Deuteronomy 9:7-24

The History of Israel’s Stubbornness

9:7 Remember – don’t ever forget ¹  – how you provoked the Lord your God in the desert; from the time you left the land of Egypt until you came to this place you were constantly rebelling against him. ²  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 ³  forty days and nights, eating and drinking nothing. 9:10 The Lord gave me the two stone tablets, written by the very finger ⁴  of God, and on them was everything ⁵  he ⁶  said to you at the mountain from the midst of the fire at the time of that assembly. 9:11 Now at the end of the forty days and nights the Lord presented me with the two stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant. 9:12 And he said to me, “Get up, go down at once from here because your people whom you brought out of Egypt have sinned! They have quickly turned from the way I commanded them and have made for themselves a cast metal image.” ⁷  9:13 Moreover, he said to me, “I have taken note of these people; they are a stubborn ⁸  lot! 9:14 Stand aside ⁹  and I will destroy them, obliterating their very name from memory, ¹⁰  and I will make you into a stronger and more numerous nation than they are.”

9:15 So I turned and went down the mountain while it ¹¹  was blazing with fire; the two tablets of the covenant were in my hands. 9:16 When I looked, you had indeed sinned against the Lord your God and had cast for yourselves a metal calf; ¹²  you had quickly turned aside from the way he ¹³  had commanded you! 9:17 I grabbed the two tablets, threw them down, ¹⁴  and shattered them before your very eyes. 9:18 Then I again fell down before the Lord for forty days and nights; I ate and drank nothing because of all the sin you had committed, doing such evil before the Lord as to enrage him. 9:19 For I was terrified at the Lord’s intense anger ¹⁵  that threatened to destroy you. But he ¹⁶  listened to me this time as well. 9:20 The Lord was also angry enough at Aaron to kill him, but at that time I prayed for him ¹⁷  too. 9:21 As for your sinful thing ¹⁸  that you had made, the calf, I took it, melted it down, ¹⁹  ground it up until it was as fine as dust, and tossed the dust into the stream that flows down the mountain. 9:22 Moreover, you continued to provoke the Lord at Taberah, ²⁰  Massah, ²¹  and Kibroth-Hattaavah. ²²  9:23 And when he ²³  sent you from Kadesh-Barnea and told you, “Go up and possess the land I have given you,” you rebelled against the Lord your God ²⁴  and would neither believe nor obey him. 9:24 You have been rebelling against him ²⁵  from the very first day I knew you!

Psalms 51:5

51:5 Look, I was guilty of sin from birth,

a sinner the moment my mother conceived me. ²⁶ 

Psalms 58:3

58:3 The wicked turn aside from birth; ²⁷ 

liars go astray as soon as they are born. ²⁸ 

Ezekiel 16:3-5

16:3 and say, ‘This is what the sovereign Lord says to Jerusalem: Your origin and your birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. 16:4 As for your birth, on the day you were born your umbilical cord was not cut, nor were you washed in water; ²⁹  you were certainly not rubbed down with salt, nor wrapped with blankets. ³⁰  16:5 No eye took pity on you to do even one of these things for you to spare you; ³¹  you were thrown out into the open field ³²  because you were detested on the day you were born.

Ephesians 2:3

2:3 among whom ³³  all of us ³⁴  also ³⁵  formerly lived out our lives in the cravings of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath ³⁶  even as the rest… ³⁷ 

[9:7]  ¹ tn By juxtaposing the positive זְכֹר (zekhor, “remember”) with the negative אַל־תִּשְׁכַּח (’al-tishÿkakh, “do not forget”), Moses makes a most emphatic plea.

[9:7]  ² tn Heb “the Lord” (likewise in the following verse with both “him” and “he”). See note on “he” in 9:3.

[9:9]  ³ tn Heb “in the mountain.” The demonstrative pronoun has been used in the translation for stylistic reasons.

[9:10]  ⁴ sn The very finger of God. This is a double figure of speech (1) in which God is ascribed human features (anthropomorphism) and (2) in which a part stands for the whole (synecdoche). That is, God, as Spirit, has no literal finger nor, if he had, would he write with his finger. Rather, the sense is that God himself – not Moses in any way – was responsible for the composition of the Ten Commandments (cf. Exod 31:18; 32:16; 34:1).

[9:10]  ⁵ tn Heb “according to all the words.”

[9:10]  ⁶ tn Heb “the Lord” (likewise at the beginning of vv. 12, 13). See note on “he” in 9:3.

[9:12]  ⁷ tc Heb “a casting.” The MT reads מַסֵּכָה (massekhah, “a cast thing”) but some mss and Smr add עֵגֶל (’egel, “calf”), “a molten calf” or the like (Exod 32:8). Perhaps Moses here omits reference to the calf out of contempt for it.

[9:13]  ⁸ tn Heb “stiff-necked.” See note on the word “stubborn” in 9:6.

[9:14]  ⁹ tn Heb “leave me alone.”

[9:14]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “from under heaven.”

[9:15]  ¹¹ tn Heb “the mountain.” The translation uses a pronoun for stylistic reasons to avoid redundancy.

[9:16]  ¹² tn On the phrase “metal calf,” see note on the term “metal image” in v. 12.

[9:16]  ¹³ tn Heb “the Lord.” See note on “he” in 9:3.

[9:17]  ¹⁴ tn The Hebrew text includes “from upon my two hands,” but as this seems somewhat obvious and redundant, it has been left untranslated for stylistic reasons.

[9:19]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “the anger and the wrath.” Although many English versions translate as two terms, this construction is a hendiadys which serves to intensify the emotion (cf. NAB, TEV “fierce anger”).

[9:19]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “the Lord.” See note on “he” in 9:3.

[9:20]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “Aaron.” The pronoun is used in the translation to avoid redundancy.

[9:21]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “your sin.” This is a metonymy in which the effect (sin) stands for the cause (the metal calf).

[9:21]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “burned it with fire.”

[9:22]  ²⁰ sn Taberah. By popular etymology this derives from the Hebrew verb בָעַר (ba’ar, “to burn”), thus, here, “burning.” The reference is to the Lord’s fiery wrath against Israel because of their constant complaints against him (Num 11:1-3).

[9:22]  ²¹ sn Massah. See note on this term in Deut 6:16.

[9:22]  ²² sn Kibroth-Hattaavah. This place name means in Hebrew “burial places of appetite,” that is, graves that resulted from overindulgence. The reference is to the Israelites stuffing themselves with the quail God had provided and doing so with thanklessness (Num 11:31-35).

[9:23]  ²³ tn Heb “the Lord.” See note on “he” in 9:3.

[9:23]  ²⁴ tn Heb “the mouth of the Lord your God,” that is, against the commandment that he had spoken.

[9:24]  ²⁵ tn Heb “the Lord.” See note on “he” in 9:3.

[51:5]  ²⁶ tn Heb “Look, in wrongdoing I was brought forth, and in sin my mother conceived me.” The prefixed verbal form in the second line is probably a preterite (without vav [ו] consecutive), stating a simple historical fact. The psalmist is not suggesting that he was conceived through an inappropriate sexual relationship (although the verse has sometimes been understood to mean that, or even that all sexual relationships are sinful). The psalmist’s point is that he has been a sinner from the very moment his personal existence began. By going back beyond the time of birth to the moment of conception, the psalmist makes his point more emphatically in the second line than in the first.

[58:3]  ²⁷ tn Heb “from the womb.”

[58:3]  ²⁸ tn Heb “speakers of a lie go astray from the womb.”

[16:4]  ²⁹ tn Heb “in water you were not washed for cleansing” or “with water you were not washed smooth” (see D. I. Block, Ezekiel [NICOT], 1:473, n. 57, for a discussion of possible meanings of this hapax legomenon).

[16:4]  ³⁰ sn Arab midwives still cut the umbilical cords of infants and then proceed to apply salt and oil to their bodies.

[16:5]  ³¹ sn These verbs, “pity” and “spare,” echo the judgment oracles in 5:11; 7:4, 9; 8:18; 9:5, 10.

[16:5]  ³² sn A similar concept is found in Deut 32:10.

[2:3]  ³³ sn Among whom. The relative pronoun phrase that begins v. 3 is identical, except for gender, to the one that begins v. 2 (ἐν αἵς [en Jais], ἐν οἵς [en Jois]). By the structure, the author is building an argument for our hopeless condition: We lived in sin and we lived among sinful people. Our doom looked to be sealed as well in v. 2: Both the external environment (kingdom of the air) and our internal motivation and attitude (the spirit that is now energizing) were under the devil’s thumb (cf. 2 Cor 4:4).

[2:3]  ³⁴ tn Grk “we all.”

[2:3]  ³⁵ tn Or “even.”

[2:3]  ³⁶ sn Children of wrath is a Semitic idiom which may mean either “people characterized by wrath” or “people destined for wrath.”

[2:3]  ³⁷ sn Eph 2:1-3. The translation of vv. 1-3 is very literal, even to the point of retaining the awkward syntax of the original. See note on the word dead in 2:1.