¹These are the words of the covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the sons of Israel in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant which he made with them at Horeb. ²Then Moses called the whole of Israel together, and he said to them, “You have seen everything that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land – ³the great trials which your eyes have seen – those great signs and wonders. ⁴But the Lord has not given you a heart to know or eyes to see or ears to hear up to this day. ⁵‘When I led you in the desert for forty years, your clothes on you did not wear out, and your sandals did not wear out on your feet. ⁶You did not eat bread or drink wine or strong drink, in order that you might know that I am the Lord your God.’ ⁷And you came to this place, and Sihon king of Heshbon and Og king of Bashan came out to confront us in war, and we defeated them, ⁸and we captured their land, and we gave it as an inheritance to the Reubenites and to the Gadites and to the Manassite half-tribe. ⁹Now you shall keep the words of this covenant, and you shall carry them out, so that you act wisely in everything you do. ¹⁰You are all standing today before the Lord your God – your heads of your tribes, your elders, and your officers, and every man of Israel, ¹¹your little ones, your wives, and your foreigner who is in the midst of your camp, both the hewer of your wood and the drawer of your water – ¹²for you to enter into the covenant of the Lord your God and into his oath which the Lord your God is making with you today, ¹³in order to set you up today as a people to himself, and he will be God to you, as he has said to you, and as he swore to your fathers – to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. ¹⁴‘And it is not with you alone that I am making this covenant and this oath’, ¹⁵but with whoever is here with us standing today before the Lord our God, and with whoever is not here with us today, ¹⁶for you know how we dwelt in the land of Egypt, and how we passed through the middle of the nations which you have passed through. ¹⁷And you saw their abominations and their idols – the wood and stone, silver and gold, which they had – ¹⁸being careful in case there is among you a man or woman or family or tribe whose heart is turning away today from being with the Lord our God, by going to serve the gods of those nations, in case there is a root among you bearing poison and wormwood, ¹⁹and it comes to pass, when he hears the words of this curse, and he blesses himself in his heart and says, ‘I will have peace, for I will walk in the obstinacy of my heart, so as to add drunkenness to thirst’, ²⁰that the Lord will not be willing to forgive him, for then the Lord's anger and his jealousy will fume against that man, and all the curse written in this book will rest on him, and the Lord will blot his name out from under heaven. ²¹And the Lord will separate him from all the tribes of Israel to evil, according to all the oaths of the covenant which is written in this book of the law. ²²And the latter generation – your sons who will arise after you – and the foreigner who comes from a far land, shall speak, when they see the blows on this land, and its sicknesses with which the Lord made it sick – ²³sulphur and salt, the whole land a conflagration. It shall not be sown, and it will not support growth, and no grass will come up in it, as in the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim, which the Lord overthrew in his anger and in his fury. ²⁴And all the nations will say, ‘Why did the Lord act so towards this land? What was the reason for the kindling of this great anger?’ ²⁵And they will say, ‘Because they forsook the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt. ²⁶And they went their way and served other gods and worshipped them – gods they did not know and which he had not apportioned to them. ²⁷And the anger of the Lord was kindled against that land, in bringing on it the whole curse which is written in this book. ²⁸And the Lord uprooted them from their land, in anger and in fury and in great wrath, and he cast them into another land, as it is at this day.’ ²⁹The hidden things of the Lord our God, and the things revealed to us and to our sons for the age, are: to carry out all the words of this law.