Chapter 7

¹ And when the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land, into which thou goest to possess it, and shall remove great nations from before thee, the Chettite, and Gergesite, and Amorite, and Chananite, and Pherezite, and Evite, and Jebusite, seven nations more numerous and stronger than you, ² and the Lord thy God shall deliver them into thy hands, then thou shalt smite them: thou shalt utterly destroy them: thou shalt not make a covenant with them, neither shall ye pity them: ³ neither shall ye contract marriages with them: thou shalt not give thy daughter to his son, and thou shalt not take his daughter to thy son. ⁴ For he will draw away thy son from me and he will serve other gods; and the Lord will be very angry with you, and will soon utterly destroy thee. ⁵ But thus shall ye do to them; ye shall destroy their altars, and shall break down their pillars and shall cut down their groves, and shall burn with fire the graven images of their gods. ⁶ For thou art a holy people to the Lord thy God; and the Lord thy God chose thee to be to him

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a peculiar people beyond all nations that are upon the face of the earth.

⁷ It was not because ye are more numerousthan all other nations that the Lord preferred you, and the Lord made choice of you: for ye are fewer in number than all other nations. ⁸ But because the Lord loved you, and as keeping the oath which he sware to your fathers, the Lord brought you out with a strong hand, and the Lord redeemed thee from the house of bondage, out of the hand of Pharao king of Egypt. ⁹ Thou shalt know therefore, that the Lord thy God, he is God, a faithful God, who keeps covenant and mercy for them that love him, and for those that keep his commandments to a thousand generations, ¹⁰ and who recompenses them that hate him to their face, to destroy them utterly; and will not be slack with them that hate him: he will recompense them to their face.

¹¹ Thou shalt keep therefore the commands, and the ordinances, and these judgments, which I command thee this day to do. ¹² And it shall come to pass when ye shall have heard these ordinances, and shall have kept and done them, that the Lord thy God shall keep for thee the covenant and the mercy, which he sware to your fathers. ¹³ And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee; and he will bless the offspring of thy ¹body, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the herds of thine oxen, and the flocks of thy sheep, on the land which the Lord sware to thy fathers to give to thee. ¹⁴ Thou shalt be blessed beyond all nations; there shall not be among you an impotent or barren one, ²or among thy cattle. ¹⁵ And the Lord thy God shall remove from thee all sickness; and none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou hast seen; and that thou hast known, will he lay upon thee; but he will lay them upon all that hate thee.

¹⁶ And thou shalt eat all the spoils of the nations which the Lord thy God gives thee; thine eye shall not spare them, and thou shalt not serve their gods; for is an offence to thee.

¹⁷ But if thou shouldest say in thine heart, This nation is a ³greater than I, how shall I be able to destroy them utterly? ¹⁸ thou shalt not fear them; thou shalt surely remember all that the Lord thy God did to Pharao and to all the Egyptians: ¹⁹ the great temptations which thine eyes have seen, those signs and great wonders, the strong hand, and the high arm; how the Lord thy God brought thee forth: so the Lord your God will do to all the nations, whom thou fearest in their presence. ²⁰ And the Lord thy God shall send against them the hornets, until they that are left and they that are hidden from thee be utterly destroyed. ²¹ Thou shalt not be wounded before them, because the Lord thy God in the midst of thee is a great and powerful God. ²² And the Lord thy God shall consume these nations before thee by little and little: thou shalt not be able to consume them speedily, lest the hand become desert,

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and the wild beasts of the field be multiplied against thee. ²³ And the Lord thy God shall deliver them into thy hands, and thou shalt destroy them with a great destruction until ye shall have utterly destroyed them. ²⁴ And he shall deliver their kings into your hands, and ye shall destroy their name from that place; none shall stand up in opposition before thee, until thou shalt have utterly destroyed them.

²⁵ Ye shall burn with fire the graven images of their gods: thou shalt not covet their silver, neither shalt thou take to thyself gold from them, lest thou shouldest offend thereby, because it is an abomination to the Lord thy God. ²⁶ And thou shalt not bring an abomination into thine house, so ⁴shouldest thou be an accursed thing like it; thou shalt utterly hate it, and altogether abominate it, because it is an accursed thing.