The covenant in the land of Moab
1The Lord made a covenant with the Israelites at Mount Horeb long ago, but the Lord told Moses to make another covenant with the Israelites in the land of Moab. Here are the words of the covenant.
2Moses called all the Israelites and told them: ‘You have seen everything that the Lord has done in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, his officers and to his land. 3You have seen how the Lord made the people of Egypt suffer when He showed his signs and miracles. 4But until today the Lord has not helped you understand everything that you saw and heard.
5The Lord said: “For 40 years I have led you through the desert, but your clothes and your sandals have not become old. They are still good. 6You did not have any bread to eat or wine to drink, because you had to learn that I am the Lord your God.”
7When you came to this place, King Sihon of Heshbon and King Og of Bashan came to attack us, but we defeated them. 8We took their land and we gave it to the Reuben and Gad tribes and the half tribe of Manasseh to belong to them.
9You must do everything that this covenant says so that all may be well with you. 10Today all of you are standing in front of the Lord your God. The leaders of your tribes, the other leaders, the supervisors and all the men of Israel, 11your children, your wives, the strangers who live among you, your woodcutters and water carriers are all here. 12You are standing here to make a covenant with the Lord your God and to listen to what the Lord says. He will tell you what will happen to you if you break this covenant. 13You are standing here today because the Lord wants to tell you that you are his people and that He is your God, as He said and as He promised your forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 14I make this covenant not only with you, and I will not tell only you what will happen if you break this covenant. 15I make this covenant with everyone who is standing here with us and also with everyone who is not here with us today.
16Because you know that we lived in the land of Egypt and how we walked through the lands of other nations on our way here. 17You have seen their ugly idols which God hates, images made of wood, stone, silver and gold. 18Make sure that there is no man or woman, family or tribe among you who thinks that they want to turn away from the Lord our God to go and worship the gods of those nations. If there is anyone who thinks that he wants to worships_idols, he will be like a root of a plant that brings bitter and poisonous fruit. 19Someone like that does not listen when people tell him what will happen to him if he breaks the covenant. He is stubborn and says: “I will do what I want. I will be safe, and nothing bad will happen to me.” 20The Lord will not forgive a person who says that. He will be very angry with him and very bad things will happen to him, all the bad things that are written in these laws. The Lord will make all the people in the world forget that this person lived. 21The Lord will cut him off and take him away from the other people in the tribes_of_Israel and he will suffer when the Lord destroys him and makes all the curses that we read about in this covenant happen to him.
22The children of the next generation who will come after you, and the people of other nations from far away lands, will see what has happened in this land. They will see how God made everyone sick and they will say: 23“All the land was burnt. There is only sulphur and salt left over. No one can sow anything there. Nothing grows there, and there is no grass. It looks like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, like Admah and Zeboim, the cities which the Lord destroyed when He became angry with those people.”
24The people of other nations will ask: “Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why did He become so angry?”
25Then the people will tell them: “This is because the people of the land_of_Israel have broken the covenant that the Lord their God made with them when He saved them from the land of Egypt. 26They worshipped other gods and bowed down before them, gods which they did not know and were not their gods. 27The Lord became angry and He made all these bad things happen to this land as He said in this book. 28He was very angry. He sent them away from their land and He made them live in another land where they are still today.”
29The Lord our God knows everything, also the things that we don't know, but He has shown us and our children these things so that we can know them, and He told us always to do everything as He said in this covenant.’
