Be very strong! Carefully obey ¹  all that is written in the law scroll of Moses so you won’t swerve from it to the right or the left,

or associate with these nations that remain near ¹  you. You must not invoke or make solemn declarations by the names of their gods! ²  You must not worship ³  or bow down to them!

for the Lord determined to make them obstinate so they would attack Israel. He wanted Israel to annihilate them without mercy, as he had instructed Moses. ¹ 

The Lord made the Jordan a boundary between us and you Reubenites and Gadites. You have no right to worship the Lord.’ ¹  In this way your descendants might cause our descendants to stop obeying ²  the Lord.

Indeed, for forty years the Israelites traveled through the desert until all the men old enough to fight when they left Egypt, the ones who had disobeyed the Lord, died off. ¹  For the Lord had sworn a solemn oath to them that he would not let them see the land he had sworn on oath to give them, ²  a land rich in ³  milk and honey.