★ The Hebrew opens kol ha-mitzvah, ‘the WHOLE commandment’ — a singular collective covering everything Moses is about to say, the same singular already governing Deuteronomy 6:1’s ‘this is the commandment’ (already on these pages). Reading straight down the shelf: ASV keeps the oddity, ‘All the commandment’; NWT 1984 and NWT 2013 both keep it singular, ‘every commandment’; so does NIV, ‘every command’. KJV pluralizes it outright, ‘All the commandmentS’, and Douay-Rheims and Geneva follow it there. ⚠ On the Spanish shelf the same seam runs through TIME rather than across versions: TNM 1987 keeps the collective, «todo mandamiento», and TNM 2019 moves to a plural partitive, «cada uno de los mandamientos» — naming the plural noun the 1987 edition kept folded into one. Five verbs follow in a chain — keep, do, live, multiply, go in and possess — the same live/multiply/possess sequence 6:3 already used.

★ Two verbs, paired, and paired again fourteen verses later. Le-ma‘an annotkha le-nassotkha — ‘to humble you, to test you’ — is not one verb doing two jobs but two distinct roots standing side by side, the same pairing this translation has already met separately: anah is Egypt’s own affliction verb, run backward on the wilderness itself (Genesis 15:13, already on these pages); nasah is the root behind the place-name Massah, ‘Testing’ (Deuteronomy 6:16, already on these pages). Here the pair is not a place-name at all, just the plain verbs, side by side — and they recur, nearly verbatim, at v16 below.

★ ‘Not by bread alone does the human live’ — the most quoted sentence in the book so far. The Hebrew word is ha-adam, the human, humankind — rendered that way on this site since Genesis 1, and this is exactly the sentence Matthew 4:4 (already on these pages) has Jesus quote back at the tempter in the wilderness, forty days into his own fast. ⚠ One honest wrinkle, already flagged when that Gospel chapter shipped: the Hebrew says ‘by everything that goes out of the mouth of Jehovah’ — there is no noun ‘word’ anywhere in the clause, only the verb yatza, to go out, turned into the noun motza, an issuing, an utterance. Reading the shelf for exactly that noun: English splits three ways — KJV, NIV and Douay-Rheims all supply ‘word’ (the Douay by way of the Vulgate, itself following the Greek Old Testament’s rhēmati — the very noun Matthew’s own Gospel then quotes); NWT 1984 and NWT 2013 supply a different noun, ‘expression’; only ASV keeps the Hebrew noun-less, ‘everything that proceedeth’. ⚠ The Spanish shelf leans further toward the Hebrew’s own bareness than the English one does: RV 1909, RV60 and NVI all read «todo lo que sale de la boca», no noun at all — and TNM 2019 now joins them, dropping the noun TNM 1987 had supplied, «toda expresión de la boca». Another instance of the pattern the closing note below is tracking, though this one runs the OTHER direction — the later edition converging on the wider Spanish shelf’s own bareness rather than clarifying an image away. This translation follows the Hebrew’s own noun, motza, an issuing, rendered ‘utterance’ — matching Matthew 4’s own note on the same verse.

⚠ The Douay-Rheims takes the humbling a step further than any other witness on the shelf: ‘He afflicted thee WITH WANT’ — naming the hunger as the affliction’s own instrument, where the Hebrew simply runs three verbs in a row (he humbled you, and he made you hunger, and he fed you). A small addition, and it happens to be exactly right about the mechanism the sentence goes on to describe.

Two physical claims, stated flatly and never explained: the clothing did not age, the feet did not swell, across forty years of walking. Twelve of the thirteen witnesses stay just as plain; the one exception is TLB, which adds a detail the Hebrew does not supply — ‘your feet haven’t been BLISTERED or swollen’ — the paraphrase’s own habit of filling in a physical picture nothing else on the shelf offers.

★ Yeyasser…meyasserkha — ‘disciplines…disciplines you’ — is the verb behind this site’s own musar entry, written for Proverbs 1:2 and grounded there in exactly this image: ‘he who spares the rod hates his son’ (Proverbs 13:24, not yet on these pages), ‘do not despise the discipline of Jehovah’ (Proverbs 3:11, not yet on these pages, and the verse that supplies the parent for Proverbs’ own noun). This is the one place in the Torah’s own narrative where the metaphor Proverbs will build a whole vocabulary out of — a father’s corrective hand, aimed at a son — is spoken about God directly, in the plain past tense, of forty real years. ⚠ The shelf divides by REGISTER more than by meaning: KJV and ASV ‘chasteneth’, matching RV60’s «castiga» and RV 1909’s identical «castiga» — all four keep the severity; Douay-Rheims softens to ‘traineth up…trained thee up’ and Geneva to ‘nurtureth’, both losing the correction; NIV and NWT land in the middle, ‘disciplines’/‘corrects’; and TLB paraphrases furthest, ‘punishes you to help you’, supplying a purpose clause the Hebrew leaves the reader to infer.

★ Wheat, barley, vine, fig, pomegranate, olive oil, honey — this verse is the source text for what later Jewish tradition names the shivat ha-minim, the ‘seven species’ native to the land, still cited today (first-fruits liturgy, blessings recited over food, even the design of Israeli coinage). Nothing later is read back into the translation; the list is simply named here, once, in this order, and everything downstream takes its cue from these seven nouns.

⚠ Nechoshet, the metal dug from the hills at v9, splits the shelf three ways. Nine of the thirteen read COPPER: ASV, NWT (both editions), NIV, TNM (both editions), TLB, RV60 and NVI all agree. Three read BRASS: KJV, Douay-Rheims and Geneva — brass being an alloy with no clear attestation this early. And one, RV 1909, stays generic, ‘metal’ («cortarás metal»), naming neither. This translation follows the nine-witness majority. The same word gets a second life nine verses on: at v15 below the danger in that same wilderness is a saraph, a burning serpent — and the rescue Israel is eventually given for exactly that danger is a serpent made of this exact metal (Numbers 21:9, already on these pages, where the pun — nachash nechoshet, ‘a copper serpent’ — is in the consonants themselves). The blessing of v9 and the danger of v15 are made of the same word.

★ This verse is the source text later Jewish law cites for the obligation to say a blessing AFTER eating — reported, not verified from this project’s own sources: the Talmud, tractate Berakhot 48b, is standardly cited as deriving the obligation from here directly — Birkat Hamazon, ‘the Blessing of the Food’, said once the meal is over rather than the more familiar blessing spoken before it. ⚠ The verb matters to that tradition: it is barakh, ‘to bless’, the same verb this project has tracked since Genesis, and reading the shelf for it specifically shows a real divide. KJV, ASV, Douay-Rheims, Geneva, TLB and RV60 all keep ‘bless’/«bendecirás»; NIV, NVI, NWT 2013 and TNM 2019 all move to ‘praise’/«alabarás» — where NWT 1984 and TNM 1987 both still read ‘bless’/«bendecir». Another instance, on both shelves at once, of the pattern the closing note below is tracking — and here the swap has a real cost: the technical name of the tradition this verse anchors is literally ‘the BLESSING of the food’, not its praise.

★ Shakach, ‘to forget’, checked across the whole archived Hebrew of Deuteronomy, stands in thirteen verses total — and four of its occurrences land in these four verses alone. Before this chapter the book had used it exactly four times, once each (4:9, 4:23, 4:31, 6:12, all already on these pages) — so this one chapter, in three verses, matches the entire rest of the book’s use of the word up to here. Verse 19 below adds a doubled fifth occurrence, an emphatic Hebrew construction (‘if FORGETTING you forget’) discussed in its own note.

★ The structure is a trap sprung in slow motion. V11 states the danger; vv12–13 list, in careful sequence, exactly what triggers it — eating and being satisfied, building good houses, herds and flocks multiplying, silver and gold multiplying — and only then, once every condition is met, v14 springs the verb: ‘then your heart grows high, and you forget’. The warning is not against poverty. It is against the exact prosperity the chapter has just spent nine verses promising.

⚠ Ve-ram levavekha, ‘your heart grows high’, is rendered literally here to preserve an image the later editions on both shelves let go. KJV, ASV, Douay-Rheims and NWT 1984 all keep the heart ‘lifted up’; NWT 2013 moves to ‘do not let your heart become PROUD’, and TNM 2019 matches it, «no dejes que tu corazón se vuelva ORGULLOSO», against TNM 1987’s still-literal «tu corazón realmente se eleve». Another instance of the pattern below, on both shelves at once. Even the older Spanish witnesses split on the same seam a generation earlier than the TNM did: RV 1909 keeps the image, «se eleve luego tu corazón», where RV60 already reads «se enorgullezca tu corazón» — the same clarifying move, a full half-century before either NWT/TNM edition made it.

★★ Read against vv2–3, these two verses are close to a word-for-word repeat of the chapter’s own opening. V2–3: le-ma‘an annotkha le-nassotkha…va-ya‘akhelkha et ha-man asher lo yadata ve-lo yad‘un avotekha — ‘to humble you, to test you…and he fed you the manna, which you did not know and your fathers did not know’. V15–16: ha-ma‘akhilkha man ba-midbar asher lo yad‘un avotekha, le-ma‘an annotkha u-lema‘an nassotekha — ‘who fed you manna in the wilderness, which your fathers did not know, to humble you and to test you’. Same two verbs, same withheld knowledge, same food, the order of clauses reshuffled and ‘which YOU did not know’ quietly dropped the second time. The chapter that opened by telling Israel to remember the wilderness closes by re-narrating it, in its own earlier words, as Exhibit A against forgetting — the form of the sentence enacting the content of the warning.

★ Nachash saraph, ‘fiery serpent’, at v15 — checked against the whole archived Hebrew Bible, this exact two-word collocation occurs in exactly one verse: this one. Its only relative is the definite plural at Numbers 21:6 (already on these pages), ‘the burning serpents’ Jehovah sends among the people for their own grumbling — the incident this verse is looking back on. This translation keeps ‘fiery’ specifically to preserve that link; the shelf splits on exactly this word. KJV, ASV, Geneva and RV60 («serpientes ardientes») all keep the burning image; NWT and TNM both move to ‘poisonous’/«venenosas» — a real hazard, but a different one, and it severs the very echo this note is built on; TLB drops the image entirely, ‘dangerous snakes’. ⚠ The Douay-Rheims goes furthest of all, translating the Vulgate’s own elaboration rather than the Hebrew: ‘the serpent BURNING WITH HIS BREATH’ — a detail neither the Hebrew nor any other witness on either shelf supplies.

★ The error the chapter is built to head off is stated in one sentence and answered in the next: ‘My power and the strength of my hand have made me this wealth’ (v17), against ‘it is HE who gives you power to make wealth’ (v18). The Hebrew repeats koach, ‘power/strength’, in both verses — the man claims it as his own possession, and the text hands the same noun straight back to its source without ever disputing that the power is real. Nothing in the rebuttal denies the wealth was earned by real strength; it denies only where that strength came from.

⚠ The purpose clause closing v18 — ‘so that he may establish his covenant…as at this day’ — makes the whole forty-year discipline retroactively purposeful: the humbling of vv2–3 and the manna of v16 were not punishment for its own sake but the mechanism by which a people who might otherwise credit themselves are kept able to receive a promise that was never theirs to earn.

★★ The root avad, ‘to perish, to destroy’, is doubled twice in two verses — avod tovedun at v19 (an infinitive absolute plus the verb, ‘perishing you shall perish’) and ma‘avid…tovedun at v20 — four occurrences in two verses. And v19’s exact wording is not new to this book: ha‘idoti vakhem hayom, ki avod tovedun, ‘I bear witness against you today that you shall surely perish’, is close to verbatim what Deuteronomy 4:26 (already on these pages) already said, with exactly one change: that verse calls heaven and earth to witness (‘I call the heavens and the earth to witness against you today’) and adds ‘quickly’; this one drops both, Moses himself standing as the sole witness this time. The same formula, stripped once.

★ Eqev, ‘on the heel of’, closes the chapter exactly where the last one opened it — only inverted. Checked against the whole archived Hebrew of Deuteronomy for the word itself (not merely the letters, which also spell ‘Jacob’), eqev stands as a bare word in exactly two verses in this book: Deuteronomy 7:12, ‘on the heel of your listening’ — the verse that names the week of the Torah’s annual reading cycle, parashat Eikev, which runs from that verse through this one and beyond — and this verse, ‘on the heel of your NOT listening’. The last chapter promised the covenant would follow obedience like a heel follows a foot; this one closes the same image in reverse, inside the very reading-week the word names.

⚠ This is not the last time the doubled ‘surely perish’ formula recurs in the book (it returns again at Deuteronomy 30:18, not yet on these pages) — but the pairing with Deuteronomy 4:26 is the tightest, sharing the largest block of identical wording of any two instances checked.