Exodus 23:31-33

23:31 I will set ¹  your boundaries from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert to the River, ²  for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you will drive them out before you.

23:32 “You must make no covenant with them or with their gods. 23:33 They must not live in your land, lest they make you sin against me, for if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare ³  to you.”

Exodus 34:12

34:12 Be careful not to make ⁴  a covenant with the inhabitants of the land where you are going, lest it become a snare ⁵  among you.

Numbers 33:52

33:52 you must drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images, all their molten images, ⁶  and demolish their high places.

Deuteronomy 7:2-3

7:2 and he ⁷  delivers them over to you and you attack them, you must utterly annihilate ⁸  them. Make no treaty ⁹  with them and show them no mercy! 7:3 You must not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons,

Deuteronomy 20:16

Laws Concerning War with Canaanite Nations

20:16 As for the cities of these peoples that ¹⁰  the Lord your God is going to give you as an inheritance, you must not allow a single living thing ¹¹  to survive.

Jude 1:2

1:2 May mercy, peace, and love be lavished on you! ¹² 

¹ tn The form is a perfect tense with vav consecutive.

² tn In the Hebrew Bible “the River” usually refers to the Euphrates (cf. NASB, NCV, NRSV, TEV, CEV, NLT). There is some thought that it refers to a river Nahr el Kebir between Lebanon and Syria. See further W. C. Kaiser, Jr., “Exodus,” EBC 2:447; and G. W. Buchanan, The Consequences of the Covenant (NovTSup), 91-100.

³ tn The idea of the “snare” is to lure them to judgment; God is apparently warning about contact with the Canaanites, either in worship or in business. They were very syncretistic, and so it would be dangerous to settle among them.

⁴ tn The exact expression is “take heed to yourself lest you make.” It is the second use of this verb in the duties, now in the Niphal stem. To take heed to yourself means to watch yourself, be sure not to do something. Here, if they failed to do this, they would end up making entangling treaties.

⁵ sn A snare would be a trap, an allurement to ruin. See Exod 23:33.

⁶ tn The Hebrew text repeats the verb “you will destroy.”

⁷ tn Heb “the Lord your God.” The pronoun has been used in the translation for stylistic reasons to avoid redundancy.

⁸ tn In the Hebrew text the infinitive absolute before the finite verb emphasizes the statement. The imperfect has an obligatory nuance here. Cf. ASV “shalt (must NRSV) utterly destroy them”; CEV “must destroy them without mercy.”

⁹ tn Heb “covenant” (so NASB, NRSV); TEV “alliance.”

¹⁰ tn The antecedent of the relative pronoun is “cities.”

¹¹ tn Heb “any breath.”

¹² tn Grk “may mercy and peace and love be multiplied to you.”