7. When you came to this place, Sihon king of Heshbon and Og king of Bashan came out to fight us, but we defeated them.
8. We captured their land and gave it to the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and East Manasseh to be their own.
9. You must carefully obey everything in this agreement so that you will succeed in everything you do.
10. Today you are all standing here before the Lord your God—your leaders and important men, your elders, officers, and all the other men of Israel,
11. your wives and children and the foreigners who live among you, who chop your wood and carry your water.
12. You are all here to enter into an agreement and a promise with the Lord your God, an agreement the Lord your God is making with you today.
13. This will make you today his own people. He will be your God, as he told you and as he promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
14. But I am not just making this agreement and its promises with you
15. who are standing here before the Lord your God today, but also with those who are not here today.
16. You know how we lived in Egypt and how we passed through the countries when we came here.
17. You saw their hateful idols made of wood, stone, silver, and gold.
18. Make sure no man, woman, family group, or tribe among you leaves the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of those nations. They would be to you like a plant that grows bitter, poisonous fruit.
19. These are the kind of people who hear these curses but bless themselves, thinking, “We will be safe even though we continue doing what we want to do.” Those people may destroy all of your land, both wet and dry.
20. The Lord will not forgive them. His anger will be like a burning fire against those people, and all the curses written in this book will come on them. The Lord will destroy any memory of them on the earth.
21. He will separate them from all the tribes of Israel for punishment. All the curses of the Agreement that are written in this Book of the Teachings will happen to them.