Deuteronomy 9: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Moses tells Israel they are about to cross the Jordan and dispossess nations stronger than they are, because the LORD goes ahead of them. He warns them not to credit their own righteousness: the nations are being driven out for their wickedness, and to keep the oath God swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He then retells their record of rebellion, especially the metal calf at Horeb, the broken tablets, his forty days of fasting, and his prayers for the people and for Aaron. The chapter closes with the words of that prayer.

Claim by Claim

1. 9:1
   • Moses calls Israel to hear.
   • Israel is to cross the Jordan this day.
   • Israel is going in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than itself.
   • The cities of those nations are great and fortified up to the heavens.
2. 9:2
   • The people of that land are great and tall.
   • They are the sons of the Anakim.
   • Israel knows about them.
   • Israel has heard it said, "Who can stand before the sons of Anak?"
3. 9:3
   • Israel is to know this day that the LORD its God is the one crossing over ahead of it.
   • The LORD is a consuming fire.
   • The LORD will destroy those nations.
   • The LORD will subdue them before Israel.
   • Israel will dispossess them.
   • Israel will destroy them quickly.
   • This is as the LORD has spoken to Israel.
4. 9:4
   • Israel is not to say in its heart, after the LORD thrusts those nations out before it, that the LORD brought it in to possess this land because of its own righteousness.
   • The LORD is dispossessing these nations before Israel because of the wickedness of those nations.
5. 9:5
   • Israel is not going in to possess their land because of its righteousness.
   • Israel is not going in to possess their land because of the uprightness of its heart.
   • The LORD Israel's God is dispossessing these nations before Israel because of the wickedness of those nations.
   • The LORD is doing this to establish the word he swore to Israel's fathers.
   • The fathers to whom the LORD swore are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
6. 9:6
   • Israel is to know that the LORD its God is not giving it this good land to possess because of its righteousness.
   • The land being given is good.
   • Israel is a stiff-necked people.
7. 9:7
   • Israel is commanded to remember.
   • Israel is commanded not to forget how it provoked the LORD its God to wrath in the wilderness.
   • From the day Israel left the land of Egypt until they came to this place, they have been rebellious against the LORD.
8. 9:8
   • At Horeb Israel provoked the LORD to wrath.
   • The LORD was angry with Israel enough to destroy them.
9. 9:9
   • Moses went up the mountain to receive the tablets of stone.
   • The tablets of stone were the tablets of the covenant that the LORD made with Israel.
   • Moses stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights.
   • Moses ate no bread during that time.
   • Moses drank no water during that time.
10. 9:10
    • The LORD gave Moses the two tablets of stone.
    • The tablets were written with the finger of God.
    • On the tablets were all the words the LORD spoke with Israel on the mountain.
    • The LORD spoke those words from the midst of the fire.
    • The LORD spoke those words on the day of the assembly.
11. 9:11
    • At the end of forty days and forty nights the LORD gave Moses the two tablets of stone.
    • Those tablets were the tablets of the covenant.
12. 9:12
    • The LORD said to Moses to arise and go down quickly from there.
    • The LORD said Moses' people had corrupted themselves.
    • The LORD said Moses had brought that people out of Egypt.
    • The LORD said they had quickly turned aside from the way he commanded them.
    • The LORD said they had made themselves a molten image.
13. 9:13
    • The LORD spoke further to Moses.
    • The LORD said he had seen this people.
    • The LORD said this people is a stiff-necked people.
14. 9:14
    • The LORD told Moses to let him alone.
    • The LORD said he would destroy them.
    • The LORD said he would blot out their name from under heaven.
    • The LORD said he would make of Moses a nation mightier and greater than they.
15. 9:15
    • Moses turned and came down from the mountain.
    • The mountain was burning with fire.
    • The two tablets of the covenant were in Moses' two hands.
16. 9:16
    • Moses looked and saw that Israel had sinned against the LORD their God.
    • Israel had made themselves a molten calf.
    • Israel had quickly turned aside from the way the LORD had commanded them.
17. 9:17
    • Moses took hold of the two tablets.
    • Moses threw them out of his two hands.
    • Moses broke them before Israel's eyes.
18. 9:18
    • Moses fell down before the LORD as he had at the first.
    • Moses fell down for forty days and forty nights.
    • Moses ate no bread during that time.
    • Moses drank no water during that time.
    • Moses did this because of all the sins Israel had sinned.
    • Israel had done evil in the sight of the LORD.
    • Israel's doing evil provoked the LORD to anger.
19. 9:19
    • Moses was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure with which the LORD was wroth against Israel.
    • The LORD's wrath was enough to destroy Israel.
    • The LORD listened to Moses at that time also.
20. 9:20
    • The LORD was very angry with Aaron, enough to destroy him.
    • Moses prayed for Aaron also at that time.
21. 9:21
    • Moses took Israel's sin, the calf they had made.
    • Moses burned the calf with fire.
    • Moses crushed it and ground it thoroughly until it was fine as dust.
    • Moses cast its dust into the brook that descended from the mountain.
22. 9:22
    • At Taberah Israel provoked the LORD to wrath.
    • At Massah Israel provoked the LORD to wrath.
    • At Kibroth-hattaavah Israel provoked the LORD to wrath.
23. 9:23
    • The LORD sent Israel out from Kadesh-barnea.
    • The LORD said, "Go up and possess the land which I have given you."
    • Israel rebelled against the command of the LORD their God.
    • Israel did not believe him.
    • Israel did not listen to his voice.
24. 9:24
    • Israel has been rebellious against the LORD from the day Moses knew them.
25. 9:25
    • Moses fell down before the LORD for the forty days and forty nights that he fell down.
    • Moses did this because the LORD had said he would destroy Israel.
26. 9:26
    • Moses prayed to the LORD.
    • Moses addressed him as Lord GOD.
    • Moses asked him not to destroy his people and his inheritance.
    • Moses said the LORD had redeemed them through his greatness.
    • Moses said the LORD had brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand.
27. 9:27
    • Moses asked the LORD to remember his servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
    • Moses asked the LORD not to regard the stubbornness of this people.
    • Moses asked the LORD not to regard their wickedness.
    • Moses asked the LORD not to regard their sin.
28. 9:28
    • Moses said this was lest the land from which the LORD brought them out should say something.
    • That land would say the LORD was not able to bring them into the land he promised them.
    • That land would say the LORD hated them.
    • That land would say the LORD brought them out to kill them in the wilderness.
29. 9:29
    • They are the LORD's people.
    • They are the LORD's inheritance.
    • The LORD brought them out by his great power.
    • The LORD brought them out by his outstretched arm.

Words Worth Explaining

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

9:1

"Listen, Israel" addresses the whole nation as if it were one person; through much of this chapter the Hebrew "you" is singular, spoken to the people as a single body. Cities "fortified to the sky" was a standard way of saying the walls were impossibly high, not a measurement, the same expression turns up in Egyptian and Mesopotamian reports of enemy strongholds.

9:2

Anak and his descendants, the Anakim, were remembered as an unusually tall population living around Hebron in the southern hill country. The scouts sent into Canaan a generation earlier reported them as giants beside whom the Israelites felt like grasshoppers, and the saying quoted here ("Who can stand up against the sons of Anak?") was evidently a proverb about hopeless odds.

9:3

"A consuming fire" was a common way of speaking. Fire eats up whatever it touches and nothing can push it back.

9:4

The King James word here is "righteousness," which in 1611 meant being in the right, having a legitimate claim, rather than simply being nice. What Moses denies is that Israel has earned the land by good behavior.

9:5

The promise sworn to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the pledge in Genesis that their descendants would be given the land of Canaan. To "swear" it is legal language: a binding oath, not a hope or an intention.

9:6

"Stiff-necked" is an image from farming. An ox that stiffens its neck refuses the yoke and will not be steered by the plowman. Applied to people it means obstinate and unmanageable, not proud in the modern sense.

9:7

The desert here is the dry, empty country where Israel wandered for forty years after leaving Egypt.

9:8

Horeb is the other name used in the Bible for Mount Sinai, the mountain where the covenant was made after the escape from Egypt. Deuteronomy consistently calls it Horeb.

9:9

A covenant was a formal, binding agreement of the kind kings made with each other or with the peoples under them: it named the parties, set out obligations, and was written down and stored. The stone tablets are that written document, which is why they matter so much in what follows. "Forty days and forty nights" is a conventional biblical span for a long, complete period, not necessarily an exact count.

9:10

"Written by the finger of God" is a figure of speech for something done directly by God rather than through a human hand; the same phrase is used elsewhere for acts no human could perform. "The day of the assembly" refers to the one occasion when the entire nation was summoned to stand at the foot of the mountain and hear the commandments spoken aloud.

9:12

An "image of melted metal" is a cast idol: metal melted down and poured into a mold. The incident being recalled is the making of the golden calf at Sinai while Moses was on the mountain, told at length in Exodus 32.

9:14

"Wipe their name out from under the sky" means to leave no descendants and no memory, in a culture without a strong idea of individual afterlife, having your name continue through your children was how a person and a people survived. The offer that follows, to build a nation out of Moses instead, would transfer to him the promise made to Abraham.

9:16

A young bull was a standard image of strength and fertility across the ancient Near East, and was often used to represent a god or to serve as the pedestal a god was imagined to stand on. The offense is not the choice of animal but the making of a physical image at all.

9:17

Smashing the tablets was not just temper. In the ancient Near East a treaty was written out on tablets kept as legal documents, and destroying the document was the recognized way of declaring the agreement dead. Moses breaks them "before your eyes" so that everyone sees what has just happened to the agreement.

9:18

Lying face down on the ground was the posture of a subject before a king or a petitioner begging for a life. Combined with going without food and water, it is the standard bodily language of urgent pleading and mourning.

9:20

Aaron was Moses' older brother and the head of the priesthood. According to Exodus 32 it was Aaron who collected the people's gold and made the calf, which is why he is singled out here.

9:21

Burning, grinding to powder, and scattering the remains in running water destroys the object beyond any possibility of recovering or reusing the gold, a thorough, deliberate erasure rather than simple disposal. The parallel account in Exodus 32 adds that the water was then given to the people to drink.

9:22

These three place names are all named for what went wrong there, and the names carry their meanings openly in Hebrew: Taberah means "burning," Massah means "testing" or "quarreling," and Kibroth-hattaavah means "graves of craving." The list is a shorthand reminder of episodes the hearers already knew.

9:23

Kadesh-barnea was an oasis on the southern edge of Canaan and the staging point for the invasion. From there scouts were sent into the land; when they came back with reports of fortified cities and giants, the people refused to go up, and that refusal cost them a generation in the wilderness.

9:26

"Redeemed" translates a legal term for buying something back: paying the price to free a slave, or to recover family land or a relative sold into debt. "Inheritance" is likewise a property word, land or possessions permanently held within a family and not to be sold off. Calling Israel God's inheritance says they are his own permanent holding, and the argument is that an owner does not destroy what he has just paid to get back. "With a mighty hand" is a stock phrase, borrowed from Egyptian royal language, for overwhelming force.

9:27

Moses is arguing from the promise sworn to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob generations before. The request is that God act on that old commitment rather than on what this generation has just done.

9:28

"The land you brought us out of" means Egypt, and the argument turns on reputation: if the people die in the desert, the watching Egyptians will read it as a failure of power or as spite, not as punishment. Ancient prayers commonly appealed to what other nations would say about a god who could not deliver.

9:29

"Outstretched arm," like "mighty hand," comes from the imagery of a warrior or king with arm raised to strike. The two phrases together are a fixed expression used throughout Deuteronomy for the rescue from Egypt.