Moses' Song
30Then Moses spoke the words of this song in the hearing of the whole assembly of Israel, from beginning to end. He said:
321Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak.
Let the earth hear the sayings from my mouth.
2Let my teaching drop down like rain,
and let my sayings distill like dew,
like raindrops on grass,
like showers on green plants.
3Yes, I will proclaim the name of the Lord.
Ascribe greatness to our God.
4He is the Rock! Perfect is his work.
Indeed, all of his ways are justice.
He is a faithful God. He does no wrong.
Righteous and upright is he.
5Israel acted corruptly against him.
They are not his children.
They are a twisted and crooked generation.
6Is this how you repay the Lord,
you foolish people, who are not wise?
Is he not your father, who created you,
who made you and established you?
7Remember the days of the distant past.
Consider the years of many generations.
Ask your father and he will tell you about it.
Ask your elders and they will describe it to you.
8When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance,
when he separated the children of Adam,
he established the boundaries for peoples
according to the number of the sons of Israel.[] 9But the allotment for the Lord is his people.
Jacob is the territory that is his possession.
10The Lord found Jacob in a wild land,
in a desolate land, in a howling wasteland.
He encircled him. He cared for him.
He guarded him like the pupil of his eye.
11As an eagle rises from its nest
and hovers over its young,
then spreads its wings to catch them
and carries them on the edge of its wings,
12so the Lord alone led Israel.
There was no foreign god with him.
13He caused them to ride over the high places of the land,
and they ate the produce from the fields.
He caused them to suck honey from the rocks
and olive oil from the hardest flint.
14He fed them with curds from the cattle and milk from the flocks,
with fat lambs, rams, and goats from Bashan,
with the very best wheat,
and they drank foaming wine, the blood of the grape.
15Jeshurun[] grew fat and kicked. “You grew fat, you were stout, you were stuffed.”
Then he abandoned the God who made him,
and he mocked the Rock who saved him.
16They made him jealous with strange gods.
They provoked him with abominations.
17They sacrificed to demons that are not gods,
to gods they had not known,
to newcomers from their neighbors,
gods whom your fathers did not fear.
18You failed to remember the Rock who conceived you.
You forgot the God who gave you birth.
19The Lord saw this and rejected them,
because his sons and daughters had provoked him.
I will hide my face from them,
until I see what their final condition will be,
because they are a twisted generation,
children who cannot be trusted.
21They have made me jealous with their non-gods.
They have provoked me with their useless things.
So I will make them jealous by a non-people.
By a foolish nation I will provoke them.
22For a fire has been ignited by my anger,
and it burns to the depths of hell.[] It devours the earth and its produce.
It sets the foundations of the mountains on fire.
23I will pile up disasters for them.
I will use up all my arrows on them.
24They will be sucked dry by hunger and burned up by fever.
I will send them bitter destruction.
Wild animals will sink their teeth into them
with the burning venom of snakes that crawl in the dust.
25In the street the sword will take away their children.
Inside the houses terror will fill young man and young woman alike,
the nursing child, together with the gray-haired old man.
26I would have said, “I will cut them to pieces.
I will erase their memory from mankind,”
27if I had not dreaded the taunting of the enemy.
I did not want their adversaries to misunderstand.
I did not want them to say,
“Our hand is high-and-mighty,
and the Lord has not done any of this.”
