We will be innocent if we carefully keep all these commandments before the Lord our God, just as he demands.”

and he delivers them over to you and you attack them, you must utterly annihilate them. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy!

for they will turn your sons away from me to worship other gods. Then the anger of the Lord will erupt against you and he will quickly destroy you.

you must not fear them. You must carefully recall what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and all Egypt,

He, the God who leads you, will expel the nations little by little. You will not be allowed to destroy them all at once lest the wild animals overrun you.

Be sure you do not forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments, ordinances, and statutes that I am giving you today.

Listen, Israel: Today you are about to cross the Jordan so you can dispossess the nations there, people greater and stronger than you who live in large cities with extremely high fortifications.

Understand, therefore, that it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is about to give you this good land as a possession, for you are a stubborn people!

Now at the end of the forty days and nights the Lord presented me with the two stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant.

Moreover, he said to me, “I have taken note of these people; they are a stubborn lot!

Stand aside and I will destroy them, obliterating their very name from memory, and I will make you into a stronger and more numerous nation than they are.”

When I looked, you had indeed sinned against the Lord your God and had cast for yourselves a metal calf; you had quickly turned aside from the way he had commanded you!

For I was terrified at the Lord’s intense anger that threatened to destroy you. But he listened to me this time as well.

I will write on the tablets the same words that were on the first tablets you broke, and you must put them into the ark.”

Then I turned, went down the mountain, and placed the tablets into the ark I had made – they are still there, just as the Lord commanded me.

Then he said to me, “Get up, set out leading the people so they may go and possess the land I promised to give to their ancestors.”

However, only to your ancestors did he show his loving favor, and he chose you, their descendants, from all peoples – as is apparent today.

a land the Lord your God looks after. He is constantly attentive to it from the beginning to the end of the year.

But you must seek only the place he chooses from all your tribes to establish his name as his place of residence, and you must go there.

some evil people have departed from among you to entice the inhabitants of their cities, saying, “Let’s go and serve other gods” (whom you have not known before).