēs gēs — ‘so that it MAY GO WELL WITH YOU, and you will be long-lived on the earth’ — both clauses, in that order. Paul is quoting the DEUTERONOMY form of the fifth Word, with its added ‘go well with you,’ not the shorter Exodus 20 form. A detail invisible unless the two Old Testament chapters are compared first.

Hebrew compresses the sixth through ninth Words — murder, adultery, theft, false witness — into a single verse, four bare two-word prohibitions in a row; the split into four separate verses is an English (and Spanish) numbering convention, not a feature of the Masoretic text.

★ The ninth Word’s wording is where this chapter quietly out-does Exodus 20 at its own game. Exodus 20:16 (already on these pages) forbids testifying ‘as a false witness,’ using the noun sheqer, ‘falsehood.’ This verse instead uses shav, ‘emptiness’ — the SAME word already used four verses earlier, at v10, for taking Jehovah’s name ‘for emptiness.’ Exodus 20 names misusing the divine name and lying under oath as two separate wrongs, with two separate Hebrew nouns; this chapter, alone on these pages, names them with the identical word. A structural tightness Exodus does not share.

⚠ Fetched directly and compared word for word against Exodus 20:16, not one witness on the shelf marks this Hebrew distinction — but they get there two different ways. KJV, ASV, Douay-Rheims and the Geneva Bible all use ‘bear false witness against thy neighbour’ here, the literal identical clause each of them already used at Exodus 20:16 — the same fixed English phrase covering two different Hebrew nouns. NIV does the same with its own fixed phrase, ‘give false testimony against your neighbor,’ word for word at both verses. The NWT is the one witness that actually varies its wording between the two chapters — at Exodus 20:16 both its editions explicitly name a witness (1984 ‘testify falsely as a witness’; 2013 ‘when you are a witness’), but here the NWT drops that word entirely: ‘testify to a falsehood against your fellowman’ — no mention of a witness at all — even though the Hebrew ed, ‘witness,’ is present in both verses identically. On the Spanish shelf, RV60, the RV 1909 and NVI all keep ‘falso testimonio’ here too (the NVI word for word identical to its own Exodus 20:16); the TNM is the Spanish sibling of the same split — its 1987 edition drops ‘testigo’ the way NWT 1984 drops ‘witness,’ and its own 2019 revision keeps ‘falso testimonio’ but still drops the separate ‘testigo’ clause Exodus 20:16 has.

★ The chamad dictionary entry, written when Exodus 20 shipped, already promised this verse as the place where the tenth Word changes shape — and checked directly against the Hebrew of both chapters, it does, in two ways at once. Exodus 20:14 (already on these pages) lists the neighbour’s HOUSE first, then his wife and everything else, all under the SAME verb, chamad, ‘covet,’ used twice. This verse puts the WIFE first, on her own, still under chamad — and then switches to a second, different verb, tit’avveh, ‘desire,’ for the house, the field, and everything else. Two real changes: the order is reversed, and where Exodus uses one verb twice, this chapter uses two.

The taah dictionary entry already tracks where tit’avveh’s own letters lead: spelled identically to the rare surveyor’s verb that marks out the borders of Canaan at Numbers 34:7–10 (already on these pages) — a coincidence of spelling, not a shared root, but a genuinely checkable one on the page. This verse is also the only place in the whole Hebrew Bible where tit’avveh means ‘desire’ and includes ‘his FIELD’ among the neighbour’s property — a term Exodus 20’s list does not have at all.

⚠ Checked directly against the shelf, the two verbs are assigned differently version to version — seven English witnesses, six different treatments of the same two clauses (the NWT alone changing between its own two editions). ASV, NIV and the Geneva Bible all match this translation’s own mapping, ‘covet’ the wife and ‘desire’ the house; KJV reverses it exactly — ‘desire’ the wife, ‘covet’ the house; the NWT’s 1984 edition reaches for a third pairing, ‘desire’ the wife and ‘crave’ the house — its own 2013 revision then drops the distinction its predecessor kept, using ‘desire’ for both; and TLB a fourth pairing again, ‘burn with desire’ for the wife and ‘envy’ for the house. Douay-Rheims drops the second verb’s distinctness altogether, using ‘covet’ once and letting the house, field and the rest simply follow as its object. On the Spanish shelf the picture is tighter: RV60, the RV 1909 and NVI all agree with this translation, ‘codiciar’ the wife and ‘desear’ the house — but the TNM (both editions) uses ‘desear’ for both, adding only an intensifier (‘desear con vehemencia’ / ‘desees egoístamente’) to mark the second clause, rather than a genuinely second verb.

★ The Hebrew verb behind ‘added’ here is yasaph — the identical root Deuteronomy 4:2 (already on these pages) used to forbid ISRAEL from adding to Moses’ own words: ‘you shall not add to the word that I am commanding you.’ Here, one chapter later, the same verb describes what JEHOVAH himself did at Horeb when he spoke the Ten Words: he ‘added nothing more.’ The restraint Moses will demand of Israel in chapter 4 is modeled by God himself in chapter 5’s own narrated past — a rule that precedes the command to keep it.

The same root recurs once more, three verses later (v21), and in the opposite direction — the terrified people beg Moses NOT to let them go on hearing God’s voice: ‘if we continue [yosphim, the same root] to hear the voice of Jehovah our God any longer, we will die.’ Between v18 and v21, the same Hebrew root moves from a limit God sets on his own speech to a limit the people beg him to set on theirs.

This is the same scene Exodus 20:18–21 (already on these pages) narrates in the third person — the people trembling at a distance while Moses approaches the thick darkness — retold here in the FIRST person, by Moses himself, to the very generation that was not there to hear it happen. The content agrees closely with Exodus’s account (v20’s ‘we have seen this day that God may speak with a human being, and he still lives’ matches Exodus’s own report of the people’s reaction almost exactly), but the voice has changed: Exodus reports what the people did; this chapter reports what the people SAID, in their own words, as Moses remembers them.

★ V24’s divine verdict on that request is easy to read past: ‘they have done well in all that they have spoken.’ Asking not to hear God’s voice directly — asking, in effect, for a human mediator — is not treated as a failure of faith in this account. It is called RIGHT, and it is the request that installs Moses as the go-between named already at v5.

The scene closes with a clean division of labor: everyone else is sent ‘to your tents’ (v26), while Moses alone is told to ‘stand here with me’ (v27) to receive ‘all the commandment, and the statutes, and the ordinances’ — the same three-part legal vocabulary this sermon opened with at v1, now assigned specifically to Moses to teach onward. The mediator role sketched at v5 and confirmed at v24 is formalized here as an ongoing arrangement, not a one-time event at the mountain.

The chapter closes on a formula — ‘you shall not turn aside, to the right hand or to the left’ — that reduces the whole preceding recitation to a single spatial image: obedience as a straight road with a known direction, departure from it named as a turn either way, with no privileged side. The chapter’s own opening promise returns unchanged at its close: keep this ‘so that you may live’ (v29, echoing v1’s own ‘so that you may live, and go in and take possession of the land’ at Deuteronomy 4:1, already on these pages).