32
1 “Listen to me, all you who are in the heavens,
and all you who are on the earth, listen to what I say [MTY].
2 I wish/desire that my teaching will fall on you like rain drops
or be like dew on the ground,
and be like a gentle rain on the young plants,
like showers on the grass.
3 I will praise Yahweh [MTY].
And all you people should tell others that our God is very great.
4 He is like a rock [MET] under which we are protected;
everything that he does is perfect and completely just/fair [DOU].
He always does what he says that he will do;
he never does anything that is wrong.
5 “But you Israeli people have been very unfaithful to him;
because of your sins, you no longer deserve to be his children.
You are extremely wicked and deceitful [DOU].
6 You foolish and senseless [DOU] people,
◄is this the way that you should repay Yahweh for all that he has done for you?/this is certainly not the way that you should repay Yahweh for all that he has done for you.► [RHQ]
He is your father; he created you [RHQ];
he caused you to become a nation.
7 “Think about what happened long ago;
consider what happened to your ancestors.
Ask your parents, and they will inform you;
ask the older people, and they will tell you.
8 When God, who is greater than any other god, long ago divided the people into groups,
he assigned to the nations their land.
He determined where each people-group should live
and ◄assigned to/chose for► each people-group a god/angel.
9 But Yahweh decided that we would be his people;
he chose us, the descendants of Jacob, to belong to him.
10 “He saw our ancestors when they were in a desert,
wandering in a land ◄that was desolate/where no people lived►.
He protected them and took care of them,
as every person takes good care of his own eyes. [SIM, IDM]
11 Yahweh protected his people just like an eagle encourages its babies to fly
and flutters over them [MET],
spreading its wings and catching them if they start to fall.
12 Yahweh was the only one who led them;
no other foreign god helped him.
13 “After they entered the land that Yahweh promised to give to them,
Yahweh enabled them to rule the hilly areas;
they ate the crops that grew in the fields.
They found honey in the rocks,
and their olive trees [MTY] grew even in stony ground.
14 The cows gave them plenty of curds/yogurt, the goats gave them plenty of milk,
they had well-fed sheep and cattle,
they had very good wheat,
and they made delicious wine from their grapes.
15 “The Israeli people became rich and prosperous,
but then they rebelled against God;
they abandoned him, the one who created them,
the one who powerfully saves them.
16 So he abandoned them because they started to worship other/strange gods.
Because of their worshiping disgusting idols,
he became angry.
17 They offered sacrifices to gods who were really demons,
gods that their ancestors had never known;
they offered sacrifices to gods that they had recently found out about,
gods whom your ancestors had never revered.
18 They forgot the true God, the one who protects them [MET],
the one who created them and caused them to live.
19 “When Yahweh saw that they had abandoned him, he became angry,
so he rejected the Israeli people, who are like his sons and daughters.
20 He said, ‘They are very wicked/stubborn people,
very unfaithful;
so I will no longer help them,
and then I will watch and see what happens to them.
21 They * Because they heymade me very angry because of their worshiping idols, which are not really gods;
they have caused me to be jealous [MET] because I want them to worship only me.
So now, in order to cause them to become jealous,
I will send to attack them an army of a nation of worthless and foolish people.
22 I will be very angry, and I will destroy them
like a fire that will burn on the earth and all the way down to the place where dead people are [MET];
that fire will destroy the earth and everything that grows on it,
and it will even burn what is down under the mountains.
23 I will cause them to experience many disasters;
they will feel as though [MET] I am shooting all my arrows at them.
24 They will die because of being hungry and because of having hot fevers
and because of terrible diseases;
I will send wild animals to attack [MTY] them,
and poisonous snakes to bite [MTY] them.
25 Outside their houses, their enemies will kill them [MTY] with swords,
and in their homes, their enemies will cause them to be terrified.
Their enemies will kill young men and young women,
and they will kill infants and old people with gray hair.
26 I wanted to scatter the Israeli people to distant countries
in order that no one would ever remember them.
27 But if I did that, their enemies would wrongly boast
that they were the ones who had gotten rid of my people;
they would say, “We [SYN] are the ones who defeated them;
it was not Yahweh who has done all these things.” ’
28 You Israelis are a nation of people who do not have any sense.
None of you is wise.
29 If you were wise, you would understand why you would be punished;
you would have realized what was going to happen to you.
30 You would have realized why 1,000 of your soldiers would be defeated by only one of the enemy soldiers,
and why two of your enemies would chase away 10,000 Israeli soldiers.
You would realize that this would happen only if God, the one who always defended you [MET], had allowed your enemies to defeat you,
because he had abandoned you.
31 Your enemies know that their gods are not powerful like Yahweh, our God,
so their gods could not have defeated us Israelis.
32 Your enemies are like [MET] grapevines planted near the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah cities;
the grapes from those vines are bitter and poisonous;
33 the wine from those grapes is like the poison of snakes [DOU].
34 “Yahweh says, ‘I know [RHQ] what I have planned to do to the Israeli people and to their enemies,
and those plans are so secure that it as though he locked them up [MET].
35 I am the one who will get revenge and pay those enemies back for what they have done to my people,
at the right time for them to be punished [IDM];
they will soon experience disasters,
and I will punish/destroy them quickly.’
36 “But Yahweh will see that you who are truly his people, who ◄are innocent/have not done things that are wrong►,
and he will be merciful to you.
And he will see that you are helpless,
and that there are very few of you, slaves or free people, who are still alive.
37 Then Yahweh will ask his people, ‘Where are the gods
that you thought would protect you [MET]?
38 You gave to those gods the best parts of the animals that you sacrificed,
and you poured out wine for them to drink.
So, they should begin to help you;
they should be the ones who will protect you!
39 “But now you will realize that I, only I, am God;
there is no other god who is a real god.
I am the one who can kill people and who can cause people to live;
I can wound people, and I can heal people,
and there is no one who can prevent me from doing those things.
40 I raise my hand toward heaven and solemnly declare
that just as sure as I live forever,
41 that when I sharpen my sword,
as I [SYN] prepare to punish people,
I will get revenge on my enemies;
I will pay back those who hate me.
42 I will kill all of my enemies with a sword;
it will be as though I had arrows that will be covered with their blood.
I will kill [MTY] all those whom I capture
and cut off their leaders’ heads.’
43 “You people of all nations, you as well as his people should praise Yahweh,
because Yahweh gets revenge on those who kill the people who serve him;
and he cleanses his people’s land
which has become defiled because of their sins.”
44 Joshua and Moses/I recited the words of that song while the Israeli people were listening. 45 When they/we finished reciting to the Israeli people the words of this song, 46 Moses/I said, “Never forget all these commands that I have been giving you today. Teach these laws to your children, in order that they will faithfully obey all of them. 47 These instructions are very important [LIT]. If you obey them, you will live a long time in the land that you are about to cross the Jordan River to occupy.”
God told Moses that he would see the land from far away
48 On that same day, Yahweh said to Moses/me, 49 “Go to the Abarim Mountain range here in the Moab region, across from Jericho. Climb Nebo Mountain, and look toward the west to see Canaan land, the land that I am about to give to the Israeli people. 50 You will die on that mountain [EUP, DOU], like your older brother Aaron died on Hor Mountain. 51 You will die because both of you disobeyed me in the presence of the Israeli people, when you all were at Meribah Springs near Kadesh town in the Zin Desert. You did not honor and respect me in the presence of the Israeli people in the way that I deserve because I am God. 52 When you are on that mountain where I told you to go, you will see in the distance in front of you the land that I am about to give to the Israeli people, but you will not enter it.”