Deuteronomy 31:30-32:27

GOD’S WORD Translation

⁵ He recognizes that his people are corrupt.
To their shame they are no longer his children.
They are devious and scheming.
⁶ Is this how you repay the Lord,
you foolish and silly people?
Isn’t he your Father and Owner,
who made you and formed you?

⁷ Remember a time long ago.
Think about all the past generations.
Ask your fathers to remind you,
and your leaders to tell you.
⁸ When the Most High gave nations their land,
when he divided the descendants of Adam,
he set up borders for the tribes
corresponding to the number of the sons of Israel.

⁹ But the Lord’s people were his property.
Jacob was his own possession.
¹⁰ He found his people in a desert land,
in a barren place where animals howl.
He guarded them, took care of them,
and protected them because they were helpless.
¹¹ Like an eagle that stirs up its nest,
hovers over its young,
spreads its wings to catch them,
and carries them on its feathers,
¹² so the Lord alone led his people.
No foreign god was with him.
¹³ He made them ride on the heights of the earth
and fed them with the produce of the fields.
He gave them honey from rocks
and olive oil from solid rock.
¹⁴ They ate cheese from cows
and drank milk from sheep and goats.
He gave them fat from lambs,
rams from the stock of Bashan,
male goats, and the best wheat.
They drank the blood-red wine of grapes.

¹⁵ Jeshurun ^[a] got fat and disrespectful.
(You got fat! You were stuffed! You were gorged!)
They abandoned the God who made them
and treated the rock of their salvation like a fool.
¹⁶ They made him furious because they worshiped foreign gods
and angered him because they worshiped worthless idols.
¹⁷ They sacrificed to demons that are not God,
to gods they never heard of.
These were new gods, who came from nearby,
gods your ancestors never worshiped.
¹⁸ (You ignored the rock who fathered you
and forgot the God who gave you life.)

¹⁹ The Lord saw this and rejected them,
because his own sons and daughters had made him angry.
²⁰ He said, “I will turn away from them
and find out what will happen to them.
They are devious people,
children who can’t be trusted.
²¹ They made him furious because they worshiped foreign gods
and angered him because they worshiped worthless idols.
So I will use those who are not my people to make them jealous
and a nation of godless fools to make them angry.
²² My anger has started a fire
that will burn to the depths of hell.
It will consume the earth and its crops
and set the foundations of the mountains on fire.
²³ I will bring one disaster after another on them.
I will use up all my arrows on them.
²⁴ They will be starved by famines
and ravaged by pestilence and deadly epidemics.
I will send vicious animals against them
along with poisonous animals that crawl on the ground.
²⁵ Foreign wars will kill off their children,
and even at home there will be horrors.
Young men and young women alike will die
as well as nursing babies and gray-haired men.
²⁶ I said that I would cut them in pieces
and erase everyone’s memory of them.
²⁷ But I didn’t want their enemies to make me angry.
I didn’t want their opponents to misunderstand and say,
‘We won this victory!
It wasn’t the Lord who did all this!’ ”