For this is no idle word for you – it is your life! By this word you will live a long time in the land you are about to cross the Jordan to possess.”

He said to his father and mother, “I have not seen him,” ¹  and he did not acknowledge his own brothers or know his own children, for they kept your word, and guarded your covenant.

So all of you approached me and said, “Let’s send some men ahead of us to scout out the land and bring us back word as to how we should attack it and what the cities are like there.”

For the thing is very near you – it is in your mouth and in your mind ¹  so that you can do it.

Now if you say to yourselves, ¹  ‘How can we tell that a message is not from the Lord?’ ²  –

So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab as the Lord had said.

(I was standing between the Lord and you at that time to reveal to you the message ¹  of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire and would not go up the mountain.) He said:

whenever a prophet speaks in my ¹  name and the prediction ²  is not fulfilled, ³  then I have ⁴  not spoken it; ⁵  the prophet has presumed to speak it, so you need not fear him.”

Do not add a thing to what I command you nor subtract from it, so that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I am delivering to ¹  you.

“But if any prophet presumes to speak anything in my name that I have not authorized ¹  him to speak, or speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet must die.

However, through all this you did not have confidence in the Lord your God,

So he humbled you by making you hungry and then feeding you with unfamiliar manna. ¹  He did this to teach you ²  that humankind ³  cannot live by bread ⁴  alone, but also by everything that comes from the Lord’s mouth. ⁵ 

the Lord said to me,

Then the Levitical priests ¹  will approach (for the Lord your God has chosen them to serve him and to pronounce blessings in his name, ²  and to decide ³  every judicial verdict ⁴ )

Then they took ¹  some of the produce of the land and carried it back down to us. They also brought a report to us, saying, “The land that the Lord our God is about to give us is good.”

You have been rebelling against him ¹  from the very first day I knew you!

At the testimony of two or three witnesses they must be executed. They cannot be put to death on the testimony of only one witness.

It is not because of your righteousness, or even your inner uprightness, ¹  that you have come here to possess their land. Instead, because of the wickedness of these nations the Lord your God is driving them out ahead of you in order to confirm the promise he ²  made on oath to your ancestors, ³  to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

You must do what you are instructed, and the verdict they pronounce to you, without fail. Do not deviate right or left from what they tell you.

he said to them, “Keep in mind all the words I am solemnly proclaiming to you today; you must command your children to observe carefully all the words of this law.