1. ¶ These are the words of the covenant, which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the sons of Israel in the land of Moab, besides the covenant which he made with them in Horeb.

2. Moses, therefore, called unto all Israel and said unto them, Ye have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt unto Pharaoh and unto all his slaves and unto all his land,

3. the great trials which thine eyes have seen, the signs and those great miracles.

4. Yet the Lord has not given you a heart to perceive and eyes to see and ears to hear until today.

5. And I have brought you forty years through the wilderness; your clothes are not waxed old upon you, and neither has thy shoe waxed old upon thy foot.

6. Ye have never eaten bread, neither have ye drunk wine or strong drink that ye might know that I am the Lord your God.

7. And when ye came unto this place, Sihon, the king of Heshbon, and Og, the king of Bashan, came out against us unto battle, and we smote them;

8. and we took their land and gave it for an inheritance unto the Reubenites and unto the Gadites and to the half tribe of Manasseh.

9. Thou shalt keep, therefore, the words of this covenant and do them that ye may understand all that ye do.

10. ¶ Ye stand today, all of you, before the Lord your God, your princes of your tribes, your elders, and your officers, with all the men of Israel,

11. your little ones, your wives, and thy strangers that dwell within thy camp, from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water,

12. that thou may enter into covenant with the Lord thy God and into his oath, which the Lord thy God makes with thee today,

13. to confirm thee today as his people and that he may be unto thee as God, as he has said unto thee, and as he has sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

14. Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath,

15. but with those that stand here with us today before the Lord our God and also with those that are not here with us today.

16. For ye know how we have dwelt in the land of Egypt, and how we came through the Gentiles which ye passed by;

17. and ye have seen their abominations and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which they have among them.

18. Peradventure there shall be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turns away today from the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of those Gentiles; peradventure there shall be among you a root that bears poison and wormwood;

19. and it shall be, when that one hears the words of this curse, that he blesses himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of my heart, to add drunkenness to thirst.

20. The Lord will not forgive him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.

21. And the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law.

22. So that the generation to come of your children that shall rise up after you, and the stranger that shall come from a far land shall say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses which the Lord has laid upon it,

23. and that the whole land thereof is brimstone and salt and burning, that it is not sown, nor shall it produce anything, nor shall any grass grow therein, like in the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, which the Lord overthrew in his anger and in his wrath;

24. even all Gentiles shall say, Why has the Lord done thus unto this land? What means the heat of this great anger?

25. Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt;

26. for they went and served other gods and worshipped them, gods whom they knew not and who had not given anything unto them.

27. Therefore, the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book.

28. And the Lord rooted them out of their land in anger and in wrath and in great indignation and cast them into another land, as it is today.

29. The hidden things of the Lord our God are uncovered unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.