Deuteronomy 32:1-20

The Voice

32 Moses: Listen, O sky, so I may speak!
        Pay attention, O earth, to what I say!
²     Let my teaching fall on you like raindrops;
        let what I say collect like the dew,
    Like rain sprinkling the grass,
        like showers on the green plants.
³     I will proclaim the name of the Eternal;
        I will utter greatness to our God.
⁴     He’s the Rock, and His work is perfect; everything He does is right.
    He’s the God who can be trusted, who never does wrong
        because He’s righteous and upright.
⁵     But a perverse and crooked generation has broken its word to Him.
        They are not counted as His children—not with such deficiencies.
⁶     Is this how you repay the Eternal,
        you foolish, unwise people?
    Isn’t He your Father who produced you,
        who made you and established you?
⁷     Remember the days long ago;
        consider the years of past generations.
    Ask your father, and he’ll explain it to you;
        ask the elders, and they’ll tell you:
⁸     When God, the Most High in heaven gave all the nations their inherited territory,
        when He divided the descendants of Adam into nations,
    When He established the boundaries of the peoples,
        as the number of the sons of God,
⁹     Because the Eternal’s territory is His people;
        and Jacob is the territory of God’s inheritance.
¹⁰     The Eternal found Jacob out in the wilderness,
        out in an empty, windswept desert wasteland.
    He put His arms around him and took care of him;
        He protected him as the apple of His eye.
¹¹     Just as an eagle stirs up its nest, encouraging its young to fly,
        and then hovers over them in case they need help,
    And spreads its wings and catches them if they fall,
        and carries them up high on its wings;
¹²     So the Eternal guided Jacob through the wilderness
        without the help of any foreign god.
¹³     He set him on the heights of the land
        and fed him from the produce of the fields.
    He even fed him honey from the rocks
        and oil from flinty stones,
¹⁴     Butter from his cows and milk from his flocks,
        fattened young lambs, rams raised in Bashan, and goats,
        the finest fatty kernels of wheat, and wine from the lifeblood of grapes.
¹⁵     But Jeshurun—my upright ones of Israel—got fat and kicked back—
        yes, you were fat and bloated and stuffed.
    He abandoned the God who made him
        and disdained the Rock of his salvation.
¹⁶     They made Him jealous by worshiping foreign gods;
        they infuriated Him with their disgusting idols.
¹⁷     They offered sacrifices to demons that are not God;
        they worshiped gods they hadn’t known,
    New ones that had just appeared,
        gods their ancestors had never been acquainted with.
¹⁸     You ignored the Rock who bore you
        and forgot the God who gave birth to you.

¹⁹ Moses: The Eternal saw this and rejected them
        because His sons and daughters had made Him so angry.

²⁰ Eternal One: I won’t look at them when they pray;
        I’ll just watch and see what happens to them
    Because they’re a perverse generation,
        children who are unfaithful.