Deuteronomy 5:15

5:15 Recall that you were slaves in the land of Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there by strength and power. ¹  That is why the Lord your God has commanded you to observe ²  the Sabbath day.

Deuteronomy 9:28

9:28 Otherwise the people of the land ³  from which you brought us will say, “The Lord was unable to bring them to the land he promised them, and because of his hatred for them he has brought them out to kill them in the desert.” ⁴ 

Deuteronomy 11:10

11:10 For the land where you are headed ⁵  is not like the land of Egypt from which you came, a land where you planted seed and which you irrigated by hand ⁶  like a vegetable garden.

¹ tn Heb “by a strong hand and an outstretched arm,” the hand and arm symbolizing divine activity and strength. Cf. NLT “with amazing power and mighty deeds.”

² tn Or “keep” (so KJV, NRSV).

³ tc The MT reads only “the land.” Smr supplies עַם (’am, “people”) and LXX and its dependents supply “the inhabitants of the land.” The truncated form found in the MT is adequate to communicate the intended meaning; the words “the people of” are supplied in the translation for clarity.

⁴ tn Or “wilderness” (so KJV, NASB, NRSV, NLT).

⁵ tn Heb “you are going there to possess it”; NASB “into which you are about to cross to possess it”; NRSV “that you are crossing over to occupy.”

⁶ tn Heb “with your foot” (so NASB, NLT). There is a two-fold significance to this phrase. First, Egypt had no rain so water supply depended on human efforts at irrigation. Second, the Nile was the source of irrigation waters but those waters sometimes had to be pumped into fields and gardens by foot-power, perhaps the kind of machinery (Arabic shaduf) still used by Egyptian farmers (see C. Aldred, The Egyptians, 181). Nevertheless, the translation uses “by hand,” since that expression is the more common English idiom for an activity performed by manual labor.