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Deuteronomy 7: What the Passage Says

102 claims across 26 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Deuteronomy 7 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

Moses tells Israel what to do when the LORD brings them into the land: drive out the seven nations living there, destroy them completely, make no treaty with them, and do not intermarry with them, because that would pull their children into worshiping other gods. He tells them to tear down the altars, pillars, Asherah poles, and idols. He explains that God chose them not because they were large but because he loved them and kept his oath to their ancestors, and he promises blessing on their families, crops, herds, and health if they obey. He tells them not to fear these nations, since God will drive them out little by little, and warns them not to take the silver or gold from the idols or bring any detestable thing into their homes.

Claim by Claim

  1. 7:1
    • When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to take possession of it, this instruction applies.
    • The LORD your God will clear away many nations before you.
    • The nations cleared away include the Hittites.
    • The nations cleared away include the Girgashites.
    • The nations cleared away include the Amorites.
    • The nations cleared away include the Canaanites.
    • The nations cleared away include the Perizzites.
    • The nations cleared away include the Hivites.
    • The nations cleared away include the Jebusites.
    • These are seven nations.
    • These seven nations are more numerous and stronger than you.
  2. 7:2
    • The LORD your God will give them over to you.
    • You shall strike them down.
    • You shall devote them entirely to destruction.
    • You shall make no covenant with them.
    • You shall show them no mercy.
  3. 7:3
    • You shall not intermarry with them.
    • You shall not give your daughter to their son.
    • You shall not take their daughter for your son.
  4. 7:4
    • They will turn your son away from following the LORD.
    • Your son and those turned away will serve other gods.
    • The anger of the LORD will burn against you.
    • The LORD will destroy you quickly.
  5. 7:5
    • Instead you shall deal with them this way.
    • You shall tear down their altars.
    • You shall smash their standing pillars.
    • You shall cut down their Asherah poles.
    • You shall burn their carved images with fire.
  6. 7:6
    • You are a holy people belonging to the LORD your God.
    • The LORD your God chose you to be his own treasured people.
    • He chose you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth.
  7. 7:7
    • The LORD did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than any other people.
    • You were the fewest of all peoples.
  8. 7:8
    • The LORD brought you out because he loved you.
    • The LORD brought you out because he kept the oath he swore to your fathers.
    • The LORD brought you out with a mighty hand.
    • The LORD redeemed you from the house of slaves.
    • The LORD redeemed you from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
  9. 7:9
    • You are to know that the LORD your God is God.
    • He is the faithful God.
    • He keeps covenant and steadfast love to a thousand generations.
    • He keeps it with those who love him and keep his commandments.
  10. 7:10
    • He repays those who hate him to their face by destroying them.
    • He will not delay toward the one who hates him.
    • He will repay the one who hates him to his face.
  11. 7:11
    • You shall keep the commandment, the statutes, and the ordinances.
    • The speaker is commanding them this day.
    • You are to do them.
  12. 7:12
    • If you listen to these ordinances and keep them and do them, this will follow.
    • The LORD your God will keep with you the covenant and the steadfast love that he swore to your fathers.
  13. 7:13
    • He will love you.
    • He will bless you.
    • He will multiply you.
    • He will bless the fruit of your womb.
    • He will bless the fruit of your ground.
    • He will bless your grain, your new wine, and your oil.
    • He will bless the offspring of your cattle and the young of your flock.
    • This will be in the land he swore to your fathers to give you.
  14. 7:14
    • You will be blessed above all peoples.
    • There will be no barren male or female among you.
    • There will be no barren animal among your livestock.
  15. 7:15
    • The LORD will remove all sickness from you.
    • He will not put on you any of the evil diseases of Egypt that you know.
    • He will lay those diseases on all who hate you.
  16. 7:16
    • You shall consume all the peoples the LORD your God gives over to you.
    • Your eye shall not pity them.
    • You shall not serve their gods.
    • Serving their gods would be a snare to you.
  17. 7:17
    • You may say in your heart that these nations are more numerous than you.
    • You may ask how you can dispossess them.
  18. 7:18
    • You shall not be afraid of them.
    • You shall surely remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt.
  19. 7:19
    • Your eyes saw the great trials.
    • Your eyes saw the signs and the wonders.
    • Your eyes saw the mighty hand and the outstretched arm.
    • By these the LORD your God brought you out.
    • The LORD your God will do the same to all the peoples you fear.
  20. 7:20
    • The LORD your God will send the hornet among them.
    • He will do so until those who are left and who hide themselves from you perish.
  21. 7:21
    • You shall not be terrified before them.
    • The LORD your God is in your midst.
    • He is a great and awesome God.
  22. 7:22
    • The LORD your God will clear away those nations before you little by little.
    • You will not be able to finish them off quickly.
    • If they were destroyed quickly the wild beasts of the field would multiply against you.
  23. 7:23
    • The LORD your God will give them over to you.
    • He will throw them into great confusion.
    • He will do so until they are destroyed.
  24. 7:24
    • He will give their kings into your hand.
    • You shall wipe out their name from under heaven.
    • No man will be able to stand before you.
    • This will continue until you have destroyed them.
  25. 7:25
    • You shall burn the carved images of their gods with fire.
    • You shall not covet the silver or gold on them.
    • You shall not take that silver or gold for yourself.
    • Taking it would ensnare you.
    • It is an abomination to the LORD your God.
  26. 7:26
    • You shall not bring an abomination into your house.
    • If you do you will become devoted to destruction like it.
    • You shall utterly detest it.
    • You shall utterly abhor it.
    • It is devoted to destruction.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

7:1
These seven names are the peoples living in Canaan before Israel settled there, listed here as a set formula rather than a survey. "Canaanite" is the broadest of them and is sometimes used for all the inhabitants of the land; the Hittites shared a name with the empire in what is now Turkey, though the group named here seems to have been a local one; the Jebusites are elsewhere connected with Jerusalem before David took it. Several of the other names are known almost only from lists like this one.
7:2
"Set apart for complete destruction" translates a single Hebrew word (herem). It means placing something permanently outside ordinary human use by handing it over to God, for a city or an army, by destroying it rather than taking it as plunder or absorbing it. The KJV's "utterly destroy" carries only the destruction, not the idea of things being surrendered to God. A "covenant" or "treaty" here is a formal, binding agreement between peoples, sworn with oaths and usually setting out obligations on both sides.
7:3
In this world, marriage between families was a political act as much as a personal one: giving and taking daughters was one of the standard ways two groups sealed a lasting alliance. The ban on intermarriage is therefore closely tied to the ban on treaties in the previous verse.
7:4
"Kindled" means set on fire. The King James Version pictures anger as a flame that catches and burns.
7:5
Four items of ordinary Canaanite worship. An altar is a raised structure, usually of stone, on which animals and other offerings were burned. The "sacred stone pillars" (KJV "images") are upright standing stones set up to mark a holy place or represent a god. An "Asherah pole" is a wooden pole or living tree standing for the goddess Asherah. The "carved images" (KJV "graven images") are figures cut from wood or stone, often plated with precious metal, see verse 25.
7:6
"Holy" in the Hebrew does not mean morally pure; it means set apart, reserved for one particular use. "Treasured people" (KJV "special people") translates a word used of a king's own private hoard, as distinct from the property of the kingdom, a personal possession kept back for himself.
7:8
"With a mighty hand" is a stock phrase for overwhelming force, borrowed from the way Egyptian kings described their own power. "Redeemed" (here "bought back") is the vocabulary of the marketplace and the family: paying a price to get a relative, a slave, or a piece of land back out of someone else's hands. The KJV's "house of bondmen" is literally "house of slaves."
7:9
A covenant is a binding agreement sworn with an oath, spelling out what each side owes the other; it is the basic term for the arrangement between God and Israel. "Steady love" (KJV "mercy") translates hesed, a word for loyal, committed kindness shown by someone inside an ongoing relationship, closer to "faithfulness" or "unfailing loyalty" than to pity. "A thousand generations" is a way of saying "beyond counting," not a fixed sum; it is deliberately set against the "third and fourth generation" of punishment named in the Ten Commandments.
7:10
"To his face" is an idiom meaning directly and in person, with no intermediary and no delay, the point picked up by "he will not put it off."
7:11
"Commands, rules, and decisions" (KJV "commandments, statutes, judgments") are three overlapping Hebrew terms for kinds of law: direct orders, fixed standing regulations, and rulings of the sort a judge hands down. Used together like this they mean the whole body of law rather than three separate categories.
7:12
"Hearken" means listen and obey. "Sware" is the old past tense of swear, meaning he made a solemn promise.
7:13
Grain, new wine, and olive oil are the three staple products of the land, and naming them together is a standard shorthand for agricultural prosperity. "New wine" is the fresh juice of the recent harvest. "The fruit of your womb" (here "your children") is the same word applied to people that is applied to crops, holding human and agricultural fertility in one phrase.
7:14
"Barren" means unable to have babies. In this world children were survival: extra hands for the farm and someone to care for you when you grew old.
7:15
"The terrible diseases you saw in Egypt" points back to what the audience is assumed to remember from their time there, possibly the plagues of the exodus, possibly illnesses Egypt was simply known for. The text does not specify.
7:16
A "snare" or "trap" is a bird-catcher's device: something that looks harmless, is stepped into unawares, and then holds fast. The image is of being caught before you notice.
7:17
"Say in thine heart" means think to yourself, not speak out loud. "Dispossess" means to push people off the land they hold.
7:19
The KJV's "temptations" does not mean enticements to sin; the older sense is trials or testings, the ordeals Egypt was put through. "Signs and wonders" are events meant to be read as evidence of who is acting. "Outstretched arm," like "mighty hand," is borrowed Egyptian royal language for a king's power in war.
7:20
The Hebrew word rendered "hornet" is rare and its meaning uncertain. It may mean literal hornets or wasps; some take it as a figure for panic or terror sent ahead of an army, and others connect it with Egyptian military campaigns through Canaan, since the bee was a royal symbol of Egypt. Translations keep "hornet" because the ambiguity cannot be resolved.
7:21
The KJV's "terrible" means inspiring terror or awe, not "very bad." The Hebrew word describes something whose presence makes people afraid; "awesome" in its older sense is the nearest modern equivalent.
7:22
Land left empty of people reverts quickly to wilderness. The concern is practical: a countryside cleared all at once, faster than settlers can occupy it, becomes overrun by lions, bears, and boar, which then threaten the newcomers.
7:23
The King James "destroy them with a mighty destruction" flattens a more specific word. The Hebrew describes throwing an army into panic so that its line breaks and it runs, the confusion that turns a battle into a rout.
7:24
To "wipe out a name" means more than erasing an inscription. A person's name carried on in descendants and in being remembered; destroying it means ending the line and the memory of it together, which for a king means the end of his dynasty.
7:25
Wooden or stone idols were commonly overlaid with sheets of silver or gold, so burning the image would leave the precious metal behind, intact and valuable. That salvaged metal is what is forbidden here. "Detestable" (KJV "abomination") translates a word for something a community treats as unfit and repellent, a matter of what is excluded rather than of taste.
7:26
"Set apart for destruction" (KJV "a cursed thing") is the same word used in verse 2: something handed over to God and so barred from ordinary use. The warning is that the status is catching, bringing such an object home puts the household under it too.

Read Deuteronomy 7