★ ‘Seven nations’ is a phrase that stands exactly ONCE in the Hebrew Bible, and this is it. Checked against the whole archived Masoretic text: the two words shiv‘ah goyim occur in this verse and nowhere else. Other passages list the same peoples — Joshua 3:10 and Joshua 24:11 (neither yet on these pages) both name seven — but only here does the text stop and count them. The number is not decoration: seven is completeness, and the chapter is about a totality.

★ The list is shorter than the promise it fulfils. Genesis 15:19–21 (already on these pages) promised Abram the land of TEN peoples: Kenite, Kenizzite, Kadmonite, Hittite, Perizzite, Rephaim, Amorite, Canaanite, Girgashite, Jebusite. Six of those ten are in this verse. The Hivite is added; four are simply gone — the Kenite, the Kenizzite, the Kadmonite, and the Rephaim, whose last named survivor, Og of Bashan, was killed four chapters ago (Deuteronomy 3:11, already on these pages). This translation does not claim the ten shrank to seven for that reason; it prints both lists and lets a reader see that the promise and its fulfilment do not use the same census.

⚠ The Girgashite is the ghost of the seven. The name occurs in seven verses in the whole Hebrew Bible — Genesis 10:16 and Genesis 15:21 (both already on these pages), this verse, Joshua 3:10, Joshua 24:11, 1 Chronicles 1:14 and Nehemiah 9:8 — and every one of the seven is a LIST. No Girgashite ever speaks, fights, rules a city or is fought. Deuteronomy’s other statement of the ban names six and drops him (20:17, not yet on these pages). He exists only to make the number come out right.

★ The verb for what God does to them is a verb about things slipping off. Nashal, here and again at v22, is not a military word. It is what a sandal does when it comes off a foot — ‘shal your sandals from your feet’ at the burning bush (Exodus 3:5, already on these pages) is this verb in the imperative — and it is what an axe head does when it flies off its handle and kills a bystander (Deuteronomy 19:5, not yet on these pages, the case the cities of refuge exist for). This translation reads ‘shakes loose’, which is a strange thing to say about nations and is meant to be: the image is of something being knocked off the thing it was attached to. ⚠ All thirteen witnesses reach for conquest vocabulary instead — counted one by one, with no exceptions. The ASV and KJV read ‘cast out’, the Douay-Rheims ‘shall have destroyed’, the Geneva Bible ‘root out’, the NIV ‘drives out’, the TLB ‘he will destroy’, both editions of the NWT ‘clear away’, the TNM 1987 «tendrá que quitar» and the TNM 2019 «te irá quitando», the RV60 «haya echado de delante de ti», the RV 1909 «hubiere echado de delante de ti» and the NVI «echará de tu presencia». Thirteen of thirteen. None of them is wrong about the effect; all of them spend the picture.

Cherem is not a synonym for slaughter, and translating it as one loses the thing that makes it terrible. The root means to shut off, to seal away, to consecrate irreversibly — the same root behind Arabic haram, ‘forbidden/sacred’. A thing under the ban is God’s, absolutely and unransomably, and the way a city is given to God is that nobody gets to have it: no plunder, no captives, no treaty. Leviticus 27:28–29 (already on these pages) is the law itself, and it is chillingly plain — a devoted thing may never be sold or redeemed, and a devoted PERSON ‘shall surely be put to death’. The Hebrew here doubles the verb (hacharem tacharim, an infinitive absolute reinforcing its own finite verb), which is why this translation says it twice.

★ Here is a fact about this chapter that can be checked rather than argued: the ban is Deuteronomy’s own addition to material it inherited. Verses 1–5 are a rewrite of two passages already on these pages — Exodus 34:11–16 (do not cut a covenant with them; break down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their Asherim; do not take their daughters for your sons) and Exodus 23:32–33 (make no covenant with them or their gods; they will be a snare to you). V5 is Exodus 34:13 almost word for word. But searched across the whole archived Hebrew of Exodus, the root ch-r-m stands in exactly one verse of that book — Exodus 22:19, an unrelated law — and in NEITHER of the two passages this chapter is rewriting. The command to devote the nations to destruction is what Deuteronomy puts in where its sources had a prohibition on treaties.

⚠ And in Deuteronomy the ban is carried out before it is commanded. The word’s first two appearances in this book are narrative, not law: Deuteronomy 2:34 and 3:6 (both already on these pages), where Israel has already done this to Sihon’s cities and to Og’s, ‘men, women and little ones’. A reader arriving at chapter 7 is not being told about something that might happen. It has happened, twice, in the two chapters before the sermon reached the law.

⚠ The shelf divides on whether the word is about destroying or about devoting, and only one translation family keeps the second half. The KJV, ASV, Geneva Bible and Douay-Rheims all read ‘utterly destroy them’; the NIV ‘destroy them totally’ (with a footnote that does explain the term); the TLB ‘do a complete job of it…utterly wipe them out’; RV60 «las destruirás del todo» and the RV 1909 «del todo las destruirás»; the NVI «deberás destruirlas por completo». Both editions of the NWT read ‘devote them to destruction’ and the TNM 1987 «darlas por entero a la destrucción» — the only wordings on either shelf that keep the giving-over as well as the killing, and the only ones that let a reader see why the same word can be applied to a lump of silver at v26. The TNM 2019 gives that up and reads simply «destruirlas sin falta».

⚠ This verse has a documented history of being used to license atrocity, and the honest thing is to name it before explaining it. Deuteronomy 7 and its companion chapter 20 were quoted in the Iberian and English conquest of the Americas, in Cromwell’s Irish campaigns, in the Boer and later Afrikaner nationalist reading of the Great Trek, and by modern settler extremists who identify a present-day people with Amalek or with the Canaanites. Every one of those readings requires the same move: taking a text about seven named Bronze Age peoples who no longer existed when the book was written down and treating ‘Canaanite’ as a role a living population can be cast in. The text does not offer that. It names seven nations, once, and Deuteronomy itself treats the ban as closed and past. What the chapter is actually arguing about is intermarriage and worship, not race — and its own next chapters keep aiming at the same danger from inside Israel rather than outside it. Stating that does not make the chapter comfortable. It is not meant to be.

The last clause has its own small point. ‘Show them no favour’ is lo techonnem, from chanan, the verb of showing grace — the root behind the name Hannah and behind ‘gracious’ in the great formula of Exodus 34:6. What is being forbidden is not cruelty’s opposite in general but this specific thing: extending grace as a party to a treaty extends it.

★ The chapter’s actual argument is in v4, and it is about a household, not a battlefield. The reason given for the ban is not that these peoples are wicked, or that the land is owed; it is that a marriage produces a grandchild who serves other gods. V3 spells the exchange out in both directions — your daughter to his son, his daughter to your son — and then v4 follows only ONE of the two: ‘for HE will turn your son away’. The verb yasir is third person masculine singular, and its nearest available subject is the foreign father-in-law of the clause immediately before.

⚠ The shelf is split over that one letter, and the split runs straight through two translations’ own revisions. Singular: the ASV ‘For he will turn away thy son’, the NWT 1984 ‘For he will turn your son’, the TNM 1987 «Porque él apartará a tu hijo», and both Reina-Valeras with an implied singular subject — the RV60 «Porque desviará a tu hijo de en pos de mí» and the RV 1909 «Porque desviará á tu hijo». Plural: the KJV and Geneva Bible ‘For they will…’, the NIV ‘for they will turn your children away’, and the NVI «porque ellas los apartarán de mí». ★ And the two revisions move: the NWT 2013 goes to ‘For they will turn your sons away’ and the TNM 2019 to «Porque ellos harán que tus hijos dejen de servirme», in both cases abandoning a singular their own earlier editions had kept. That is the first of several places in this chapter where the 1984/1987 editions read closer to the Hebrew than the 2013/2019 ones (see the closing note). ⚠ The Douay-Rheims is alone again and for the usual reason: ‘For SHE will turn away thy son’ — a feminine subject the Hebrew does not have, coming through the Latin.

★ Verse 5 is Exodus 34:13 with almost nothing changed (already on these pages): break down the altars, smash the standing stones, cut down the asherim. Deuteronomy adds one item at the end — burn their carved images with fire — and that added item is what the chapter comes back to at v25 to close on. A matzevah is an upright stone set up as a marker or a cult object; an asherah is a wooden pole or stylised tree standing for the goddess of that name, which is why the Hebrew can say ‘their Asherahs’ in the plural and mean objects rather than deities. ⚠ Four of the thirteen turn the goddess into ordinary woodland, three of them in English: the KJV and Geneva Bible both read ‘cut down their groves’, and the Douay-Rheims ‘cut down their groves’ as well, following the Vulgate’s lucos. The ASV keeps the transliteration ‘their Asherim’; the NIV ‘their Asherah poles’; both NWT editions ‘their sacred poles’; and the fourth woodland reading is the RV 1909’s «sus bosques», woods, where RV60 corrects to «sus imágenes de Asera» — the clearest single case on either shelf of a modern revision restoring a name an older one had turned into scenery.

★ Segullah is a rare word, and its two least famous appearances are what fix its meaning. Checked across the whole archived Hebrew Bible, it stands in eight verses. Six are about Israel or the faithful: Exodus 19:5 (already on these pages), this verse, Deuteronomy 14:2 and 26:18, Psalm 135:4 and Malachi 3:17 (none of those four yet on these pages). The other two are not theological at all. At 1 Chronicles 29:3 David distinguishes his segullah of gold and silver from everything he has already assigned to the temple; at Ecclesiastes 2:8 the king lists ‘silver and gold and the segullah of kings and provinces’ among the things he amassed for himself. In both, it is a monarch’s own private hoard, kept separate from the treasury of the realm. That is the picture behind the word: not a favourite among subjects, but the one chest the king keeps in his own room.

⚠ The shelf spreads across the whole distance from property to status to sentiment, and the spread is instructive. The NIV ‘his treasured possession’ and the NWT 1984 ‘a special property’ both keep the property sense; the ASV ‘a people for his own possession’ is the most careful; the KJV ‘a special people’ and the Douay-Rheims ‘his peculiar people’ make it about status rather than ownership; the Geneva Bible ‘a precious people’ goes further still, into sentiment; and the TLB ‘his own chosen ones’ drops the noun altogether. On the Spanish shelf RV60 and the RV 1909 agree on «un pueblo especial», and the NVI is the sharpest of the thirteen with «su propiedad exclusiva».

★ Verse 7 answers the question ‘why this people?’ by ruling out the only answer anyone had, and then not replacing it. Not for numbers — and the reason offered is that they had no numbers to speak of: ‘for you are the fewest of all the peoples’. Then v8: because he loved you, and because he keeps oaths. The argument is deliberately circular, and it is the same circle Deuteronomy has drawn before — Deuteronomy 4:37 (already on these pages) said ‘because he loved YOUR FATHERS, and chose their seed after them’. ★ The change between the two verses is the whole point: three chapters ago the love was for the ancestors and this generation inherited it second-hand; here the love is for the people standing in front of him. The verb in v7 is chashaq, to be attached to, to be set on — a word Hebrew also uses of a man’s desire for a particular woman — and it has no cause supplied anywhere in the sentence.

⚠ One word here comes back later and English cannot carry it. ‘The fewest’ is ha-me‘at, the little one; at v22 the nations are cleared away me‘at me‘at, little by little. Same word, twice, at the two ends of the chapter: Israel is the little thing, and little is also the rate. English splits ‘few’ from ‘little’ and cannot hold both. Of the thirteen, exactly one keeps a single word in both places — the RV 1909, «los más pocos de todos los pueblos» at v7 and «poco á poco» at v22. This translation’s own Spanish twin can do it and does; the English cannot, and says so rather than forcing it.

★ Ha-El ha-ne’eman, ‘the faithful God’, occurs in exactly one verse of the Hebrew Bible, and it is this one. Verified against the whole archived text. The adjective itself is not rare — it stands in seventeen verses, of a servant (Moses, ‘faithful in all my house’, Numbers 12:7, already on these pages), a prophet, a priest, a house, a witness, a messenger, a peg driven into a wall — but attached to God as a title it is used here and nowhere else. The one other verse that calls God faithful with this word does it as a relative clause, not a name (Isaiah 49:7, not yet on these pages). The word’s root is the one behind amen: it means reliable, load-bearing, the sort of thing you can put your weight on.

★ The comparison worth making is with the same formula in the Ten Words, because this chapter quietly drops half of it. Deuteronomy 5:8–9 (already on these pages, and Exodus 20:4–5 before it) pairs steadfast love to thousands with iniquity ‘visited on the children, to the third and the fourth generation, of those who hate me’. Here the first half is expanded — not ‘thousands’ but ‘a thousand GENERATIONS’ — and the second half is rewritten: the one who hates is repaid el panav, TO HIS FACE, twice in one verse, and no descendant is mentioned at all. The asymmetry is now total in both directions: love runs a thousand generations forward, and punishment runs to exactly one person, in his own lifetime. This translation keeps the doubled ‘to his face’ rather than smoothing it, because the repetition is the argument. ⚠ It also keeps a grammatical seam that reads like an error and is not one: v10 opens PLURAL, ‘repaying those who hate him’, and then turns singular inside the same clause, ‘to destroy HIM’, before running singular for the rest of the verse. The Hebrew does exactly that. The sentence starts with a category and finishes with one man, which is the point it is making.

⚠ Where ‘to a thousand generations’ attaches is a real question, and here the two shelves’ older editions and their newer ones part company. In the Hebrew the phrase sits at the very end of the verse, after both relative clauses, which lets it govern the keeping rather than the lovers. The ASV, the KJV, the Geneva Bible, the Douay-Rheims, RV60 and the RV 1909 all keep it at the end where the Hebrew has it. The NIV moves it forward — ‘keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him’ — so that the generations now count the lovers. ★ And so, in their own revisions, do both editions of this translation’s most literal witness: the NWT 1984 ends ‘those who keep his commandments to a thousand generations’ and the TNM 1987 «hasta mil generaciones» last of all, while the NWT 2013 reads ‘keeping his covenant and loyal love to a thousand generations of those who love him’ and the TNM 2019 puts it first of all, «que por mil generaciones mantiene su pacto». That is the second place in this chapter where the older edition of that pair is the one following the Hebrew.

⚠ A smaller thing at v11 that continues the previous chapter’s. Ha-mitzvah here is SINGULAR — ‘the commandment, and the statutes, and the ordinances’ — exactly as at Deuteronomy 6:1 and 6:25, where the same singular was the subject of a note. The KJV pluralises it here (‘the commandments’) where the ASV does not; the singular is the shape Deuteronomy keeps returning to, and it is not an accident of number.

★ The conjunction that opens this verse is a body part. Eqev is the heel — the same noun that gets Jacob his name when he comes out of the womb gripping his brother’s aqev (Genesis 25:26, already on these pages) — and Deuteronomy uses it as a preposition meaning something like ‘in the track of’, ‘as the consequence of’, what follows on the heel of something else. This translation prints ‘on the heel of your listening’ rather than a bare ‘because’, because the word is doing work: the blessing is not a payment for obedience so much as a thing that comes along behind it.

This verse gives its name to a whole week of the annual Torah reading cycle, Eiqev, which is why the printed Hebrew edition this project works from carries a heading here that is not part of the text.

⚠ None of the thirteen keeps the image, and it would be unreasonable to expect it: the KJV ‘Wherefore it shall come to pass, if ye hearken’, the ASV keeping the causal sense instead, ‘because ye hearken’, the NIV a plain conditional, the Geneva Bible ‘For if ye hearken’, RV60 «Y por haber oído estos decretos», the NVI «Si prestas atención a estas leyes». What is worth noticing is the drift in the mood rather than the metaphor: the Hebrew, the ASV and the older Spanish read it as a statement about what WILL follow, while several of the English witnesses turn it into an ‘if’ — a condition Israel might fail — where the sentence itself simply describes a sequence.

★ That drift runs straight through this project’s most literal witness, on both shelves. The NWT 1984 keeps the causal ‘because YOU continue listening’ and the TNM 1987 «por continuar ustedes escuchando»; their own revisions make it conditional — the NWT 2013 ‘If you continue listening’ and the TNM 2019 «Si ustedes siguen escuchando». Another appearance of this chapter’s revision pattern, in a note that is not about it.

★★ The Hebrew for ‘the young of your flock’ is ashterot tzonekha — and ashterot is, letter for letter, the plural of ASHTORETH, the Canaanite goddess. This is not an etymological guess; it is the same consonantal word. Checked across the archived Hebrew Bible, the letters ‘-sh-t-r-t (in both its written spellings) stand in twenty-one verses. Nine of the twenty-one are the goddess or her images: Israel serves ‘the Baals and the Ashtaroth’ at Judges 2:13, 10:6, 1 Samuel 7:3–4 and 12:10; Solomon goes after ‘Ashtoreth the god of the Sidonians’ at 1 Kings 11:5 and 11:33, and Josiah defiles her high place at 2 Kings 23:13 (none of those yet on these pages). Some are the city named for her — including Deuteronomy 1:4 (already on these pages), where Og king of Bashan is the man ‘who dwelt in Ashtaroth’. And exactly FOUR are livestock: this verse and Deuteronomy 28:4, 28:18 and 28:51 (none yet on these pages), always in the same fixed phrase, and never anywhere else in the Bible.

★ Its partner in the phrase is the same kind of word. Shegar — ‘the shegar of your cattle’ — occurs in five verses in the whole Hebrew Bible: the four Deuteronomic ones above, and Exodus 13:12 (already on these pages), where every firstborn sheger of an animal belongs to Jehovah. Outside the Bible the same name is attested as a deity in the wider West Semitic world, paired with Ashtar in exactly this cattle-and-flocks role — that identification is reported by the scholarship, not verified from our own sources, and is stated here as such.

What can be said from the text alone is enough. Eight verses after commanding that the Asherahs be cut down, this chapter promises fertility for herds and flocks using a pair of words of which one is undeniably the name of a fertility goddess. The most economical reading is that the phrase had gone dead — a fossil, the way ‘by Jove’ or the word ‘Thursday’ carries a god nobody is invoking. But it is a fossil of exactly the thing the chapter is about, sitting in the blessing that the chapter offers as the alternative. ⚠ And it is invisible in every one of the thirteen witnesses: the ASV ‘the young of thy flock’, the KJV and Geneva Bible ‘the flocks of thy sheep’, the NIV ‘the lambs of your flocks’, the NWT 1984 ‘the progeny of your flock’, RV60 and the RV 1909 «los rebaños de tus ovejas», the Douay-Rheims ‘the flocks of thy sheep’. This translation does not print the goddess’s name in the verse either — that would over-claim a live allusion the Hebrew may not intend — but it will not let the fact go unmentioned.

⚠ One more thing in the same verse, changed in the same two revisions as elsewhere in this chapter: peri bitnekha is ‘the fruit of your BELLY’. The ASV reads ‘the fruit of thy body’, the KJV ‘the fruit of thy womb’ and the NIV ‘the fruit of your womb’, the NWT 1984 ‘the fruit of your belly’ and the TNM 1987 «el fruto de tu vientre». Their own revisions replace the image with its meaning — the NWT 2013 ‘he will bless you with many children’, the TNM 2019 «te bendecirá con muchos hijos».

V14 contains a phrase English translations regularly quietly repair. The Hebrew has aqar va-aqarah, a barren MALE and a barren female — a masculine form of a word that everywhere else in the Bible describes women (Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, Samson’s mother). It is the only place in the Torah where infertility is named as a male condition as well, and this translation keeps both. ⚠ So do most of the shelf, though the wording drifts: the ASV ‘there shall not be male or female barren’, the KJV ‘there shall not be male or female barren’ too, the Geneva Bible ‘neither male nor female barren’, RV60 «varón ni hembra estéril». The NIV reaches for a modern word that covers both — ‘none of your men or women will be childless’ — and the Douay-Rheims paraphrases into ‘of either sex’.

⚠ V15 is one of the chapter’s hard verses and should not be softened. The sickness Israel is promised freedom from is not simply removed from the world; it is redirected — ‘he will put them on all who hate you’. The Hebrew verb in the second half is natan, to GIVE, which is the same verb used of handing the nations over at v2 and v23. The plagues that were an argument against Pharaoh in Exodus become, in this sentence, a standing instrument. Every witness on both shelves keeps the redirection; none of them flinch from it, and neither does this one.

The verb is chus, which is what an eye does when it flinches from a thing it could do — the word for the flicker of pity that stops a hand. Deuteronomy uses the same formula elsewhere in contexts that have nothing to do with foreign nations at all, including the law of the false witness. ⚠ The shelf is unusually varied for such a short clause: the ASV ‘thine eye shall not pity them’, the KJV ‘thine eye shall have no pity upon them’, the Geneva Bible ‘thine eye shall not spare them’, the Douay-Rheims ‘Thy eye shall not spare them’, the NIV ‘Do not look on them with pity’, the NWT 1984 keeping the organ, ‘Your eye must not feel sorry for them’ — and the TLB reducing the whole thing to ‘Have no pity’, with the eye gone.

⚠ And the eye is where this chapter’s revision pattern turns up in a note that is not about it. The NWT 2013 drops the organ — ‘You must not feel sorry for them’ — and so does the TNM 2019 with «No debes sentir lástima por ellos», where the TNM 1987 had kept «Tu ojo no debe sentirse apenado por ellos». The same trade as everywhere else here: an image for its meaning.

★ But the clause the verse ends on is the one the chapter has been building toward, and it is a quotation. ‘For that would be a snare to you’ is Exodus 23:33 (already on these pages) almost verbatim, and Exodus 34:12 says it a third time. Moqesh is a bird trap — the trigger stick of a snare. Notice what is and is not being feared. The danger named in this chapter is never that Israel will be conquered by the seven nations; it is that Israel will end up worshipping with them. That is why the chapter’s two commands about them are to destroy their altars and not to marry their children, and why it finishes on a piece of gold rather than a battle.

★ The list Israel is told to remember is one already on these pages, and the word that heads it pays off the last chapter’s. Ha-massot, ‘the testings’, is the plural of massah — the noun that gave Massah its name and that Deuteronomy 6:16 (already on these pages) used three times in one sentence: do not TEST Jehovah as you TESTED him at TESTING. One chapter later the same noun turns up in the plural, and the direction of the testing has reversed. There, Israel tested God. Here, the great massot are things GOD did to Egypt, which Israel watched.

★ And the list itself is a quotation. Deuteronomy 4:34 (already on these pages) asked whether any god had ever taken a nation from the midst of a nation ‘with testings, with signs and with wonders and with war and with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm’. This verse repeats it with two changes: ‘war’ is dropped, and the testings acquire an adjective — the GREAT testings. The one item removed from a list of divine acts, in a chapter that is entirely about a war, is the war.

⚠ The shelf is where this chapter’s revision pattern shows up again. The ASV and NIV read ‘the great trials’, RV60 and the RV 1909 «las grandes pruebas», and all four are keeping the testing sense. The KJV has ‘The great temptations’ and the Geneva Bible ‘The great tentations’, which meant testing in their English and no longer does. The Douay-Rheims reads ‘The exceeding great plagues’, abandoning it. ★ And so do the two later revisions of the shelf’s most literal family, where their own earlier editions had not: the NWT 1984 reads ‘the great provings’ and the TNM 1987 «las grandes pruebas», while the NWT 2013 has ‘the great judgments’ and the TNM 2019 «los grandes castigos». Judgment and punishment are not what a test is, and the link back to Massah goes with them.

V18 doubles its own verb the way v2 does: zakhor tizkor, remember-you-shall-remember. Deuteronomy’s answer to being outnumbered is not a strategy but a memory.

★ Ha-tzir‘ah, ‘the hornet’, occurs in exactly three verses of the Hebrew Bible — Exodus 23:28 (already on these pages), this verse, and Joshua 24:12 (not yet on these pages) — and all three are the same promise, that something is sent ahead of Israel to drive the inhabitants out. It is always singular and always with the definite article, THE hornet, as though it were a known agent rather than a swarm. ⚠ A search of the consonants returns thirteen verses, but ten of them are the town of Zorah, Samson’s birthplace, which is spelled identically; reading the hits rather than counting them is what keeps the figure at three.

⚠ Here the shelf’s usual pattern inverts, and it is worth saying so plainly. Nine of the thirteen read an insect: the ASV, KJV and NIV ‘the hornet’, the Geneva Bible and Douay-Rheims ‘hornets’, the TLB ‘hornets to drive out those who hide from you’, and on the Spanish shelf RV60, the RV 1909 and the NVI all «avispas». The remaining four are one translation in two languages and two editions each, and all four read a state of mind: the NWT 1984 and 2013 both ‘the feeling of dejection’, the TNM 1987 «el sentimiento de decaimiento» and the TNM 2019 «hará que sientan desánimo». That reading is defensible — it derives the noun from a root meaning to strike or smite, and reads the sending of panic ahead of an army, which is what v23 describes in plain words and what Exodus 23:27 promises one verse before its own hornet. It is a real minority position and not a doctrinal one. But it is an interpretation of an obscure noun and not what the noun ordinarily means, and this project’s standing rule about that family — follow it where it is tighter to the source — cuts the other way here. This is also the one place in the chapter where all four editions of that family stand together AGAINST the rest of the shelf: they agree with each other and differ from everyone else.

★★ Verse 2 orders a total and immediate ban. Verse 22 says it cannot be done quickly, and gives an ecological reason. If the land empties faster than Israel can fill it, the wild animals take it. The two statements sit twenty verses apart in one speech, and this translation prints both without harmonising them.

★ The slow-conquest sentence is itself a quotation, and comparing it with its source shows what Deuteronomy kept and what it cut. Exodus 23:29–30 (already on these pages) reads: ‘I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the beasts of the field multiply against you. Little by little I will drive them out…until you have increased.’ Deuteronomy keeps the beasts and drops the desolation, and keeps the phrase me‘at me‘at exactly — two words that stand in only these two verses in the whole Hebrew Bible, and nowhere else. ⚠ It also, at v3, forbids marrying people it has just said will not exist. A chapter commanding total destruction contains, in its own text, a timetable that takes generations and a marriage law that assumes survivors. Readers have harmonised this in every direction for two thousand years; the honest report is that the seams are visible and the text does not resolve them.

⚠ V23’s mehumah gedolah is a panic, a rout — the noun for the confusion sent on an army rather than the casualties inflicted on it. The ASV is the most exact, if now unreadable: ‘will discomfit them with a great discomfiture’, keeping the Hebrew’s noun-and-verb pairing. The KJV and Geneva Bible both read ‘destroy them with a mighty destruction’, which loses the difference between panicking an enemy and killing him; the NIV ‘throwing them into great confusion’ and the NWT 1984 ‘rout them with a great rout’ both keep it. On the Spanish shelf RV60 and the RV 1909 agree word for word, «las quebrantará con grande destrozo».

One counterweight belongs here, because this chapter’s revision pattern is not universal. At v2 and again at v23 the Hebrew verb is plain natan, to GIVE. The NWT 1984 renders it ‘abandon them to you’ and the TNM 1987 «las abandonará en tus manos», while the NWT 2013 has ‘give them over to you’ and the TNM 2019 «las entregará en tus manos». There the LATER edition is the closer of the two, on both shelves.

★ The verb in v25 is chamad — the verb of the tenth Word. The verb is not rare, but its two most famous places are the two statements of the tenth Word — Exodus 20:13 uses it twice, and Deuteronomy 5:17 once (both in the Hebrew numbering this project follows, and both already on these pages) — and this verse. The object has changed: not a neighbour’s house or wife, but the silver and gold plating on an idol you have been told to burn. Coveting is what turns an object you were supposed to destroy into an object you keep. ⚠ This translation reads ‘covet’ in all three places, and so does the ASV — ‘thou shalt not covet’ at the tenth Word and again here. The KJV does not: it reads ‘covet’ at the tenth Word and ‘thou shalt not desire the silver or gold’ here, so the most famous verb in the Ten Commandments arrives in this verse under another name and the connection is gone for an English reader. The NIV keeps it (‘Do not covet’), as do RV60 and the RV 1909 with «no codiciarás»; the NWT 1984 reads ‘You must not desire’, consistent with its own Exodus.

★★ And then the chapter closes by turning its own worst word around. At v2 the seven nations are cherem, devoted to destruction. At v26 a piece of silver carried into an Israelite house makes the HOUSEHOLDER cherem, ‘devoted to destruction like it’. The category is not ethnic and never was; it is contagious, and the last thing this chapter does is show it spreading in the wrong direction. Joshua 7 will build a whole narrative on exactly that (not yet on these pages), and Numbers 21:3 (already on these pages) had already turned the word into a place-name, Hormah.

⚠ Whether a reader can SEE that reversal depends entirely on the translation, and exactly one family on either shelf lets them. The NWT 1984 carries its v2 wording straight through and reads ‘a thing devoted to destruction’ here, and the TNM 1987 «una cosa dada por entero a la destrucción» — the same phrase in both places (the v2 halves are quoted in the note on v2). Everyone else changes words in between: the KJV, which read of utterly destroying at v2, has ‘a cursed thing’ here, the ASV ‘a devoted thing’, the Geneva Bible ‘accursed’, the Douay-Rheims to ‘an anathema’, RV60 and the RV 1909 both to «anatema», and the NIV to ‘set apart for destruction’ (which does keep it, at the cost of not matching its own v2). This translation uses one phrase for both, which is the only reason the last verse lands.

⚠ The final clause doubles two different verbs back to back: shaqqets teshaqqetzennu ve-ta‘ev teta‘avennu. The first is the verb of sheqets, the word Leviticus 11 (already on these pages) keeps carefully distinct from ordinary uncleanness; the second is the verb of to‘evah, the noun used in the verse before. This translation reads ‘utterly detest it and utterly abominate it’ — ‘abominate’ being an ugly English verb, chosen because it is the only one that lets the reader hear the ‘abomination’ of v25 inside it.