1 These are the words of the covenant that the LORD commanded Moses to make with the Israelites in the land of Moab, besides the covenant he made with them at Horeb.

2 Moses called all Israel and said to them, “You have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, to all his servants, and to all his land, 3 the great trials your eyes saw, those signs and great wonders. 4 But to this day the LORD has not given you a heart to understand, eyes to see, or ears to hear. 5 I have led you forty years in the wilderness. Your clothes have not worn out on you, and your sandal has not worn out on your foot. 6 You have not eaten bread or drunk wine or strong drink, so that you may know that I am the LORD your God. 7 When you came to this place, Sihon king of Heshbon and Og king of Bashan came out against us to battle, and we struck them. 8 We took their land and gave it as an inheritance to the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh. 9 Keep the words of this covenant and do them, so that you may prosper in all you do.

10 Today you stand, all of you, before the LORD your God: your tribal heads, your elders and officers, all the men of Israel, 11 your little ones, your wives, and the resident foreigner within your camp, from the one who cuts your wood to the one who draws your water, 12 so that you may enter the covenant of the LORD your God and his oath, which the LORD your God is making with you today, 13 to establish you today as his people and to be your God, as he has told you and as he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 14 I am not making this covenant and this oath with you alone, 15 but with whoever stands here with us today before the LORD our God and with whoever is not here with us today. 16 For you know how we lived in the land of Egypt and how we passed through the midst of the nations through which you passed. 17 You saw their abominations and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which were with them. 18 Let there not be among you a man or woman, family or tribe, whose heart turns away today from the LORD our God to go and serve the gods of those nations. Let there not be among you a root bearing poison and wormwood. 19 If someone hears the words of this curse and blesses himself in his heart, saying, ‘I shall have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart,’ thus sweeping away the watered land with the dry, 20 the LORD will not be willing to forgive him. Then the anger of the LORD and his jealousy will smoke against that man, and the whole curse written in this scroll shall settle on him. The LORD will blot out his name from under heaven. 21 The LORD will set him apart for calamity from all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant written in this scroll of the law. 22 The generation to come, your children who arise after you, and the foreigner who comes from a distant land, shall say when they see the plagues of that land and the diseases with which the LORD has afflicted it, 23 ‘All its land is sulfur and salt, a burning waste, neither sown nor producing, with no grass growing on it, like the overthrow of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, which the LORD overthrew in his anger and wrath.’ 24 All the nations shall say, ‘Why has the LORD done this to this land? What is the meaning of this great burning anger?’ 25 They shall say, ‘Because they forsook the covenant of the LORD, the God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt. 26 They went and served other gods and bowed down to them, gods they had not known and that he had not allotted to them. 27 So the anger of the LORD burned against that land, bringing upon it the whole curse written in this scroll. 28 The LORD uprooted them from their ground in anger, wrath, and great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day.’ 29 The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, so that we may do all the words of this law.