Deuteronomy 29:20

29:20 The Lord will be unwilling to forgive him, and his intense anger ¹  will rage ²  against that man; all the curses ³  written in this scroll will fall upon him ⁴  and the Lord will obliterate his name from memory. ⁵ 

Deuteronomy 32:20-22

32:20 He said, “I will reject them, ⁶ 

I will see what will happen to them;

for they are a perverse generation,

children ⁷  who show no loyalty.

32:21 They have made me jealous ⁸  with false gods, ⁹ 

enraging me with their worthless gods; ¹⁰ 

so I will make them jealous with a people they do not recognize, ¹¹ 

with a nation slow to learn ¹²  I will enrage them.

32:22 For a fire has been kindled by my anger,

and it burns to lowest Sheol; ¹³ 

it consumes the earth and its produce,

and ignites the foundations of the mountains.

[29:20]  ¹ tn Heb “the wrath of the Lord and his zeal.” The expression is a hendiadys, a figure in which the second noun becomes adjectival to the first.

[29:20]  ² tn Heb “smoke,” or “smolder.”

[29:20]  ³ tn Heb “the entire oath.”

[29:20]  ⁴ tn Or “will lie in wait against him.”

[29:20]  ⁵ tn Heb “blot out his name from under the sky.”

[32:20]  ⁶ tn Heb “I will hide my face from them.”

[32:20]  ⁷ tn Heb “sons” (so NAB, NASB); TEV “unfaithful people.”

[32:21]  ⁸ sn They have made me jealous. The “jealousy” of God is not a spirit of pettiness prompted by his insecurity, but righteous indignation caused by the disloyalty of his people to his covenant grace (see note on the word “God” in Deut 4:24). The jealousy of Israel, however (see next line), will be envy because of God’s lavish attention to another nation. This is an ironic wordplay. See H. Peels, NIDOTTE 3:938-39.

[32:21]  ⁹ tn Heb “what is not a god,” or a “nondeity.”

[32:21]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “their empty (things).” The Hebrew term used here to refer pejoratively to the false gods is הֶבֶל (hevel, “futile” or “futility”), used frequently in Ecclesiastes (e.g., Eccl 1:1, “Futile! Futile!” laments the Teacher, “Absolutely futile! Everything is futile!”).

[32:21]  ¹¹ tn Heb “what is not a people,” or a “nonpeople.” The “nonpeople” (לֹא־עָם, lo’-’am) referred to here are Gentiles who someday would become God’s people in the fullest sense (cf. Hos 1:9; 2:23).

[32:21]  ¹² tn Heb “a foolish nation” (so KJV, NAB, NRSV); NIV “a nation that has no understanding”; NLT “I will provoke their fury by blessing the foolish Gentiles.”

[32:22]  ¹³ tn Or “to the lowest depths of the earth”; cf. NAB “to the depths of the nether world”; NIV “to the realm of death below”; NLT “to the depths of the grave.”