Deuteronomy 10 Summary and Study Guide

Moses had smashed the first two tablets at the foot of the mountain. God told him to cut two more himself, and then wrote the same commandments on them again. This Deuteronomy 10 summary and study guide covers what God asked of Israel after that.

Setting the Stage

Forty days after Israel promised to keep everything God had said, they melted their jewellery into the shape of a calf and worshipped it. Moses came down the mountain carrying two stone tablets God had written with His own hand, saw what they were doing, and threw the tablets down at the foot of the mountain until they broke.

That is the wound the next several chapters keep pressing on. Deuteronomy 9 is Moses telling their children, forty years later, that Canaan is not a prize for good behaviour, and the calf is his proof. He ends that chapter quoting the prayer he prayed on the mountain while the nation’s future hung in the balance. Deuteronomy 10 is what God said back.

Comprehensive Deuteronomy 10 Summary

God tells Moses to cut two new tablets of stone and to make a wooden chest to keep them in. Moses does both, climbs the mountain with the blank stones in his hand, and God writes the Ten Commandments on them a second time, exactly as before. Moses carries them down and puts them in the chest, where he says they still are.

The account then breaks off for two verses of travel notes. Israel journeyed to Moserah, where Aaron died and was buried, and his son Eleazar took over as priest. From there they moved on to Gudgodah and then to Jotbath, a place with running streams. Back at the mountain, God had set the tribe of Levi apart to carry the chest, serve Him, and bless the people in His name, giving them no land because He Himself was their portion.

Moses returns to his own story. He stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights a second time, God listened to him again, and Israel was spared. Then God told him to get up and lead the people toward the land.

At that point Moses turns to face the crowd in front of him. What does God require, he asks, and answers his own question: fear Him, walk in His ways, love Him, serve Him with everything you are, and keep commandments given for your good. The God asking owns the highest heavens and everything on earth, and He set His love on this one family anyway.

So cut away the hardness of your hearts and stop being stubborn, because this God takes no bribes and plays no favourites. He sees that orphans and widows get justice, and He feeds and clothes the foreigner.

Love the foreigner too, Moses says, because you were foreigners once. Fear God, serve Him, hold on to Him. Seventy people went down into Egypt, and look at you now.

One Word Summary

• Rewritten: the broken covenant is put back in the same words
• Requirement: the chapter turns on a question about what God asks
• Heart: the command everything in the second half aims at

In One Sentence

After the golden calf, God has Moses cut two new tablets and writes the same Ten Commandments on them again, keeps the priesthood alive through Eleazar when Aaron dies, and then tells Israel through Moses that what He wants is a circumcised heart that fears Him, holds to Him, and loves the foreigner.

Theme of Deuteronomy 10

Deuteronomy 10 is about what God wants from people who have already failed Him. The answer is not a longer list of duties but a changed heart, and Moses spends the first half of the chapter piling up the mercies that make such a demand fair. Running alongside that are two more ideas: restoration that does not lower the standard, since the second tablets carry the same words as the first, and a greatness proved by care, since the God who owns the highest heavens is the God who counts whether a foreigner has clothes.

Deuteronomy 10 Outline

• Deuteronomy 10:1-2: God tells Moses to cut two new stone tablets and make a wooden ark, and promises to write on them what was on the first.
• Deuteronomy 10:3-5: Moses makes the ark of shittim wood, carries the tablets up the mountain, receives them written, and puts them in the ark.
• Deuteronomy 10:6-7: Israel travels from Beeroth of the children of Jaakan to Mosera, where Aaron dies and Eleazar becomes priest, then on to Gudgodah and Jotbath.
• Deuteronomy 10:8-9: The LORD separates the tribe of Levi to carry the ark, minister to Him, and bless in His name, giving them the LORD Himself instead of an inheritance.
• Deuteronomy 10:10-11: Moses recalls his second forty days on the mountain, God’s refusal to destroy Israel, and the command to lead the people onward.
• Deuteronomy 10:12-13: Moses asks what God requires and answers it: fear, walk, love, serve, and keep the commandments for your own good.
• Deuteronomy 10:14-15: Heaven and earth belong to the LORD, and He set His delight on Israel’s fathers and chose their children.
• Deuteronomy 10:16-17: Israel is told to circumcise the heart and be no more stiffnecked, and the LORD is named God of gods and Lord of lords, who regards no persons and takes no bribe.
• Deuteronomy 10:18-19: He gives justice to the fatherless and widow and food and clothing to the stranger, so Israel must love the stranger.
• Deuteronomy 10:20-22: Fear Him, serve Him, cleave to Him, swear by His name; He is their praise, and seventy have become as many as the stars.

Observations from Deuteronomy 10

“At That Time” Does Not Mean the Same Time Each Time

The phrase appears three times in this chapter, in verses 1, 8 and 10, and all three point back to Horeb: the second tablets, the setting apart of Levi, and Moses’ forty days of pleading. The travel note in verses 6 and 7 sits in the middle of that run, and Aaron died there almost thirty-eight years after Horeb. Moses is arranging his material by subject rather than by date, and once a reader sees that, most of the chapter’s apparent disorder settles down.

The Chapter Travels from the Highest Heaven to a Change of Clothes

Verse 14 says the heaven of heavens belongs to God. Verse 17 calls Him God of gods and Lord of lords. Verse 18 says He gives a foreigner food and clothing.

In five verses Moses moves from the outer edge of the universe down to a poor man’s dinner and coat, and that descent is his argument rather than a change of subject. The God big enough to own the heavens is the God who checks whether a stranger ate today.

The Tribe That Gets No Land Is the Tribe That Gets God

Verse 9 says Levi gets no share of land alongside the other tribes, and then says in the same sentence that the LORD is his inheritance. Two verses later God tells Moses to lead the people in to possess the land sworn to their fathers.

The eleven tribes are marching toward property; the twelfth is told it already has something better. Moses argues neither side. He places the two statements beside each other and lets the reader weigh them.

Stiffnecked Crosses the Chapter Break

Moses calls Israel a stiffnecked people twice in the previous chapter, in Deuteronomy 9:6 and 9:13, both times as a description of what they are. In Deuteronomy 10:16 the same word appears as a command: be no more stiffnecked. The picture behind it is an ox that will not take the yoke. Between the two chapters the word turns from a diagnosis into something Israel is told to stop doing, and that turn is the whole movement of the chapter in one word.

Difficult Verses Explained

Why Does Deuteronomy 10 Mention Aaron’s Death in the Middle of a Sermon About Stone Tablets?

Moses does not say why, and some careful readers have admitted they cannot explain the placement. The most likely reason is that every item in those two verses is a mercy that outlasted Israel’s failure. Aaron had made the golden calf, and he later died in the wilderness under God’s judgment for what happened at Meribah (Numbers 20:12), so a reader might expect the priesthood to die with him.

Instead Eleazar stepped into his father’s place, the nation kept moving, and God led them to Jotbath, a land of rivers of waters. On that reading the travel record proves what Moses is claiming: God answered the prayer, and the answer was still visible thirty-eight years later in a living priesthood and running water.

Did Aaron Die at Moserah or at Mount Hor?

Both, on the reading most interpreters take: Moserah is the wider district and Mount Hor is the peak inside it. Numbers 20:27-28 and Numbers 33:38 place Aaron’s death on Mount Hor, and Deuteronomy 32:50 says the same. Deuteronomy 10:6 gives the region instead of the summit, and it is the only verse in the Bible that mentions Aaron being buried. The Bible never says the two names are one place, so this is a conclusion drawn from putting the passages together rather than something either passage states.

The travel note also runs in the opposite order to Numbers 33:30-33, which most likely means the two lists describe two different passes through the same stretch of country, the second one made when Edom refused Israel permission to cross and they had to go the long way round (Numbers 20:21; 21:4). None of these places can be identified on a map today.

Did Moses Make the Ark, or Did Bezalel?

Most likely Moses had it made and speaks here as the leader who gave the order. Deuteronomy 10:3 says “I made an ark of shittim wood”, which is to say he made an ark of acacia, the common desert hardwood. Exodus 25:10 records God commanding the ark before the golden calf happened, and Exodus 37:1 says Bezalel was the craftsman who built it.

Scripture does not explain the gap further, and the simplest reading is that Moses is summarising a stretch of events by subject, the same way he does with “at that time” elsewhere in the chapter. Some have suggested a temporary chest made before the finished ark, which the text neither states nor rules out.

Common Misunderstandings

• That Levi earned the priesthood by their zeal at the calf. Exodus 32:26-29 records the Levites acting when Moses called for anyone on the LORD’s side, and many teachers connect the two. Deuteronomy 10:8 itself gives no reason at all. It says the LORD separated them, and leaves it there.
• That the Levites had nowhere to live. Having no tribal allotment is not the same as having no towns. Numbers 35:1-8 and Joshua 21 assign Levi forty-eight cities scattered through the other tribes.
• That choosing Israel makes God partial. Verse 15 says He chose them and verse 17 says He respects no persons, and verse 16 sits between the two on purpose. Being chosen is what puts Israel under the command, not what excuses them from it.

Christ Connection

The strongest line from this chapter to Christ runs through the foreigner. God loves the stranger and gives him food and clothing, and Israel must love the stranger because they were strangers in Egypt themselves (Deuteronomy 10:18-19). Paul tells Gentile believers that they “were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12), which is to say they were outsiders with no share in anything God had promised.

Then he says what changed: “Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19). Deuteronomy 10 shows a God who feeds outsiders. Ephesians 2 shows Him bringing them inside at the cost of His Son.

Three other lines run from this chapter to Christ, and the New Testament draws each of them itself.

• The mediator. Israel is still standing at all because Moses spent forty days between them and God (Deuteronomy 10:10), and Hebrews 7:25 says Jesus “ever liveth to make intercession for them” who come to God by Him, which is to say He is always alive and always pleading.
• The priesthood death cannot end. When Aaron died his son took his place (Deuteronomy 10:6), and Hebrews 7:23-24 sets that succession against a priest who “continueth ever” and holds a priesthood that never passes to anyone else.
• The circumcised heart. The heart Moses commands Israel to cut in verse 16 is the same heart God later promises to cut Himself (Deuteronomy 30:6), and Paul says that promise lands in Christ, where believers are “circumcised with the circumcision made without hands” (Colossians 2:11), a cutting away done by God rather than by a knife.

When, Where, and Why

• When: The fortieth year after Israel left Egypt, on the first day of the eleventh month (Deuteronomy 1:3). Scholars date the exodus itself to either the fifteenth or the thirteenth century BC and the question is still debated. The events Moses recounts in verses 1 to 5 and 8 to 11 happened at Horeb about thirty-nine years earlier, while Aaron’s death in verse 6 came in that final year (Numbers 33:38).
• Where: Moses is speaking on the plains of Moab, east of the Jordan, with the land in sight across the river. The tablets and the setting apart of Levi belong to Horeb, also called Sinai. Beeroth of the children of Jaakan, Mosera, Gudgodah and Jotbath all lay in the Arabah near Mount Hor, and none of them has been identified with any confidence.
• Why: Moses is preaching a farewell sermon to a generation that was not at Sinai. He includes this chapter to finish the argument he began in Deuteronomy 9:1. Since Israel has nothing of its own to offer and survives only because God was merciful, what God asks for in return is not achievement but a changed heart.

Key Verses

“And now, Israel, what doth the LORD thy God require of thee, but to fear the LORD thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, To keep the commandments of the LORD, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good?”

Deuteronomy 10:12-13

God asks Israel for reverence, an obedient life, affection, wholehearted service, and kept commands, and He tells them plainly that the commands are for their benefit. This is the hinge of the chapter and the sentence most readers arrive looking for.

“Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked.”

Deuteronomy 10:16

Cut away what is hard in you, and stop resisting. Every Israelite male already carried the physical mark of the covenant, so Moses is telling them the sign on the body was never the point.

“For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward.”

Deuteronomy 10:17

The LORD is higher than anything else called a god, He is awesome in power, He shows no favouritism, and He cannot be bought. “Regardeth not persons” is a courtroom phrase, and it says God will not weigh who you are instead of what is true. John gives the same title, King of kings and Lord of lords, to Jesus in Revelation 19:16.

“Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Deuteronomy 10:19

Israel is told to love the foreigner living among them, and the reason given is memory. They knew from the inside what it was to be the outsider, and God expects that memory to soften them rather than harden them.

“Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God; him shalt thou serve, and to him shalt thou cleave, and swear by his name.”

Deuteronomy 10:20

Respect God, serve Him, hold tightly to Him, and use His name when you swear an oath. This is where the chapter lands, and Jesus reached for the same command in the wilderness when Satan offered Him the kingdoms of the world: “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve” (Matthew 4:10).

Key Lessons from Deuteronomy 10

• God wrote the same commandments on the second set of tablets, which shows that restoring a people does not mean lowering what is asked of them (Deuteronomy 10:2-4).
• Israel survived to march at all because one man pleaded for them on the mountain for forty days and forty nights (Deuteronomy 10:10).
• Aaron died under judgment and the priesthood carried on in his son, so God’s provision for His people can outlast the person carrying it (Deuteronomy 10:6).
• Levi was handed no territory because God handed them Himself, and Moses treats that as the better portion (Deuteronomy 10:9).
• Moses puts God’s demands to Israel as a question rather than an order, because reverence and love have to be given rather than forced (Deuteronomy 10:12).
• Being chosen does not exempt anyone from God’s standards, since the God who chose Israel shows no partiality and takes no bribe (Deuteronomy 10:15-17).
• What Israel suffered in Egypt is given back to them as a reason for kindness rather than an excuse for hardness (Deuteronomy 10:19).

For the whole book at a glance, see our Book of Deuteronomy Summary by Chapter. To go deeper into the lessons from this chapter, read our full study: Lessons from Deuteronomy 10.

Bible Study Questions

1. According to Deuteronomy 10:12-13, what five things does God require of Israel, and what reason does Moses give for the commandments at the end of verse 13?
2. What three duties is the tribe of Levi given in verse 8, and what do they receive instead of land in verse 9?
3. Why does Moses interrupt his account of the tablets in verses 6 and 7 to report Aaron’s death and a change of camp?
4. Verse 15 says God chose Israel above all people and verse 17 says He regards no persons. How do those two statements fit together, and why might verse 16 sit between them?
5. “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart” (verse 16). What in your own life is that command aimed at this week?
6. Verse 18 says God loves the stranger by giving him food and clothing. Who is the stranger where you live, and what would loving them actually cost you?
7. Levi was given no land because the LORD was their inheritance (verse 9). What would have to change in you for that to sound like good news rather than a loss?
8. God gave Israel back the same commandments they had broken (verse 4). What does that say about the way He restores people who have failed Him?

Frequently Asked Questions

Deuteronomy 10, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference. You can also read Deuteronomy 10 in another translation.

1 At that time the LORD said unto me, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first, and come up unto me into the mount, and make thee an ark of wood.

2 And I will write on the tables the words that were in the first tables which thou brakest, and thou shalt put them in the ark.

3 And I made an ark of shittim wood, and hewed two tables of stone like unto the first, and went up into the mount, having the two tables in mine hand.

4 And he wrote on the tables, according to the first writing, the ten commandments, which the LORD spake unto you in the mount out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly: and the LORD gave them unto me.

5 And I turned myself and came down from the mount, and put the tables in the ark which I had made; and there they be, as the LORD commanded me.

6 And the children of Israel took their journey from Beeroth of the children of Jaakan to Mosera: there Aaron died, and there he was buried; and Eleazar his son ministered in the priest’s office in his stead.

7 From thence they journeyed unto Gudgodah; and from Gudgodah to Jotbath, a land of rivers of waters.

8 At that time the LORD separated the tribe of Levi, to bear the ark of the covenant of the LORD, to stand before the LORD to minister unto him, and to bless in his name, unto this day.

9 Wherefore Levi hath no part nor inheritance with his brethren; the LORD is his inheritance, according as the LORD thy God promised him.

10 And I stayed in the mount, according to the first time, forty days and forty nights; and the LORD hearkened unto me at that time also, and the LORD would not destroy thee.

11 And the LORD said unto me, Arise, take thy journey before the people, that they may go in and possess the land, which I sware unto their fathers to give unto them.

12 And now, Israel, what doth the LORD thy God require of thee, but to fear the LORD thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul,

13 To keep the commandments of the LORD, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good?

14 Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the LORD’S thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is.

15 Only the LORD had a delight in thy fathers to love them, and he chose their seed after them, even you above all people, as it is this day.

16 Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked.

17 For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward:

18 He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment.

19 Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.

20 Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God; him shalt thou serve, and to him shalt thou cleave, and swear by his name.

21 He is thy praise, and he is thy God, that hath done for thee these great and terrible things, which thine eyes have seen.

22 Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons; and now the LORD thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude.