Deuteronomy 26:1-5

Presentation of the First Fruits

26:1 When ¹  you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, and you occupy it and live in it, 26:2 you must take the first of all the ground’s produce you harvest from the land the Lord your God is giving you, place it in a basket, and go to the place where he ²  chooses to locate his name. ³  26:3 You must go to the priest in office at that time and say to him, “I declare today to the Lord your ⁴  God that I have come into the land that the Lord ⁵  promised ⁶  to our ancestors ⁷  to give us.” 26:4 The priest will then take the basket from you ⁸  and set it before the altar of the Lord your God. 26:5 Then you must affirm before the Lord your God, “A wandering ⁹  Aramean ¹⁰  was my ancestor, ¹¹  and he went down to Egypt and lived there as a foreigner with a household few in number, ¹²  but there he became a great, powerful, and numerous people.

[26:1]  ¹ tn Heb “and it will come to pass that.”

[26:2]  ² tn Heb “the Lord your God.” The pronoun has been used in the translation for stylistic reasons to avoid redundancy.

[26:2]  ³ sn The place where he chooses to locate his name. This is a circumlocution for the central sanctuary, first the tabernacle and later the Jerusalem temple. See Deut 12:1-14 and especially the note on the word “you” in v. 14.

[26:3]  ⁴ tc For the MT reading “your God,” certain LXX mss have “my God,” a contextually superior rendition followed by some English versions (e.g., NAB, NASB, TEV). Perhaps the text reflects dittography of the kaf (כ) at the end of the word with the following preposition כִּי (ki).

[26:3]  ⁵ tc The Syriac adds “your God” to complete the usual formula.

[26:3]  ⁶ tn Heb “swore on oath.”

[26:3]  ⁷ tn Heb “fathers” (also in vv. 7, 15).

[26:4]  ⁸ tn Heb “your hand.”

[26:5]  ⁹ tn Though the Hebrew term אָבַד (’avad) generally means “to perish” or the like (HALOT 2-3 s.v.; BDB 1-2 s.v.; cf. KJV “a Syrian ready to perish”), a meaning “to go astray” or “to be lost” is also attested. The ambivalence in the Hebrew text is reflected in the versions where LXX Vaticanus reads ἀπέβαλεν (apebalen, “lose”) for a possibly metathesized reading found in Alexandrinus, Ambrosianus, ἀπέλαβεν (apelaben, “receive”); others attest κατέλειπεν (kateleipen, “leave, abandon”). “Wandering” seems to suit best the contrast with the sedentary life Israel would enjoy in Canaan (v. 9) and is the meaning followed by many English versions.

[26:5]  ¹⁰ sn A wandering Aramean. This is a reference to Jacob whose mother Rebekah was an Aramean (Gen 24:10; 25:20, 26) and who himself lived in Aram for at least twenty years (Gen 31:41-42).

[26:5]  ¹¹ tn Heb “father.”

[26:5]  ¹² tn Heb “sojourned there few in number.” The words “with a household” have been supplied in the translation for stylistic reasons and for clarity.