Deuteronomy 7:1-18 ▼

1 “When your God YHWH brings you into the land to where you are going in to possess it, and He has cast out many nations from your presence, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations more numerous and mighty than you,

2 and your God YHWH has given them before you, then you have struck them—you utterly devote them—you do not make a covenant with them, nor do you favor them.

3 And you do not join in marriage with them; you do not give your daughter to his son, and you do not take his daughter to your son,

4 for he turns aside your son from after Me, and they have served other gods; and the anger of YHWH has burned against you and has destroyed you quickly.

5 But thus you do to them: you break down their altars, and you shatter their standing pillars, and you cut down their Asherim, and you burn their carved images with fire.

6 For you [are] a holy people to your God YHWH; your God YHWH has fixed on you, to be to Him for a peculiar people, out of all the peoples who [are] on the face of the ground.

7 YHWH has delighted in you and fixes on you, not because of your being more numerous than any of the peoples, for you [are] the least of all the peoples,

8 but because of YHWH’s loving you, and because of His keeping the oath which He has sworn to your fathers; YHWH has brought you out by a strong hand, and ransoms you from a house of servants, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

9 And you have known that He, your God YHWH, [is] God, the faithful God keeping the covenant and the kindness with those loving Him and with those keeping His commands, for one thousand generations,

10 and repaying to those hating Him to their face, to destroy them; He does not delay to him who is hating Him, He repays [it] to him to his face.

11 And you have kept the command, and the statutes, and the judgments, which I am commanding you today to do them.

12 And it has been, because you hear these judgments, and have kept and done them, that your God YHWH has kept the covenant and the kindness with you which He has sworn to your fathers,

13 and has loved you, and blessed you, and multiplied you, and has blessed the fruit of your womb, and the fruit of your ground, your grain, and your new wine, and your oil, the increase of your oxen, and the wealth of your flock, on the ground which He has sworn to your fathers to give to you.

14 Blessed are you above all the peoples; there is not a barren man or a barren woman in you—nor among your livestock;

15 and YHWH has turned aside every sickness from you, and none of the evil diseases of Egypt (which you have known) does He put on you, and He has put them on all hating you.

16 And you have consumed all the peoples whom your God YHWH is giving to you; your eye has no pity on them, and you do not serve their gods, for it [is] a snare to you.

17 When you say in your heart, These nations [are] more numerous than I, how am I able to dispossess them?

18 You are not afraid of them; you surely remember that which your God YHWH has done to Pharaoh and to all of Egypt,