Deuteronomy 29:24-28

29:24 Then all the nations will ask, “Why has the Lord done all this to this land? What is this fierce, heated display of anger ¹  all about?” 29:25 Then people will say, “Because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt. 29:26 They went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods they did not know and that he did not permit them to worship. ²  29:27 That is why the Lord’s anger erupted against this land, bringing on it all the curses ³  written in this scroll. 29:28 So the Lord has uprooted them from their land in anger, wrath, and great rage and has deported them to another land, as is clear today.”

Deuteronomy 29:1

Narrative Interlude

29:1 (28:69) ⁴  These are the words of the covenant that the Lord commanded Moses to make with the people of Israel in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant he had made with them at Horeb. ⁵ 

Deuteronomy 9:8-9

9:8 At Horeb you provoked him and he was angry enough with you to destroy you. 9:9 When I went up the mountain to receive the stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant that the Lord made with you, I remained there ⁶  forty days and nights, eating and drinking nothing.

Psalms 48:4-6

48:4 For ⁷  look, the kings assemble; ⁸ 

they advance together.

48:5 As soon as they see, ⁹  they are shocked; ¹⁰ 

they are terrified, they quickly retreat. ¹¹ 

48:6 Look at them shake uncontrollably, ¹² 

like a woman writhing in childbirth. ¹³ 

[29:24]  ¹ tn Heb “this great burning of anger”; KJV “the heat of this great anger.”

[29:26]  ² tn Heb “did not assign to them”; NASB, NRSV “had not allotted to them.”

[29:27]  ³ tn Heb “the entire curse.”

[29:1]  ⁴ sn Beginning with 29:1, the verse numbers through 29:29 in the English Bible differ from the verse numbers in the Hebrew text (BHS), with 29:1 ET = 28:69 HT, 29:2 ET = 29:1 HT, 29:3 ET = 29:2 HT, etc., through 29:29 ET = 29:28 HT. With 30:1 the verse numbers in the ET and HT are again the same.

[29:1]  ⁵ sn Horeb is another name for Mount Sinai (which some English versions substitute here for clarity, cf. NCV, TEV, CEV, NLT).

[9:9]  ⁶ tn Heb “in the mountain.” The demonstrative pronoun has been used in the translation for stylistic reasons.

[48:4]  ⁷ tn The logical connection between vv. 3-4 seems to be this: God is the protector of Zion and reveals himself as the city’s defender – this is necessary because hostile armies threaten the city.

[48:4]  ⁸ tn The perfect verbal forms in vv. 4-6 are understood as descriptive. In dramatic style (note הִנֵּה, hinneh, “look”) the psalm describes an enemy attack against the city as if it were occurring at this very moment. Another option is to take the perfects as narrational (“the kings assembled, they advanced”), referring to a particular historical event, such as Sennacherib’s siege of the city in 701 b.c. (cf. NIV, NRSV). Even if one translates the verses in a dramatic-descriptive manner (as the present translation does), the Lord’s victory over the Assyrians was probably what served as the inspiration of the description (see v. 8).

[48:5]  ⁹ tn The object of “see” is omitted, but v. 3b suggests that the Lord’s self-revelation as the city’s defender is what they see.

[48:5]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “they look, so they are shocked.” Here כֵּן (ken, “so”) has the force of “in the same measure.”

[48:5]  ¹¹ tn The translation attempts to reflect the staccato style of the Hebrew text, where the main clauses of vv. 4-6 are simply juxtaposed without connectives.

[48:6]  ¹² tn Heb “trembling seizes them there.” The adverb שָׁם (sham, “there”) is used here, as often in poetic texts, to point “to a spot in which a scene is localized vividly in the imagination” (BDB 1027 s.v.).

[48:6]  ¹³ tn Heb “[with] writhing like one giving birth.”