Deuteronomychapter 7
26 verses · Moses, by tradition · 15th to 13th century BC · The Law
Key verse
When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to possess, and He drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—
It stands in Make no covenant; break down their altars, verses 1 to 5.
The chapter
Chapter summary
The election of Israel and the driving out of the nations. Seven nations greater and mightier than Israel. Hittite, Girgashite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, Jebusite. The LORD will deliver before them. No covenants with them, no intermarriage, no compromise with their altars. ‘The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: but because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers’. Cursed things are not to be brought into the house; the gold and silver of their gods are an abomination.
Context
Law · Moses · Deuteronomy overview
The world behind this chapter
Deuteronomy 7The history
Moses is the speaker and the chapter is his instruction for a campaign he will not lead. He states the command first and the ground of it afterward, at verses 7 and 8.
The seven nations named were city-states rather than empires. Canaan in this era was a patchwork of small kingdoms, each with its own ruler, its walled town and its farmland, which is the picture the diplomatic letters found at Amarna in Egypt give, where local rulers write to Pharaoh asking for a few dozen soldiers.
The rest of the history, and what it meant to them
A first hearer knew how conquest normally worked. A conqueror kept the population as taxpayers and took their gods into his own pantheon, so the command to make no treaty and no marriage ran against the ordinary practice. The reason verse 4 gives is religion rather than descent, that marriage would turn the sons away to serve other gods.
The objects singled out at verse 5 were the working equipment of Canaanite worship, standing stones, wooden poles for the goddess Asherah, altars, and images plated with silver and gold. Albert Barnes renders the poles as idols of wood and identifies the wooden trunk used to represent Ashtoreth. The warning at verse 25 against coveting the metal on them names how the compromise usually began.
The pace at verse 22 is set deliberately slow. Adam Clarke reads it two ways together, that Israel was not yet numerous enough to fill the land and that wild animals multiply wherever a countryside is emptied faster than it can be farmed. Abandoned terraces and unworked fields return to scrub within a few seasons.
The diseases of verse 15 were known to the hearers. Albert Barnes reads them as the illnesses Egypt was infested with above other countries rather than the plagues of the exodus, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown name ophthalmia, dysentery, smallpox and the plague as maladies later writers confirm of that country.
What it meant to them
They were, by their own reckoning, the smallest of peoples, and verse 7 says so. The chapter tells them the choice was never about size, since God set His love on them and kept the oath He swore to their fathers.
It also gave them a memory to use when the walls looked high. Verses 18 and 19 answer the fear with what God did to Pharaoh, and apply the same arithmetic to a town in the hill country.
Sources cited
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews and Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament , 2000
- Albert Barnes, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments , 1832 to 1869, on Deuteronomy 7:5 and 7:15
- Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible , 1871, on Deuteronomy 7:15
- Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible , 1832, on Deuteronomy 7:22
Where the chapter sits
Deuteronomy 7 falls in Second sermon, the law restated (chapters 5–26). The Decalogue repeated; the Shema; laws for the land, for worship, for kingship, for war, for the poor. The covenant's central exposition.
Before it: First sermon, retrospective, chapters 1–4. After it: Third sermon, blessings and curses, chapters 27–30.
The whole shape of Deuteronomy→The structure of this chapter
Places1
The heads below are this chapter's scenes. The numbered points under each are its verses.
A. Make no covenant; break down their altars
1. (vv. 1-2)
Deuteronomy 7:1
“These are the seven nations whose lands the Lord promised to give to the children of Israel when they left Egypt. We must accept the fact that, according to the apostle, all the things that happened to them in a figure were written for our instruction.… The reason that they are said to be much more numerous is that there are more vices than virtues. Therefore in the list they are counted as seven nations, to be sure, but when it is a question of destroying them they are said to be innumerable.”
John Cassian· written before 435· CONFERENCE 5.16.1-2patristic
1 more voice on this verseWhat preachers and commentators have said about this verse, in their own words.
Deuteronomy 7:1
“Seven nations - There were ten in Gen. xv, 19-21. But this being some hundreds of years after, it is not strange if three of them were either destroyed by foreign or domestick wars, or by cohabitation and marriage united with, and swallowed up in the rest.”
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765)evangelical
Deuteronomy 7:2
“Thou shalt smite them, etc. - These idolatrous nations were to be utterly destroyed, and all the others also which were contiguous to the boundaries of the promised land, provided they did not renounce their idolatry and receive the true faith: for if they did not, then no covenant was to be made with them on any secular or political consideration whatever; no mercy was to be shown to them, because the cup of their iniquity also was now full; and they must either embrace, heartily embrace, the true religion, or be cut off.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
1 more voice on this verse
Deuteronomy 7:2
“If they were to be swept away like the antediluvians or the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, as incorrigible sinners who had filled up the measure of their iniquities, it mattered not to them in what way the judgment was inflicted; and God, as the Sovereign Disposer, had a right to employ any instruments that pleased Him for executing His judgments.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
Seven nations are named here and Genesis 15:19-21 had named ten to Abraham. Commentators account for the difference by the centuries of war and absorption that fall between the promise and the possession. Verse 2 gives the command in three parts, utterly destroy them, make no covenant with them, and shew no mercy unto them, and it supplies no ground at this point; the ground arrives at verses 7 and 8. Genesis 15:16 had already fixed the timing by the iniquity of the Amorites, which was not yet full in Abraham's day.
2. (vv. 3-5)
Deuteronomy 7:3
“Neither shalt thou make marriages, etc. - The heart being naturally inclined to evil, there is more likelihood that the idolatrous wife should draw aside the believing husband, than that the believing husband should be able to bring over his idolatrous wife to the true faith.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
1 more voice on this verse
Deuteronomy 7:3
“Neither shalt thou make marriages with them,....”
Deuteronomy 7:4
“To serve other Gods - That is, there is manifest danger of apostacy and idolatry from such matches. Which reason doth both limit the law to such of these as are unconverted (otherwise Salmon married Rahab, Matt. i, 5) and enlarge it to other idolatrous nations, as appears from 1 Kings xi, 2 Ezra ix, 2 Neh. xiii, 23.”
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765)evangelical
Deuteronomy 7:5
It was imitated by the Scottish Reformers, and although many ardent lovers of architecture and the fine arts have anathematized their proceedings as vandalism, yet there was profound wisdom in the favorite maxim of Knox--"pull down the nests, and the rooks will disappear."
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
The marriage prohibition carries its reason in the next breath, that they will turn away thy son from following me. 1 Kings 11:1-4 reports that outcome in Solomon, whose wives turned away his heart in his old age, and Ezra 9:1-2 and Nehemiah 13:23-27 both reach back to this passage in the same connection. Verse 5 turns from the people to the apparatus of their worship, altars, images, groves and graven images, and Exodus 34:12-16 had already set the same three together, no covenant, no marriage, and broken images.
B. The fewest of peoples, and still loved
1. (vv. 6-8)
Deuteronomy 7:6
“Thou art a holy people - And therefore should have no connection with the workers of iniquity. A special people - סגלה segullah, - Septuagint, λαον περιουσιον, - a peculiar people, a private property. The words as they stand in the Septuagint are quoted by the apostle, 1Pe 2:9.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
Deuteronomy 7:7
“For Abraham had but one son concerned in this choice and covenant, namely, Isaac, and that was in his hundredth year; and Isaac was sixty years old ere he had a child, and then had only two children; and though Jacob had twelve sons, it was a long time before they made any considerable increase.”
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765)evangelical
Deuteronomy 7:8
"He has brought you out of Egypt in pursuance of the oath sworn to your fathers." Nothing in them, or done by them, did or could make God a debtor to them; but he had made himself a debtor to his own promise, which he would perform notwithstanding their unworthiness. The tenour of the covenant into which they were taken; it was in short this, That as they were to God so God would be to them.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
2 more voices on this verse
Deuteronomy 7:8
“But because the Lord loved you - It was no good in them that induced God to choose them at this time to be his peculiar people: he had his reasons, but these sprang from his infinite goodness. He intended to make a full discovery of his goodness to the world, and this must have a commencement in some particular place, and among some people. He chose that time, and he chose the Jewish people; but not because of their goodness or holiness.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
Deuteronomy 7:8
“But because the Lord loved you,....”
Holy and special render two words, the second of which is segullah, a king's own treasure held apart from the public store. The Septuagint gives it as laon periousion, the phrase Titus 2:14 uses of the church, while 1 Peter 2:9 gathers the same language out of Exodus 19:5-6. Verses 7 and 8 then supply the ground the chapter has withheld, that the choice rested on no quality in Israel, since they were the fewest of all people, but on the love of the LORD and on an oath sworn to their fathers. Calvin reads the election in this chapter as a reason for obedience laid on the people rather than as a warrant for pride.
2. (vv. 9-11)
Deuteronomy 7:9
“The only true and living God, and not the idols of the Gentiles, who are false and lifeless ones, and therefore not the proper objects of adoration: the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy; as appeared by fulfilling the promise made to their fathers, in bringing them out of Egypt, and now them to the borders of the land of Canaan given them for an inheritance: with them that love him, and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations; see Exo 20:6 which are not the causes or conditions of his covenant and mercy, nor of his keeping them, but descriptive of the persons that enjoy the benefit thereof.”
Deuteronomy 7:10
“And repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them,.... Openly, publicly, and at once, they not being able to make any resistance.”
2 more voices on this verse
Deuteronomy 7:10
“To their face - That is, openly, and so as they shall see it, and not be able to avoid it. Slack - So as to delay it beyond the fit time or season for vengeance, yet withal he is long-suffering, and slow to anger.”
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765)evangelical
Deuteronomy 7:10
“Note, [1.] Wilful sinners are haters of God; for the carnal mind is enmity against him. Idolaters are so in a special manner, for they are in league with his rivals. [2.] Those that hate God cannot hurt him, but certainly ruin themselves.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
Deuteronomy 7:11
“Thou shalt therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments,.... The laws, moral, ceremonial, and judicial, urged thereunto both by promises and threatenings, in hopes of reward, and through fear of punishment: which I command thee this day, to do them; in the name of the Lord, and by his authority; by virtue of which he made a new declaration of them to put them in mind of them in order to observe them.”
1 more voice on this verse
Deuteronomy 7:11
“That people accordingly were truly happy as a nation, and found every promise which the faithful God made to them amply fulfilled, so long as they adhered to that obedience which was required of them.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
Verse 9 repeats the wording of the second commandment at Exodus 20:5-6, and verse 10 changes what stands there. Exodus visits iniquity upon the third and fourth generation, while here the repayment lands on the man himself, to his face, and the phrase falls twice in the one verse. Mercy running to a thousand generations against a repayment inside a single lifetime is an asymmetry the text means, and Deuteronomy 24:16 states the same limit as law, that fathers shall not be put to death for the children.
C. Blessing on womb, field, and flock
1. (vv. 12-14)
Deuteronomy 7:12
“Wherefore it shall come to pass, if ye hearken to these judgments, and keep and do them,.... Attentively listen to the declaration made of them, and be careful to observe them: that the Lord thy God shall keep unto thee the covenant and the mercy which he sware unto thy fathers; to bring them into the land of Canaan, and continue them in it; yea, to send the Messiah to them, and bring him the salvation of Israel out of Zion; see Luk 1:68.”
Deuteronomy 7:13
“Flocks of thy sheep - Render it instead: “the ewes of thy sheep.” The phrase is unique to Deuteronomy. The Hebrew word for “ewes” is the plural form of Ashtoreth, the well-known name of the “goddess of the Zidonians” 1Ki 11:5. This goddess, called by the Classical writers “Astarte,” and identified with “Venus,” represented the fruitfulness of nature.”
Deuteronomy 7:14
“Thou shalt be blessed above all people,.... Even with temporal blessings, besides those of a religious kind; they having the oracles of God, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises, Rom 3:1, there shall not be male or female barren among you; which to be was reckoned a reproach, and the contrary a blessing, Luk 1:25 Psa 128:3. or among your cattle; the Targum of Jonathan is, nor thy beasts barren of wool, and milk, and lambs.”
The blessings promised here are the seed of chapter 28, where the same items return at length before the curses take over that chapter. Corn, wine and oil is a set phrase in this book, recurring at 11:14, 14:23, 18:4 and at 28:51, where an enemy eats it. Barnes reads the words rendered flocks of thy sheep as a plural of Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Zidonians named at 1 Kings 11:5, so a word for fertility taken from the neighbours' religion carries the increase God gives, in a chapter that has just ordered her groves cut down.
2. (v. 15)
Deuteronomy 7:15
“There seems to be here not so much as a reference to the plagues inflicted miraculously by God on Egypt (compare Exo 15:26), as to the terrible diseases with which, above other countries, Egypt was infested. Compare Deu 28:27, Deu 28:35. It is not without significance that Egypt, which represents in Scripture the world as contrasted with the Church, should thus above other lands lie under the power of disease and death.”
1 more voice on this verse
Deuteronomy 7:15
“The testimony of Moses is confirmed by the reports of many modern writers, who tell us that, notwithstanding its equal temperature and sereneness, that country has some indigenous maladies which are very malignant, such as ophthalmia, dysentery, smallpox, and the plague.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)reformed
Sickness is handled by promise, and the diseases of Egypt are named as something the hearers have already seen, which thou knowest. Exodus 15:26 had made the same promise at Marah and attached a name to it, I am the LORD that healeth thee. Chapter 28:27 and 28:60 then turn the sentence around and put the diseases of Egypt on Israel itself, so one clause serves the blessing and the curse.
3. (v. 16)
Deuteronomy 7:16
“And thou shall consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee,.... All the inhabitants of the land of Canaan, which the Lord should deliver into their hands; them they were not to spare, but utterly destroy men, women, and children: thine eye shall have no pity upon them; See Gill on Deu 7:2, neither shall thou serve their gods, for that will be a snare unto thee; which will bring into utter ruin and destruction; see Exo 23:33.”
Deuteronomy 7:16-17
The command of verse 2 returns in shorter form and gains a clause that names what the chapter is guarding against, neither shalt thou serve their gods, for that will be a snare unto thee. Verse 17 then puts the objection in the hearer's own heart, these nations are more than I, how can I dispossess them, which is the report the spies brought back at Numbers 13:31. Chapter 1:26-33 has already told that story, so a reader meets the same fear twice in this book, once as history and once as a question waiting for an answer.
D. Remember Pharaoh; do not fear these nations
1. (v. 17)
Deuteronomy 7:17
“If thou shall say in thine heart,.... Should have secret thoughts arise in the heart, misgivings of heart, fears and doubts there, which, though not outwardly expressed, might be inwardly retained: these nations are more than I; seven to one, and perhaps anyone of them as powerful as Israel: how can I dispossess them? of the land they inherit, and take possession of it.”
2. (vv. 18-19)
Deuteronomy 7:18
“The word and works of God are well remembered when they are improved as helps to our faith and obedience. That is well laid up which is ready to us when we have occasion to use it.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
1 more voice on this verse
Deuteronomy 7:18
“Thou shalt not be afraid of them,....”
Deuteronomy 7:19
“The great temptations which thine eyes saw, and the signs, and the wonders,....”
Remember is one of the two commands running through this book, fourteen occurrences against nine of forget, and here it is the answer given to fear. What is to be remembered is an event rather than a doctrine, what the LORD thy God did unto Pharaoh and unto all Egypt. The signs, the wonders, the mighty hand and the stretched out arm form a fixed formula that returns at 4:34, 11:2-3 and 26:8, and the argument runs straight from what God did to Egypt to what he will do to the people of whom thou art afraid.
3. (vv. 20-21)
Deuteronomy 7:20
“Moreover, the Lord thy God will send the hornet among them,.... Not a single one, but several of them, and which may be understood of creatures so called, which resemble wasps, only twice as large, an insect very bold and venomous; see Exo 23:28. Aben Ezra interprets it of the leprosy: until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed; such of the Canaanites who escaped the sword of the Israelites, and hid themselves in holes and caverns of the earth; these the hornets would find out and sting them to death, until they were all destroyed.”
Deuteronomy 7:21
“Thou shall not be affrighted at them,.... At their numbers, nor at their gigantic stature: for the Lord thy God is among you: in the tabernacle, in the holy of holies, which was in the midst of them, and besides would give proof of his powerful presence among them, in protecting them, and destroying their enemies: a mighty God and terrible; mighty to save his people, and terrible to others.”
The hornet appears three times in Scripture, here, at Exodus 23:28 and at Joshua 24:12, and in each place God sends it ahead of Israel. Readers have taken it three ways. Gill reports Aben Ezra reading it as a disease, others hold to the insects themselves, and a further reading takes the hornet for Egyptian military pressure on Canaan, since the bee served as a royal emblem in Egypt. Verse 21 puts the ground of courage in one clause, the LORD thy God is among you, which is the presence housed in the tabernacle in the middle of the camp.
4. (vv. 22-23)
Deuteronomy 7:22
“Put out those nations - by little and little - The Israelites were not as yet sufficiently numerous to fill the whole land occupied by the seven nations mentioned Deu 7:1. And as wild and ferocious animals might be expected to multiply where either there are no inhabitants, or the place is but thinly peopled, therefore God tells them that, though at present, by force of arms, they might be able to expel them, it would be impolitic so to do, lest the beasts of the field should multiply upon them.”
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1810-1826)evangelical
Deuteronomy 7:23
“But the Lord thy God shall deliver them unto thee,.... Gradually, by little and little, until at length they should all come into their hands: and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction until they be destroyed; even all of them.”
1 more voice on this verse
Deuteronomy 7:23
“Thus we are commanded not to let sin reign, not to indulge ourselves in it nor give countenance to it, but to hate it and strive against it; and then God has promised that sin shall not have dominion over us ( Rom. vi.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
By little and little is given a reason drawn from the ground itself, that the beasts of the field would increase in emptied country, and Exodus 23:29-30 gave the same reason in almost the same words. Judges 2:20-23 supplies a different reason for nations left in the land, that God left them to prove Israel, and both accounts stand in the canon. The pace of the conquest is stated here as God's arrangement, while verse 23 keeps the outcome fixed, destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed.
5. (v. 24)
Deuteronomy 7:24
“And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand,....”
Joshua 12 lists thirty-one kings taken on the west of Jordan, which is this verse carried out and counted. To destroy their name from under heaven is the sentence passed on Amalek at 25:19, where the remembrance of Amalek is to be blotted out from under heaven. The clause about no man being able to stand before thee is spoken again to Joshua himself at Joshua 1:5, at the point where the charge passes from Moses to his successor.
6. (vv. 25-26)
Deuteronomy 7:25
“The silver or gold that is on them - The silver and gold with which the statues of the gods were overlaid. Paul is probably alluding to this command in Rom 2:22; and his accusation of the Jew thus shows that the prohibition of the text was very necessary. Lest thou be snared - As by the rich ephod made by Gideon: compare the marginal reference.”
Deuteronomy 7:26
“Neither shalt thou bring an abomination into thy house,....”
1 more voice on this verse
Deuteronomy 7:26
“The promise of God's favour to them, if they would be obedient, is enlarged upon with a most affecting copiousness and fluency of expression, which intimates how much it is both God's desire and our own interest that we be religious. All possible assurance is here given them, 1. That, if they would sincerely endeavour to do their part of the covenant, God would certainly perform his part.”
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1707-1721)puritan
The silver and gold on the images is forbidden with a reason attached, lest thou be snared therein, and Joshua 7:21 is the case in point, where Achan takes a wedge of gold and a garment out of Jericho and Israel loses the next battle. Judges 8:24-27 has Gideon make an ephod out of spoil and all Israel go a whoring after it. Barnes reads Romans 2:22 as an allusion to this command, where Paul asks a reader who abhors idols whether he commits sacrilege. The chapter closes on the word cursed, which is herem, the same root translated utterly destroy at verse 2, so the thing devoted to destruction and the man who keeps it in his house fall under one term.
This page carries no textual note on Deuteronomy 7. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
Sources for this chapter
The summary
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.
The exposition
Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible; Albert Barnes, Notes on the Old Testament; Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible; John Calvin, Commentary on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony; John Gill, Exposition of the Old Testament; Keil and Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament: The Pentateuch and Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible.