Deuteronomy 29

¹These are the words of the covenant which the LORD commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant which he made with them in Horeb. ²Moses called to all Israel, and said to them:

Your eyes have seen all that the LORD did in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land; ³the great trials which your eyes saw, the signs, and those great wonders. ⁴But the LORD has not given you a heart to know, eyes to see, and ears to hear, to this day. ⁵I have led you forty years in the wilderness. Your clothes have not grown old on you, and your sandals have not grown old on your feet. ⁶You have not eaten bread, neither have you drunk wine or strong drink, that you may know that I am the LORD your God. ⁷When you came to this place, Sihon the king of Heshbon and Og the king of Bashan came out against us to battle, and we struck them. ⁸We took their land, and gave it for an inheritance to the Reubenites, and to the Gadites, and to the half-tribe of the Manassites. ⁹Therefore keep the words of this covenant and do them, that you may prosper in all that you do. ¹⁰All of you stand today in the presence of the LORD your God: your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your officers, even all the men of Israel, ¹¹your little ones, your wives, and the foreigners who are in the middle of your camps, from the one who cuts your wood to the one who draws your water, ¹²that you may enter into the covenant of the LORD your God, and into his oath, which the LORD your God makes with you today, ¹³that he may establish you today as his people, and that he may be your God, as he spoke to you and as he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. ¹⁴Neither do I make this covenant and this oath with you only, ¹⁵but with those who stand here with us today before the LORD our God, and also with those who are not here with us today ¹⁶(for you know how we lived in the land of Egypt, and how we came through the middle of the nations through which you passed; ¹⁷and you have seen their abominations and their idols of wood, stone, silver, and gold, which were amongst them); ¹⁸lest there should be amongst you man, woman, family, or tribe whose heart turns away today from the LORD our God, to go to serve the gods of those nations; lest there should be amongst you a root that produces bitter poison; ¹⁹and it happen, when he hears the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying, “I shall have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart,” to destroy the moist with the dry. ²⁰The LORD will not pardon him, but then the LORD’s anger and his jealousy will smoke against that man, and all the curse that is written in this book will fall on him, and the LORD will blot out his name from under the sky. ²¹The LORD will set him apart for evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant written in this book of the law.

²²The generation to come—your children who will rise up after you, and the foreigner who will come from a far land—will say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses with which the LORD has made it sick, ²³that all of its land is sulphur, salt, and burning, that it is not sown, doesn’t produce, nor does any grass grow in it, like the overthrow of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, which the LORD overthrew in his anger, and in his wrath. ²⁴Even all the nations will say, “Why has the LORD done this to this land? What does the heat of this great anger mean?”

²⁵Then men will say, “Because they abandoned the covenant of the LORD, the God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt, ²⁶and went and served other gods and worshipped them, gods that they didn’t know and that he had not given to them. ²⁷Therefore the LORD’s anger burnt against this land, to bring on it all the curses that are written in this book. ²⁸The LORD rooted them out of their land in anger, in wrath, and in great indignation, and thrust them into another land, as it is today.”

²⁹The secret things belong to the LORD our God; but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.