דברים ז׳

When the ETERNAL your God brings you to the land that you are about to enter and possess, and dislodges many nations before you—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations much larger than you— and the ETERNAL your God delivers them to you and you defeat them, you must doom them to destruction: grant them no terms and give them no quarter. You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons. For they will turn your children away from Me to worship other gods, and GOD’s anger will blaze forth against you, promptly wiping you out. Instead, this is what you shall do to them: you shall tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred posts,^asacred posts Used in worship of the goddess Asherah. and consign their images to the fire. For you are a people consecrated to the ETERNAL your God: of all the peoples on earth, the ETERNAL your God chose you to be the treasured one.^bthe treasured one Lit. “for Him a people of treasure.” It is not because you are the most numerous of peoples that GOD grew attached to you and chose you—indeed, you are the smallest of peoples; but it was because GOD favored you and kept the oath made to your fathers that GOD freed you with a mighty hand and rescued you from the house of bondage, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know, therefore, that only the ETERNAL your God is God, the steadfast God who keeps this covenant faithfully to the thousandth generation of those who show love and keep the commandments, but who instantly requites with destruction those who are disloyal—never slow with those who are disloyal, but requiting them instantly. Therefore, observe faithfully the Instruction—the laws and the rules—with which I charge you today. And if you do obey these rules and observe them carefully, the ETERNAL your God will maintain faithfully for you the covenant made on oath with your fathers: [God] will favor you and bless you and multiply you—blessing your issue from the womb and your produce from the soil, your new grain and wine and oil, the calving of your herd and the lambing of your flock, in the land sworn to your fathers^cfathers See note at 1.35. to be assigned to you. You shall be blessed above all other peoples: there shall be no sterile male or female among you or among your livestock. GOD will ward off from you all sickness—and will not bring upon you any of the dreadful diseases of Egypt, about which you know, but will inflict them upon all your enemies. You shall destroy all the peoples that the ETERNAL your God delivers to you, showing them no pity. And you shall not worship their gods, for that would be a snare to you. Should you say to yourselves, “These nations are more numerous than we; how can we dispossess them?” You need have no fear of them. You have but to bear in mind what the ETERNAL your God did to Pharaoh and all the Egyptians: the wondrous acts that you saw with your own eyes, the signs and the portents, the mighty hand, and the outstretched arm by which the ETERNAL your God liberated you. Thus will the ETERNAL your God do to all the peoples you now fear. The ETERNAL your God will also send a plague^dplague Meaning of Heb. ṣirʻah uncertain. Cf. Exod. 23.28. against them, until those who are left in hiding perish before you. Do not stand in dread of them, for the ETERNAL your God is in your midst, a great and awesome God. The ETERNAL your God will dislodge those peoples before you little by little; you will not be able to put an end to them at once, else the wild beasts would multiply to your hurt. The ETERNAL your God will deliver them up to you, throwing them into utter panic until they are wiped out. Their kings will be delivered into your hand, and you shall obliterate their name from under the heavens; no one shall stand up to you, until you have wiped them out. You shall consign the images of their gods to the fire; you shall not covet the silver and gold on them and keep it for yourselves, lest you be ensnared thereby; for that is abhorrent to the ETERNAL your God. You must not bring an abhorrent thing into your house, or you will be proscribed like it; you must reject it as abominable and abhorrent, for it is proscribed.