★ The chapter opens on the Shema’s own two words, and it is not the Shema. The bare two-word address Shema Yisrael stands four times in the Hebrew Bible and all four are in this book, checked across the whole archived Hebrew: 5:1, introducing the Ten Words; 6:4, the sentence that became the creed; here; and once more not yet on these pages — 20:3, where a priest says it to troops about to fight. (A fifth verse, 27:9, has the same imperative under a different shape, hasket u-shma Yisrael, ‘Keep silence and hear, O Israel’, telling them they have become a people that day.) So the formula is not reserved for the creed at all. Two of its four uses open a BATTLE address, and the two are built the same way: ‘Hear, O Israel: you are crossing the Jordan today’ here, ‘Hear, O Israel: you are drawing near today to the battle’ there. A reader who knows only Deuteronomy 6 will hear a creed starting. What starts is a war briefing.

★ Every frightening thing the spies said is repeated here — and not one word of it is denied. Set the two side by side. Deuteronomy 1:28 (already on these pages) is the report that broke the first generation: ‘A people greater and taller than we, cities great and fortified to the heavens — and we saw the sons of the Anakim there too.’ Verses 1–2 here run the same three items in the same words — arim gedolot uvtzurot ba-shamayim, am gadol va-ram, bnei anakim — merely reordered, cities first. At Deuteronomy 1:29 Moses answered that report by telling them not to dread. Here he does not answer it. He repeats it, adds a proverb about it (‘Who can take his stand before the sons of Anak?’), grants that they know it and have heard it — the pronoun is doubled for emphasis, you yourself know, you yourself have heard — and then changes the subject of the sentence from Israel to God. The fear was never the error. Concluding from it was.

⚠ ‘A devouring fire’ is a title this book has already used against Israel. The participial phrase esh okhlah stands five times in the Hebrew Bible once BOTH spellings are searched: twice defectively — Deuteronomy 4:24 (already on these pages) and this verse — and three times written full, all in Isaiah (29:6, 30:30 and 33:14, none yet on these pages), where it is the flame of an approaching theophany and, at 33:14, the thing Isaiah asks who among us could live beside. ⚠ A consonantal search on the defective spelling alone also returns Joel 1:19, 1:20 and Job 15:34, and those are a different construction altogether: there the word is a finite verb — fire HAS DEVOURED the pastures — not a participle standing as a description. Deuteronomy’s two are the places where the phrase sits in apposition to the divine name itself. At 4:24 the fire is a warning to Israel about images. Here the identical two words go out ahead of Israel against somebody else. Same title, reversed direction, five chapters apart. ⚠ The Hebrew puts the phrase in apposition — ‘he is the one crossing over before you, a devouring fire’ — with no particle of comparison anywhere in the clause, and the shelf mostly supplies one. ASV and Geneva read ‘as a devouring fire’/‘as a consuming fire’; RV60 reads «como fuego consumidor» where RV 1909 had kept the bare apposition, «fuego consumidor». NWT 1984 is the tightest witness on the shelf here, breaking it out as its own flat sentence — ‘A consuming fire he is.’ — matched by TNM 1987, «Un fuego consumidor es él.» And KJV alone moves the fire across a semicolon and out of God’s title entirely, into the manner of the killing: ‘goeth over before thee; as a consuming fire he shall destroy them’. Mister keeps the apposition.

⚠ Three times in one verse the Hebrew adds the free-standing pronoun hu where the verb already carries its subject — he is the one crossing, he will destroy them, he will bring them low — a stress the language uses only when it wants the actor named against some other candidate. The other candidate is in the sentence: two clauses later, Israel does the dispossessing. NWT 1984 catches one of the three (‘he himself will subdue them’), as does TNM 1987 («él mismo los sojuzgará»); both of their own later revisions drop it, the first of five places in this chapter where that happens.

★ The denial is made three times, and each time it is put differently. Verse 4 forbids the thought (‘do not say in your heart…’); verse 5 states the fact flatly and adds a second ground; verse 6 turns it into something Israel must actively KNOW. The Hebrew noun is tzedaqah, and this project has now met it travelling three different roads: at Genesis 15:6 it is RECKONED to Abram for trusting; at Deuteronomy 6:25 (already on these pages) it is PROMISED to Israel for doing; and here, three times over, it is DENIED as a ground of anything. One noun, and the Hebrew Bible has already put it on all three sides of its own argument before the New Testament arrives to take it up.

★ Two reasons are given, and neither of them is Israel. The land changes hands because of the rish‘ah of the nations, and because of an oath sworn to three dead men. The second is the older claim — the promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — and the effect of pairing them is that the conquest is grounded entirely outside the generation carrying it out: partly in what somebody else did wrong, partly in what God said to somebody else’s great-grandfather. ⚠ It is worth being plain about the shape of this argument, because it has been quoted in support of conquests that had nothing to do with it: the text is not saying the winners are better. It is at pains, three times in three verses, to say they are not.

⚠ ‘A stiffnecked people’ is the golden calf’s own epithet, handed to the new generation ten verses before the calf is named. The phrase am qesheh-oref stands six times in the Hebrew Bible: four in the calf’s own aftermath (Exodus 32:9; 33:3, 5; 34:9, all already on these pages), and two here, at v6 and at v13. Proverbs 29:1 has the image without the phrase — a MAN who stiffens his neck, maqsheh-oref, with no ‘people’ in it. So the insult arrives here with a history the hearers have not yet been told, and the rest of the chapter is Moses explaining where he got it. ⚠ NWT 2013 and TNM 2019 both give up the neck — ‘an obstinate people’, «un pueblo terco» — where NWT 1984 and TNM 1987 keep it (‘stiff-necked’, «de dura cerviz»), which costs the reader the link to the four Exodus verses. Douay-Rheims intensifies instead, ‘a VERY stiffnecked people’, supplying an intensifier the Hebrew does not have at this verse (though it does at v20, of Aaron), and following the Vulgate in doing so. ⚠ And TLB does something none of the others do: it calls Israel ‘a wicked, stubborn people’ — importing the very word, wickedness, that vv4 and 5 reserve twice over for the NATIONS. The paraphrase does it again seven verses later at vv13–14, ‘this evil, stubborn people’. Twice is a habit, not a slip, and it quietly answers the question the chapter is built to leave open.

★ Deuteronomy 8 was built on shakach, to forget, and its object was God. Three of that chapter’s twenty verses warn against forgetting Jehovah — four times over, since 8:19 doubles the verb — and the danger there was prosperity: houses built, herds multiplied, silver increased, and only then the forgetting. This chapter opens its retelling with the same verb — eight verses after Deuteronomy 8’s last use of it — and swaps the object. Zekhor, al-tishkach — do not forget what you did. Chapter 8: do not forget who fed you. Chapter 9: do not forget who you were while he was feeding you. The pair is the sermon’s whole argument in two verbs.

⚠ The two imperatives sit side by side with nothing between them, which most of the shelf will not leave alone. KJV, Geneva and Douay-Rheims all insert a conjunction — ‘Remember, and forget not’ — and so does TNM 2019, «Acuérdate y nunca te olvides»; NIV supplies an object the Hebrew does not have (‘Remember this’), and so does NVI («Recuerda esto»); TLB converts the command into a question, ‘Don’t you remember’. Six witnesses keep the two imperatives bare, with nothing joining them: ASV ‘Remember, forget thou not’, NWT 1984 ‘Remember: Do not forget’ and NWT 2013 ‘Remember—never forget—’, TNM 1987 «Acuérdate: No olvides», RV 1909 «Acuérdate, no te olvides» and RV60 «Acuérdate, no olvides». Mister keeps it too, and marks the join with a full stop rather than a comma, since the second imperative is not a softening of the first.

★ Mid-verse, without warning, ‘you’ stops being one person and becomes a crowd — and it stays a crowd for the rest of the chapter. Verified against the archived Hebrew, verse by verse: there is not one second-person plural form anywhere in vv1–6. Every pronoun and every verb is singular — you are crossing, you know, you have heard, you shall know, do not say in your heart, you are a stiffnecked people. The first plural in the chapter arrives in the second half of this verse, at ad-bo’akhem, ‘until YOUR coming to this place’, and from there to v25 every address to Israel is plural. The one singular ‘you’ left inside the retelling belongs to somebody else: at vv12–14 it is God speaking to Moses. So the future is put to Israel as though to a single man; the past is put to them as a mob. English cannot show it and does not try. ⚠ The Spanish edition of this chapter CAN and does — tú through v7a, ustedes from v7b — so the two columns of this page deliberately diverge here, and the Spanish reader simply sees what the English reader has to be told. Most of the shelf shows some of it by accident of its own age: ASV keeps ‘thou wentest forth…until ye came unto this place, ye have been rebellious’ and KJV the same shift in its own words, ‘thou didst depart…until ye came unto this place’, and RV 1909 and RV60 keep it in the verbs («saliste…entrasteis…habéis sido»). NIV and NVI, having only one modern ‘you’ between them, lose it entirely.

★ ‘You have been rebellious with Jehovah’ — three Hebrew words that occur exactly twice in the whole Bible, and both times in this chapter. Mamrim heyitem im-YHVH closes this verse and opens v24, seventeen verses later, and the search of all 929 archived chapters of the Hebrew Bible returns those two verses and nothing else. Everything between them is the evidence for the sentence they bracket, and the only thing that changes on the second pass is the clock: here the rebellion is measured from Israel’s own exodus, there from the day Moses personally met them. Deuteronomy 8’s closing note asked whether a chapter quoting its own opening at its close would turn out to be a habit of this book or a one-off. It is a habit — and here it is tighter than it was there, because this time the repeated words are unique to the pair.

⚠ Hit’annaf at v8, ‘was incensed’, is a rare verb: six occurrences in the Hebrew Bible, four of them in this book (1:37 and 4:21, both of Moses himself and both already on these pages; then v8 and v20 here), and two outside it, of Solomon and of the northern kingdom. It is not the ordinary word for God being angry, and three of its four Deuteronomy uses aim it at a named leader rather than at the nation — twice at Moses, once at Aaron. This verse is the exception that keeps it from being a rule: here it lands on the people.

★ ‘Bread I did not eat, and water I did not drink’ — one chapter after the sentence about bread. Deuteronomy 8:3 (already on these pages) is the famous one: not by bread alone does the human live, but by every utterance that comes from the mouth of Jehovah. Twenty-six verses later the man who said it reports doing exactly that, twice, for forty days each time (v9 and v18), on a mountain, with the utterances in his hands. Deuteronomy makes no comment on the join and this translation adds none; the two sentences are simply set close enough together to be read in one breath. ⚠ That the same forty-day fast is what Matthew puts Jesus into before quoting 8:3 back at the tempter (Matthew 4:4, already on these pages) is a further step again, and one the Hebrew text itself does not take.

⚠ The tablets get two names in one sentence and keep both: luchot ha-avanim, the tablets of the STONE, and luchot ha-berit, the tablets of the COVENANT — material and function, side by side, and the second pair is repeated alone at v11 and v15. What Moses carries down the mountain and smashes is never called ‘the law’; it is called the covenant. That is why breaking it is an event and not an accident.

★ ‘On the day of the qahal’ — the day of the ASSEMBLY, and the first of only three uses of the phrase. Be-yom ha-qahal occurs three times in the Hebrew Bible, all in this book: here, then at 10:4 and 18:16, neither yet on these pages. It names the day Israel stood at the mountain and heard the voice out of the fire — a single date, treated as the founding assembly. ⚠ The word is worth watching because of what happens to it in Greek: qahal is regularly rendered ekklēsia in the Greek Old Testament — reported here rather than verified, since this project’s archive carries the Masoretic Hebrew and the critical Greek New Testament but no Septuagint, and the rendering is in any case not uniform (synagōgē also translates it) — the noun the New Testament will use for a congregation of believers — which this project renders ‘congregation’ and never ‘church’. The first congregation, on that vocabulary, is this one: everybody, at the foot of a burning mountain, before there is a tabernacle or a priesthood or a page of law written down.

⚠ ‘Written with the finger of God’ is left exactly as it stands. It is an anthropomorphism the Hebrew is content with, and twelve of the thirteen witnesses keep the finger — eleven of them reading ‘the finger of God’ or «el dedo de Dios» outright, and NVI rephrasing it as God writing «con su dedo» himself. Only TLB drops it, leaving tablets ‘on which he had written’ and no hand at all. The temptation to soften it into ‘by God’s own hand’ would be smoothing an image the text chose.

★ ‘YOUR people, whom YOU brought out of Egypt.’ Two possessives in one clause, and both of them have just changed owner. Everywhere else in this chapter Israel is God’s people; at the moment of the calf God hands them to Moses. Exodus 32:7 (already on these pages) does the same thing, though not in quite the same words — ‘your people, whom you brought UP out of the land of Egypt’, he‘elah where Deuteronomy has hotzi, brought OUT. Moses hands them straight back four verses later, and there he uses Deuteronomy’s verb (Exodus 32:11, ‘your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt’). Deuteronomy makes the reader wait fourteen verses for the return, and then does it twice: v26, ‘do not bring YOUR people to ruin, YOUR inheritance’, and v29, the chapter’s last sentence, ‘and they are YOUR people and YOUR inheritance’. The whole prayer at the end of the chapter is an argument about a pronoun.

★ Verse 13 is a quotation, and this translation prints it as one. Word for word, ra’iti et-ha‘am ha-zeh ve-hineh am-qesheh-oref hu is Exodus 32:9, which is already on these pages and reads there: ‘I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiffnecked people.’ What Deuteronomy changes is the frame and not the sentence: Exodus has Jehovah say it TO MOSES, Deuteronomy has him say it TO ME, and adds le’mor, ‘saying’. The quoted clause inside is untouched, because the speaker has changed and the verdict has not. So the English here is deliberately identical to the English already printed at Exodus 32:9, down to keeping ‘behold’ where this project often prefers ‘Look —’ for hineh: a quotation that is reworded stops being visible as a quotation.

★ ‘Let go of me’ is NOT the phrase Exodus uses, and the shelf makes them identical. At Exodus 32:10 the Hebrew is hanichah li, from nuach, to set down or leave be — rendered on these pages ‘let me alone’. Here it is heref mimeni, from raphah, to slacken, to let a grip go loose; the same verb tells a man to STOP in the middle of doing something. Two different images — being left in peace, and being released from a hold — and almost every witness on both shelves prints the same English or Spanish for both (‘let me alone’, «déjame»). NWT 1984 is the one that separates them, reading ‘Let me alone’ here against its own ‘So now let me be’ at Exodus 32:10. Its NWT 2013 revision reads ‘Let me be’ here and the same words there, losing the distinction. Mister renders it ‘let go of me’ and keeps ‘let me alone’ where it already stands at Exodus 32:10, so that the two verses read differently on this site because they read differently in Hebrew.

★ The offer to Moses is bigger here than it was in Exodus, and it is measured against the people it would replace. Exodus 32:10: ‘I will make of you a GREAT nation’ — goy gadol, the same two words promised to Abram at Genesis 12:2 (already on these pages), with no comparison in it. Deuteronomy 9:14: goy atzum va-rav mimenu, a nation MIGHTIER AND MORE NUMEROUS THAN THEY. The comparative is the addition, and it points backwards: verse 1 opened this chapter by describing the Canaanite nations as gedolim va-atzumim mimeka, greater and mightier than YOU. Thirteen verses later God offers to build, out of one man, exactly the kind of nation the chapter began by holding up as terrifying. ⚠ Exodus has ‘blot out’ in its telling too, twice over and in two mouths: Moses offers his own name out of God’s book (Exodus 32:32), and God answers with the same verb aimed at the individual sinner — ‘Whoever has sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book’ (Exodus 32:33, already on these pages). So what Deuteronomy changes is not whose verb it is but what it is aimed at: not a name in a book but a name under the heavens, and not one man but a nation.

⚠ Three witnesses read the offer as a promotion rather than a replacement. Douay-Rheims reads ‘set thee over a nation’, and both Spanish Reina-Valeras agree — RV 1909 «yo te pondré sobre gente fuerte», RV60 «te pondré sobre una nación fuerte». That is a different offer altogether: Moses made ruler of a great nation, rather than made INTO one. The Hebrew verb is asah with the preposition le-, the ordinary construction for making something into something, and every other witness on both shelves reads it that way — including NVI, which breaks with the Reina-Valera tradition here («De ti, en cambio, haré una nación»). The Douay-Rheims translates the Vulgate, and its Spanish company on this reading is the reason to name it rather than pass over it: an old Latin-shaped reading that survived four centuries in the Spanish shelf and was corrected only by the newest version on it. ⚠ NVI makes an addition of its own in the same verse, «borre hasta el recuerdo de su nombre» — blot out even the MEMORY of their name — where the Hebrew says only the name. ⚠ And the cohortative ‘let me make you’ (NWT 1984, TNM 1987 «déjame hacer de ti») flattens to a plain future in TNM 2019 alone, «y haré de ti» — NWT 2013 keeps it. The third of this chapter’s five, and the only one of the five that happens on the Spanish shelf and not the English.

★ Two hands, twice, and the preposition turns over between them. At v15 the tablets are al shtei yadai, ON my two hands — carried, balanced, the posture of someone bringing something down carefully. At v17 they go me‘al shtei yadai, from off my two hands. One letter of difference, and it is the whole gesture. Most of the shelf keeps the two hands (ASV ‘cast them out of my two hands’, Geneva, RV 1909 and RV60 «de mis dos manos»); Douay-Rheims drops the count and the first verb together, ‘I cast the tables out of my hands’, losing the seizing; NIV keeps the seizing and drops the count, and turns the shattering into a participle, ‘breaking them to pieces’, which subordinates the one action the sentence exists to report. ⚠ NWT 1984 reads ‘from both my hands’ and NWT 2013 ‘with both my hands’ — source changed to instrument, the fourth of the five 1984/1987-versus-2013/2019 shifts in this chapter, and on the Spanish side TNM 2019 goes further again, adding a floor to throw them at that the Hebrew does not mention.

★ Exodus breaks them ‘at the foot of the mountain’; Deuteronomy breaks them ‘before your eyes’. Exodus 32:19 (already on these pages) locates the act — tachat ha-har — and gives its cause: he came near the camp, he SAW the calf and the dancing, and his anger burned. Deuteronomy 9:16–17 keeps the seeing and drops both of the others. There is no dancing in this account, and there is no anger of Moses anywhere in this chapter — the only person angry in Deuteronomy’s telling is God. What Deuteronomy puts in their place is an audience: le-eineikhem, before YOUR eyes, addressed to the very people whose parents were watching. The retelling turns a private loss of temper into a public act performed at them.

⚠ TLB supplies the missing drama and then some: ‘I lifted the tablets high above my head and dashed them to the ground!’ The Hebrew has neither the head nor the ground. It is the paraphrase’s standing habit — filling in a physical picture nothing else on the shelf offers — and here it restores exactly the heat that Deuteronomy went to the trouble of removing.

★ Verse 20 reports two things that Exodus, telling the same story at length, never mentions. Read Exodus 32 straight through, as this project has (it is already on these pages): Moses questions Aaron and gets the famous excuse about the fire and the calf (32:21–24); the chapter ends with a plague on the PEOPLE for the calf ‘which Aaron made’ (32:35). Nowhere does it say God intended to destroy Aaron, and nowhere does Moses pray for him. Both of those come only from this verse, forty years later, in the mouth of the man who was there. ⚠ Two honest limits on how far that can be pushed. God IS angry with Aaron elsewhere — at Numbers 12:9 (already on these pages) his anger burns against Aaron and Miriam together — so the rarity here is not the anger but its stated aim, to destroy him. And Numbers 12 is the near-miss on the second half too, and an instructive one: Aaron asks Moses to intercede, and the prayer Moses actually prays is for Miriam (‘Heal her now, O God’). In Numbers 12 he asks and his sister is prayed for; here he does not ask, and he is.

⚠ The chapter records the prayer and does not record an answer. Verse 19 ends the people’s case with a result — ‘and Jehovah listened to me that time also’ — and then verse 20 gives Aaron the prayer and stops. Aaron lives, so the reader may draw the obvious inference; the text declines to state it. TLB is the one witness that closes the gap, ending the verse with the outcome supplied outright. Every other version on both shelves stops where the Hebrew stops. It is a small addition and a real one: the difference between a text that reports a prayer and a text that reports it working.

⚠ ‘That time ALSO’ (v19) and ‘ALSO for Aaron’ (v20) are the same little word gam twice over, and together they quietly say that this was not the first such rescue and Aaron was not the only beneficiary. The chapter is counting intercessions without ever listing them.

⚠ Yagorti, ‘I was in dread’, is the only emotion the chapter gives Moses, and it is fear rather than anger — fear of God, not of the mob. Set beside Exodus 32:19, where Moses’ anger burns and the tablets go down, Deuteronomy’s retelling has swapped his one recorded feeling for a different one.

★ The grammar of verse 21 identifies the calf with the sin, and the modern shelf is uncomfortable with it. Hebrew word order: ve-et chattatkhem asher-asitem et-ha‘egel laqachti — ‘And your sin, which you made — the calf — I took’. What Moses takes and burns is not an object associated with a sin; the direct object of the verb is the sin, with ‘the calf’ standing in apposition to it. The older witnesses keep it: KJV and ASV both read ‘I took your sin, the calf’, and RV 1909 «vuestro pecado, el becerro». Geneva keeps it and marks it, reading ‘I took your sin, I mean the calf’ — an editorial nudge telling the reader the two nouns are the same thing rather than two. And so, unexpectedly for a paraphrase, does TLB: ‘your sin—the calf you had made’. Five witnesses soften it, in three different ways. Two keep the apposition but demote the head noun from a sin to a thing: NWT 2013 ‘the sinful thing you made, the calf’ where NWT 1984 had ‘YOUR sin that YOU had made, the calf’, and NIV makes the identical move, ‘that sinful thing of yours, the calf you had made’. RV60 instead inserts a noun between them, «el objeto de vuestro pecado». TNM 2019 dissolves the apposition outright into a relative clause. And NVI reverses the direction of cause altogether, «ese ídolo que los hizo pecar» — the idol that MADE them sin, rather than the idol that WAS the sin. That is the fifth of this chapter’s 1984/1987-versus-2013/2019 shifts, and the second of three places in this chapter where RV60 moves away from a literalism RV 1909 had kept — the other two are the bare apposition at v3 and the «dicho» at v23 below.

⚠ What Deuteronomy does with the dust is not what Exodus does with it. Exodus 32:20 (already on these pages) has three verbs and an ending: he burned it, ground it, scattered it on the water — and made the Israelites DRINK it. Deuteronomy has three verbs (burned, beat, ground fine) and a destination: he threw the dust into ha-nachal ha-yored min ha-har, the brook coming down from the mountain, and says nothing about anyone drinking. Two details worth noticing rather than harmonising: Deuteronomy adds a running stream at the mountain that Exodus does not mention, and drops the one action in Exodus’s account that made the people swallow their own idol. This translation prints each account as it stands; readings differ, and neither is adjusted toward the other.

⚠ Verse 22 names three places in one breath and explains none of them, because the audience is assumed to know: Taberah, ‘Burning’, named at Numbers 11:3 (already on these pages) and mentioned in only one other verse in the entire Hebrew Bible — this one; Massah, ‘Testing’, whose only other appearance on these pages is Deuteronomy 6:16 (the place-name stands three times in the book — 6:16, here, and 33:8); and Kibroth-hattaavah, ‘the Graves of Craving’, from Numbers 11:34. Two of the three are burial-or-burning names given after the event they commemorate, which is what makes the list work as an argument: the map itself is the evidence.

★ ‘You rebelled against the MOUTH of Jehovah’ — and not one of the thirteen witnesses on either shelf prints the mouth. The Hebrew at v23 is pi YHVH, two words, the second of them the divine name and the first of them a body part. Eleven of the thirteen render it as an order or a command: KJV, ASV, Geneva and Douay-Rheims all read ‘the commandment’; NIV ‘the command’; NWT 1984 and NWT 2013 ‘the order’, with TNM 1987, TNM 2019 and NVI reading «la orden»; and RV60 «al mandato». Only TLB drops the noun altogether, reporting simply that Israel ‘refused to obey him’. The closest any of them comes to the image is RV 1909’s «al dicho de Jehová» — the SAYING — which at least keeps it a thing that was spoken. ★ The reason to keep the mouth is one chapter back. Deuteronomy 8:3 (already on these pages) is built on the same two words: the human lives ‘by every utterance that comes from the MOUTH of Jehovah’. Print ‘commandment’ here and the two verses stop rhyming; keep the mouth, and Deuteronomy 9:23 is the exact negative of Deuteronomy 8:3 — what you live by is the thing you rebelled against. Mister keeps it.

⚠ Verse 24 closes the bracket opened at v7 (see that note): the same three words, and the only two places in the Hebrew Bible they occur. What changes is the starting date — v7 counts from the exodus, v24 from ‘the day I knew you’, which is Moses putting his own testimony behind the charge instead of the nation’s history.

★ The prayer’s worst sentence is a quotation of Israel’s own words, put into the mouths of strangers. At Deuteronomy 1:27 (already on these pages) the exodus generation grumbles in its tents: be-sin’at YHVH otanu hotzi’anu me-eretz mitzrayim — ‘because Jehovah HATED us he brought us out of the land of Egypt’ — to destroy them. Here at v28 Moses argues that God must not destroy Israel, because if he does, the watching world will say u-mi-sin’ato otam hotzi’am, ‘and out of his hatred of them he brought them out’, to kill them in the wilderness. The same noun for the hatred, the same verb for the bringing-out, the same shape of sentence — only the killing-word differs. The blasphemy Moses is trying to prevent the nations from uttering is a sentence his own people said out loud eight chapters ago. It is not presented as a clever argument, and the text does not comment; the two verses simply stand in the same book.

⚠ Two charges, and four of the thirteen witnesses make them alternatives rather than a pair. The Hebrew joins them with a plain waw: God was not ABLE, AND he HATED them. Geneva reads ‘or because he hated them’, and both Reina-Valeras do the same (RV 1909 «ó porque los aborrecía», RV60 «o porque los aborrecía»), and so, in its own way, does TLB, which splits the sentence into two quoted alternatives joined by ‘or’. That turns a compound accusation — he was weak AND he was malicious — into a choice between two explanations. NVI restores the conjunction («Y como los aborrecía»). Mister keeps the pair, because the pair is the point: the two charges cover the whole ground between impotence and cruelty, and leave God no third character to be.

⚠ ‘Lest the LAND say’ — and the Hebrew’s own grammar is already uneasy about it. The subject ha-aretz is a feminine singular noun, and the verb attached to it, yomru, is masculine PLURAL: strictly, ‘lest the land, they say’. So the versions that supply people to do the speaking are not inventing — they are following the verb. Six of the thirteen do: Douay-Rheims ‘the inhabitants of the land’, NWT 2013 ‘the people of the land’, TNM 2019 «la gente del país», RV 1909 and RV60 both «digan los de la tierra», and NVI, which puts the speaking inside the country («en el país…digan»). KJV, ASV, NIV and NWT 1984 keep the land itself as the speaker, and this translation does too: a personified country is a figure the Hebrew Bible uses often enough, and the strangeness is worth keeping when it is the text’s own. ⚠ Geneva makes a different change in the same clause, ‘the country whence thou broughtest THEM’ — where the Hebrew has hotzetanu, brought US out, with Moses standing inside the group he is pleading for. ⚠ TLB replaces the land with ‘the Egyptians’, which is Exodus 32:12’s wording imported into Deuteronomy’s sentence — and Exodus 32:12 is a real and different reading: there it is Egypt who would speak, and the killing would be ‘in the mountains’, not in the wilderness. Two accounts, two witnesses to the slander; harmonising them costs the reader the difference.

★ The prayer ends by giving the pronouns back. God said ‘YOUR people’ to Moses at v12; Moses says ‘YOUR people and YOUR inheritance’ at v26 and again as the chapter’s last words at v29, and in between he asks God to look at Abraham, Isaac and Jacob instead of at the people in front of him — the same three names the chapter’s opening argument used at v5. He offers no defence of Israel at all. Verse 27 asks God to look AWAY from their hardness, their wickedness and their sin, naming all three; the case is not that they are better than the charge, but that they belong to him. ⚠ Nachalah, inheritance, is where one family of editions parts company with the other nine witnesses: NWT 1984 ‘your private property’ and TNM 1987 «tu propiedad particular», with NWT 2013 ‘your personal possession’ and TNM 2019 «tu propiedad» keeping the same idea in plainer words. Everything else on both shelves reads inheritance or heredad. It is a defensible gloss of a word whose root is about allotted possession, and it is worth naming as the outlier it is: the Hebrew noun is the same one that names Israel’s share of the land, and the metaphor of the chapter is family, not title.

⚠ Adonai YHVH at v26 is the double form, and this project renders it ‘Lord Jehovah’ — the same pairing ASV uses, ‘O Lord Jehovah’, and, on the Spanish shelf, RV 1909 and RV60 alike, «Oh Señor Jehová». It is the only place in the chapter where Moses addresses God by anything other than the name alone, and it comes at the exact moment he starts arguing.