1. The Lord your God will bring you into the land that you are entering and that you will have as your own. As you go in, he will force out these nations: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites—seven nations that are stronger than you.
2. The Lord your God will hand these nations over to you, and when you defeat them, you must destroy them completely. Do not make a peace treaty with them or show them any mercy.
3. Do not marry any of them, or let your daughters marry their sons, or let your sons marry their daughters.
4. If you do, those people will turn your children away from me, to begin serving other gods. Then the Lord will be very angry with you, and he will quickly destroy you.
5. This is what you must do to those people: Tear down their altars, smash their holy stone pillars, cut down their Asherah idols, and burn their idols in the fire.
6. You are holy people who belong to the Lord your God. He has chosen you from all the people on earth to be his very own.
7. The Lord did not care for you and choose you because there were many of you—you are the smallest nation of all.
8. But the Lord chose you because he loved you, and he kept his promise to your ancestors. So he brought you out of Egypt by his great power and freed you from the land of slavery, from the power of the king of Egypt.
9. So know that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God. He will keep his agreement of love for a thousand lifetimes for people who love him and obey his commands.
10. But he will pay back those people who hate him. He will destroy them, and he will not be slow to pay back those who hate him.
11. So be careful to obey the commands, rules, and laws I give you today.
12. If you pay attention to these laws and obey them carefully, the Lord your God will keep his agreement and show his love to you, as he promised your ancestors.
13. He will love and bless you. He will make the number of your people grow; he will bless you with children. He will bless your fields with good crops and will give you grain, new wine, and oil. He will bless your herds with calves and your flocks with lambs in the land he promised your ancestors he would give you.
14. You will be blessed more than any other people. Every husband and wife will have children, and all your cattle will have calves.
15. The Lord will take away all disease from you; you will not have the terrible diseases that were in Egypt, but he will give them to all the people who hate you.