Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

Create in Me a Clean Heart

Psalm 51

⁵⁸ “If you do not take care to do all the words of this Torah, the things written in this scroll, to fear this glorious and awesome Name, Adonai your God, ⁵⁹ then Adonai will make your plagues and the plagues of your descendants extraordinary—terrible and prolonged plagues, severe and prolonged illnesses. ⁶⁰ He will bring back on you all the diseases of Egypt that you were afraid of, and they will cling to you. ⁶¹ Also every illness and plague that is not written in the scroll of this Torah, Adonai will bring on you, until you are destroyed.

⁶² “You will be left few in number, instead of being like the stars of the sky in number—because you did not listen to the voice of Adonai your God. ⁶³ Now just as Adonai rejoiced over you to do you good and to multiply you, so Adonai will rejoice over you to ruin and destroy you; and you will be uprooted from the land that you are going in to possess.

⁶⁴ “Adonai will scatter you among all peoples from the one end of the earth to the other, and there you will serve other gods—wood and stone—that you and your fathers have not known. ⁶⁵ Among these nations you will find no rest, and there will be no rest for the sole of your foot. But there Adonai will give you a trembling heart and failing eyes, and a despairing spirit.

⁶⁶ “Your life will hang in the balance before you; you will be afraid night and day, and you will have no assurance of your life. ⁶⁷ In the morning you will say, ‘If only it were evening!’ and at evening you will say, ‘If only it were morning!”—from the fear of your heart that you will fear and the sight of your eyes that you will see. ⁶⁸ Adonai will bring you back to Egypt in ships, by the way that I said to you, ‘You will not see it again.’ There you will sell yourselves to your enemies as slaves and maids, but there will be no buyer.”

Renewing the Covenant

⁶⁹ These are the words of the covenant that Adonai commanded Moses to make with Bnei-Yisrael in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant He made with them at Horeb.^[a]

29 Moses called to all Israel and said to them, “You have seen all that Adonai did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and all his servants and all his land—

¹⁷ “But as the time drew near for the promise God had sworn to Abraham, the people increased and multiplied in Egypt— ¹⁸ until ‘there arose another king over Egypt who knew nothing about Joseph.’ ^{[a] 19} Dealing with our people with cruel cunning, this king mistreated our fathers and forced them to abandon their infants so they would not survive.

²⁰ “At this time Moses was born—extraordinary before God. For three months he was nurtured in his father’s house. ²¹ And when he was set outside, Pharaoh’s daughter took him and raised him as her own son. ²² Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was powerful in his words and deeds.

²³ “When he was approaching forty years of age, it came into his heart to visit his brothers, Bnei-Yisrael. ²⁴ When he saw one of them being treated unjustly, he went to the defense of the oppressed man and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian. ²⁵ He was assuming that his brothers understood that by his hand God was delivering them, but they did not understand. ²⁶ So on the next day he appeared to them as they were fighting. He tried to reconcile them in shalom, saying, ‘Men, you are brothers. Why do you wrong one another?’

²⁷ “But the one doing wrong to his neighbor pushed him away, saying, ‘Who appointed you ruler and judge over us? ²⁸ You don’t want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday, do you?’ ^{[b] 29} At this remark, Moses fled and became an exile in the land of Midian, where he became the father of two sons.