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Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak;

let the earth hear the words of my mouth.

May my teaching drop like the rain,

my speech condense like the dew;

like gentle rain on grass,

like showers on new growth.

For I will proclaim the name of the L ord;

ascribe greatness to our God!

The Rock, his work is perfect,

and all his ways are just.

A faithful God, without deceit,

just and upright is he;

yet his degenerate children have dealt falsely with him,

a perverse and crooked generation.

Do you thus repay the L ord,

O foolish and senseless people?

Is not he your father, who created you,

who made you and established you?

Remember the days of old,

consider the years long past;

ask your father, and he will inform you;

your elders, and they will tell you.

When the Most High apportioned the nations,

when he divided humankind,

he fixed the boundaries of the peoples

according to the number of the gods;

the L ord’s own portion was his people,

Jacob his allotted share.

He sustained him in a desert land,

in a howling wilderness waste;

he shielded him, cared for him,

guarded him as the apple of his eye.

As an eagle stirs up its nest,

and hovers over its young;

as it spreads its wings, takes them up,

and bears them aloft on its pinions,

the L ord alone guided him;

no foreign god was with him.

He set him atop the heights of the land,

and fed him with produce of the field;

he nursed him with honey from the crags,

with oil from flinty rock;

curds from the herd, and milk from the flock,

with fat of lambs and rams;

Bashan bulls and goats,

together with the choicest wheat—

you drank fine wine from the blood of grapes.

Jacob ate his fill;

Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked.

You grew fat, bloated, and gorged!

He abandoned God who made him,

and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation.

They made him jealous with strange gods,

with abhorrent things they provoked him.

They sacrificed to demons, not God,

to deities they had never known,

to new ones recently arrived,

whom your ancestors had not feared.

You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you;

you forgot the God who gave you birth.

The L ord saw it, and was jealous;

he spurned his sons and daughters.

He said: I will hide my face from them,

I will see what their end will be;

for they are a perverse generation,

children in whom there is no faithfulness.

They made me jealous with what is no god,

provoked me with their idols.

So I will make them jealous with what is no people,

provoke them with a foolish nation.

For a fire is kindled by my anger,

and burns to the depths of Sheol;

it devours the earth and its increase,

and sets on fire the foundations of the mountains.

I will heap disasters upon them,

spend my arrows against them:

wasting hunger,

burning consumption,

bitter pestilence.

The teeth of beasts I will send against them,

with venom of things crawling in the dust.

In the street the sword shall bereave,

and in the chambers terror,

for young man and woman alike,

nursing child and old gray head.

I thought to scatter them

and blot out the memory of them from humankind;

but I feared provocation by the enemy,

for their adversaries might misunderstand

and say, “Our hand is triumphant;

it was not the L ord who did all this.”

They are a nation void of sense;

there is no understanding in them.

If they were wise, they would understand this;

they would discern what the end would be.

How could one have routed a thousand,

and two put a myriad to flight,

unless their Rock had sold them,

the L ord had given them up?

Indeed their rock is not like our Rock;

our enemies are fools.

Their vine comes from the vinestock of Sodom,

from the vineyards of Gomorrah;

their grapes are grapes of poison,

their clusters are bitter;

their wine is the poison of serpents,

the cruel venom of asps.

Is not this laid up in store with me,

sealed up in my treasuries?

Vengeance is mine, and recompense,

for the time when their foot shall slip;

because the day of their calamity is at hand,

their doom comes swiftly.

Indeed the L ord will vindicate his people,

have compassion on his servants,

when he sees that their power is gone,

neither bond nor free remaining.

Then he will say: Where are their gods,

the rock in which they took refuge,

who ate the fat of their sacrifices,

and drank the wine of their libations?

Let them rise up and help you,

let them be your protection!

See now that I, even I, am he;

there is no god besides me.

I kill and I make alive;

I wound and I heal;

and no one can deliver from my hand.

For I lift up my hand to heaven,

and swear: As I live forever,

when I whet my flashing sword,

and my hand takes hold on judgment;

I will take vengeance on my adversaries,

and will repay those who hate me.

I will make my arrows drunk with blood,

and my sword shall devour flesh—

with the blood of the slain and the captives,

from the long-haired enemy.

Praise, O heavens, his people,

worship him, all you gods!

For he will avenge the blood of his children,

and take vengeance on his adversaries;

he will repay those who hate him,

and cleanse the land for his people.

⁴⁴ Moses came and recited all the words of this song in the hearing of the people, he and Joshua son of Nun. ⁴⁵When Moses had finished reciting all these words to all Israel, ⁴⁶he said to them: “Take to heart all the words that I am giving in witness against you today; give them as a command to your children, so that they may diligently observe all the words of this law. ⁴⁷This is no trifling matter for you, but rather your very life; through it you may live long in the land that you are crossing over the Jordan to possess.”

Moses’ Death Foretold

⁴⁸ On that very day the L ord addressed Moses as follows: ⁴⁹“Ascend this mountain of the Abarim, Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab, across from Jericho, and view the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites for a possession; ⁵⁰you shall die there on the mountain that you ascend and shall be gathered to your kin, as your brother Aaron died on Mount Hor and was gathered to his kin; ⁵¹because both of you broke faith with me among the Israelites at the waters of Meribath-kadesh in the wilderness of Zin, by failing to maintain my holiness among the Israelites. ⁵²Although you may view the land from a distance, you shall not enter it—the land that I am giving to the Israelites.”

New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

13. He made him ride on the high places. Theirs is but a frivolous imagination, who suppose that Judea was so called as being the navel or center of the earth; ²⁶²²⁶² “In summa parte orbis, qubd Terra Saneta sit in medio climate mund” — Vatablus, in Poole’s Synopsis. it is more likely that it was called high in reference to Egypt; and, indeed, it is by no means an unusual expression, that those who go into Egypt, are said to go down, and those who come into Judea to come up. Still I am rather disposed Lo think that by height he denotes its excellency; inasmuch as that land, on account of its illustrious endowments, was, as it were, the most noble theater in the world.

Moses celebrates its fertility, when he says that the people sucked honey from the rock and oil from the stones: for he means to indicate, that no part of it was unproductive, since they gathered honey from the rocks, and upon them also the olive grew. The same is the intention of the other figures, that they ate “butter of kine, and milk of sheep;” by which he signifies that the land was full of rich pastures. By “fat of lambs,” he undoubtedly means the plumpness of their flesh, because it was not lawful to eat their actual fat; but it is not unusual to denote by this word any kind of richness, as soon afterwards he calls the best meal or flour, from which the more delicate kind of bread was made, “the fat of wheat.” With respect to the wine, he magnifies God’s liberality by the use of a poetic figure, when he says they drank of the blood of the grape. There is no doubt but that he alludes to its color; yet he takes occasion to extol more highly the beneficence of God, by intimating that, when the juice of the grapes is expressed, it is just as if their blood flowed forth for the nutriment of men. Since, then, the metaphor is taken from the redness of wine, I have not hesitated to translate the epithet חמר, chamer, at the end of the verse, red. ²⁶³²⁶³ It may either mean red or effervescing; it is not easy to see why A. V. renders it pure — W. From many passages it appears to have been very delicious; and in Isaiah 27:2 the word חמר, chamer, is used for a vine of great preciousness and of exquisite flavor. Those who render it pure, have rather taken into consideration the fact, than the signification of the word.

²⁶² “In summa parte orbis, qubd Terra Saneta sit in medio climate mund” — Vatablus, in Poole’s Synopsis.

²⁶³ It may either mean red or effervescing; it is not easy to see why A. V. renders it pure — W.