Not Because You Were Great: Chosen in Love

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Ban (ḥerem),” “War, Holy,” “Canaan, Canaanites,” “Asherah,” “Pillar (Maṣṣebah),” “Election,” “Covenant,” “Marriage (Mixed).”
• Dictionary of the OT: Pentateuch — “Destroy, Utterly (ḥerem),” “Election,” “Love,” “Idolatry,” “Canaanite Religion,” “Warfare,” “Land.”
• NIDOTTE / TDOT — חֵרֶם (ḥērem, devoted thing), בָּחַר (bāḥar, choose), חָשַׁק (ḥāšaq, be attached to, set one’s love on), סְגֻלָּה (səgullāh, treasured possession), אָהַב (ʾāhaḇ, love), אֲשֵׁרָה (ʾăšērāh).

• Peter C. Craigie (NICOT), Daniel I. Block (NIVAC), J. G. McConville (Apollos), Jeffrey H. Tigay (JPS), Duane L. Christensen (WBC), Moshe Weinfeld (Anchor) on Deuteronomy.
• Studies of ḥerem in Israel and in the Mesha Inscription; of ANE conquest rhetoric; and of the covenant/treaty form (Kline; Weinfeld).
• W. L. Moran, “The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” CBQ 25 (1963) — the classic study of covenant “love” as loyalty language.
• Beale & Carson, Commentary on the NT Use of the OT (Titus; 1 Peter; the Gospels).

The ban was not unique to Israel. The Mesha Inscription (the Moabite Stone, c. 840 BC) uses the very same root. King Mesha reports taking Nebo from Israel and slaying its whole population, “for I had devoted them to destruction for (the god) Ashtar-Chemosh” (ANET 320; the inscription runs ANET 320–321). This matters two ways at once. It confirms that the language of the ban is genuine Iron-Age idiom and not a literary abstraction — and it also refuses to let anyone treat Israel’s ban as self-evidently righteous simply because Israel did it. In Moab the same practice is done for Chemosh. The question Deuteronomy forces is not whether the practice existed but who commanded this one, why, and within what limits.

“Make no covenant with them” is treaty language. Deuteronomy’s whole architecture matches the ANE suzerainty treaty, and the Hittite texts show what a vassal’s exclusive loyalty sounded like: “With my friend you shall be friend, and with my enemy you shall be enemy” (Mursilis–Duppi-Tessub, ANET 204; the Egyptian and Hittite treaties begin at ANET 199). Vassals could not make their own treaties with third parties — that was the great-king’s prerogative. Read there, “you shall make no covenant with them” (7:2) is not first a policy of cruelty but a clause of undivided allegiance, and marriage in that world was treaty (7:3): dynastic marriage sealed alliances, and alliances brought the partner’s gods along with the bride. Which is precisely the reason 7:4 gives.

Altars, pillars, Asherim. The four objects of 7:5 are the standard furniture of a Canaanite high place: the altar, the standing stone (מַצֵּבָה), the wooden Asherah pole, and the carved image. Asherah is known from the Ugaritic texts as Athirat, consort of El and mother of the gods; and the ninth/eighth-century Hebrew inscriptions from Kuntillet ʿAjrud and Khirbet el-Qom, which bless by “Yahweh… and his asherah,” show exactly the syncretism Deuteronomy is trying to prevent. That is the danger 7:4 names, and Israel proved the point: at Baal-Peor it was Moabite women and a Moabite god, not Canaanite armies, that cost Israel twenty-four thousand lives (Numbers 25).

• Mesha Inscription / Moabite Stone (Moabite, c. 840 BC; ANET 320–321) — “I had devoted them to destruction for Ashtar-Chemosh”: the ḥrm root outside Israel, done for another god. A witness, not Scripture.
• Treaty between Mursilis and Duppi-Tessub of Amurru (Hittite; ANET 203–205; the treaty section begins at ANET 199) — exclusive loyalty, no independent treaties: the world in which “make no covenant with them” is a covenant clause.
• Vassal-Treaties of Esarhaddon (Neo-Assyrian, 672 BC; ANET 534–541 — beyond our local scan, so cited without page verification) — the closest formal parallel to Deuteronomy’s stipulations and curses, and a text in which the vassal is required to “love” the sovereign.
• Ugaritic texts (Athirat) and the Hebrew inscriptions from Kuntillet ʿAjrud and Khirbet el-Qom — background to the Asherim of 7:5 and to the syncretism 7:4 anticipates.
• Wisdom of Solomon 12:3–11 (Apocrypha — a witness, not Scripture in the Protestant canon) — an extended Second-Temple meditation on exactly this chapter: God sent “wasps” (σφῆκας, cf. LXX Deut 7:20) to destroy them κατὰ βραχύ, “little by little” (cf. 7:22) — and “judging them little by little you gave them a place for repentance” (12:10).
• Jubilees 20:4; 22:20; 30:7–17 (Second-Temple — a witness, not Scripture) — hardens Deut 7:3 from seven named peoples into a blanket ban on marriage with any Gentile (see Jubilees 2). An early example of a bounded command being universalized — and a warning.
• Mishnah, Yadayim 4:4 (rabbinic-era — a witness, not Scripture) — Judah the Ammonite convert is admitted because “Sennacherib… came up and mixed all the nations”: the peoples of the Torah’s lists are no longer identifiable. Later halakhah (Maimonides, Hilkhot Melakhim 5:4) applies the same reasoning to the seven nations — the command has no possible object.

• Titus 2:14 — Christ gave himself “to purify for himself a people for his own possession”: λαὸν περιούσιον, the LXX phrase of Deut 7:6 and 14:2, now of the church.
• 1 Peter 2:9–10 — “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession… once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people.” The logic of Deut 7:7–8 exactly: chosen out of nothing you brought.
• Ephesians 1:4–5 — chosen before the foundation of the world and, “in love,” predestined for adoption — “according to the purpose of his will” — and see Ephesians 2:1–10: “not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” Same sermon, new covenant.
• 2 Corinthians 10:3–5; Ephesians 6:12 — “the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh”; “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood.” The war of Deuteronomy 7 does not carry forward into the church’s hands.
• Luke 9:51–56 — James and John ask for fire from heaven on an unwelcoming village; “he turned and rebuked them.” The disciples’ instinct was to generalize an Old Testament judgment. Jesus said no.
• Romans 8:31–39 — the New Testament’s own version of “because the Lord loves you”: nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (see Romans 8:31–39).

• Genesis 15:16 — “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete”: four centuries of delay before the judgment of this chapter, and the reason given is moral, not tribal (see Genesis 15).
• Leviticus 18:24–28; 20:22–24 — the land “vomits out” its inhabitants for what they did, and will vomit Israel out for the same. The standard cuts both ways (see Leviticus 18).
• Deuteronomy 2:4–5, 9, 19 — God forbids Israel to take a foot of Edom, Moab or Ammon: the text’s own boundary on the conquest, in the same sermon (see Deuteronomy 1–3).
• Deuteronomy 9:4–6 — the twin of 7:7: “Not because of your righteousness… for you are a stubborn people.” Two disclaimers, one sermon — not for your size, not for your goodness.
• Exodus 19:5–6; 23:20–33 — “my treasured possession… a kingdom of priests” (see Exodus 19), and the earlier promise to drive the nations out “little by little” with the same reason about the beasts (Exod 23:29–30).
• Exodus 20:5–6; 34:6–7 — the asymmetry Deut 7:9–10 restates: iniquity visited “to the third and the fourth generation,” steadfast love to thousands (see Exodus 33:12–34:9).
• Numbers 25:1–18; 33:50–56 — the danger of 7:4 actually happening at Baal-Peor (Numbers 25), and the parallel command about images and high places (Numbers 33); for the same difficult material handled in the same way, see Numbers 31.
• Titus 2:14; 1 Peter 2:9–10; Ephesians 1:4–5 — the vocabulary of 7:6–8 carried into the church without the sword.

• Peter C. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy (NICOT); Daniel I. Block, Deuteronomy (NIVAC); J. G. McConville, Deuteronomy (Apollos); Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS); Duane L. Christensen, Deuteronomy (WBC); Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1–11 (Anchor).
• Meredith G. Kline, Treaty of the Great King; Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School — the suzerainty-treaty form and its bearing on the shape (not the date) of the book.
• W. L. Moran, “The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” CBQ 25 (1963).
• K. Lawson Younger Jr., Ancient Conquest Accounts (JSOTSup 98) — the stereotyped, totalizing rhetoric shared by Israelite, Assyrian, Egyptian and Hittite campaign reports.
• Christopher J. H. Wright, The God I Don’t Understand, and Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? — two careful, non-evasive attempts to think through the Canaanite question theologically.
• G. K. Beale & D. A. Carson, eds., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Titus; 1 Peter).

• Report the ḥerem; do not soften it and do not skip it. Deuteronomy 7:1–2 says what it says. Any reading that quietly deletes it is not reading Deuteronomy. Equally, any reading that stops there has not reached the chapter’s own centre, six verses later.
• The stated reason is religious, not ethnic. 7:4 gives it: “they would turn away your sons from following me.” The chapter never says the nations are of inferior stock, and Scripture immediately proves the point in the other direction — Rahab and the Gibeonites live, Ruth the Moabite enters the royal line, and Achan the Israelite becomes ḥerem (Josh 7), which is exactly what 7:26 warned. Reading these texts as a charter for ethnic hatred inverts them.
• It is bounded, and Scripture draws the boundary itself. Seven named peoples, one land, one generation, by explicit divine command, after four hundred years of delay (Gen 15:16) — and in the same sermon God forbids touching Edom, Moab and Ammon (Deut 2). It is not a general principle and never was. It is not a model for any nation, army, church or person today, and the New Testament closes the door explicitly (2 Cor 10:4; Eph 6:12; Luke 9:54–55; Matt 26:52).
• It is still hard, and saying so is honest. This study does not claim the difficulty dissolves. Judgment on a people is a terrible thing, and the chapter itself keeps company with a God who is “slow to anger,” who delays four centuries, who clears the land little by little, and who will later hand his own people over to the same kind of judgment for the same sins (Lev 18:28). We report the tension rather than resolve it, and we refuse to make it useful.
• A live scholarly question, not adjudicated here. Younger and others argue that ANE campaign reports (including Joshua’s) use conventional totalizing rhetoric — “all,” “none left,” “utterly” — and that Joshua’s own summaries (Josh 13:1; Judg 1) show survivors, so the language may be less absolute than it sounds. Others hold the language plainly. Both are serious readings; this page reports the debate and does not settle it.
• Do not turn 7:6–8 into a boast, in any direction. Election here is corporate, undeserved, and for the sake of a promise; it comes with no superiority and, as chapter 9 will make blunt, no righteousness. The New Testament hands the same vocabulary to the church (Titus 2:14; 1 Pet 2:9) and draws the same conclusion: no one may boast.
• Note the asymmetry in 7:9–10. Steadfast love reaches “a thousand generations”; recompense reaches those who hate him “to their face” — personally, in their own lifetime, not down the family line. Deuteronomy elsewhere makes that explicit: each dies for his own sin (Deut 24:16). Consequences run through generations; guilt does not.

• You were never chosen for your size. “It was not because you were more in number… for you were the fewest of all peoples” (7:7). Whatever made God set his love on you, it was not your numbers, your record, or your usefulness. That is the most humbling and the most steadying fact you own.
• Therefore weakness cannot unchoose you. If smallness was the starting condition, smallness is not now a disqualification. “These nations are greater than I” (7:17) is true — and beside the point.
• Being loved is not being better. Deuteronomy hands the sentence to Israel and Peter hands it to the church, and both times the conclusion is worship, not superiority. A people loved for nothing in themselves has nothing to look down from.
• The real danger was never the armies. It was the quiet drift of 7:4 — the altar kept “just in case,” the god added rather than substituted, the loyalty divided at home. Israel lost more at Baal-Peor than in any battle of the wilderness years.
• God works little by little. The slow pace of 7:22 is not divine reluctance; it is care — the land would go wild if it emptied at once. He is unhurried with you for reasons you cannot see yet.
• And the sword is not ours. The war of this chapter was bounded, commanded, and finished. “The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh” (2 Cor 10:4). When two disciples reached for fire from heaven, Jesus rebuked them (Luke 9:54–55). Anyone who quotes Deuteronomy 7 to justify harming a neighbour has read it exactly backwards.

Step in response: find the sentence you secretly use to explain why God is good to you — my faith, my record, my usefulness, my family, my church — and cross it out. Then put Deuteronomy 7:7–8 in its place, out loud, in the first person: it was not because I was more in number; I was the fewest; it is because the Lord loves me and is keeping his oath. Then go do the small, slow, unglamorous thing in front of you today — because that is how he works: little by little.