Deuteronomy 29 Summary and Study Guide

“The secret things belong unto the LORD our God” is the line people reach for at a graveside or after a prayer that went unanswered. Moses spoke it at the end of a chapter where a whole nation swore itself into a covenant. This Deuteronomy 29 summary and study guide gives you the chapter that line closes.

Setting the Stage

Forty years before this, God brought Israel out of slavery in Egypt and met them at a mountain called Horeb, where they agreed to live by the law he gave them (Deuteronomy 5:2; Exodus 24:7). That generation then refused to enter the land he had promised them, and they died in the wilderness (Numbers 14:29).

The people standing in Deuteronomy 29 are their children. They are camped on the plains of Moab with the Jordan River in front of them, and the agreement their parents made at that mountain has to be sworn again by the people who will actually cross.

Comprehensive Deuteronomy 29 Summary

Moses calls the whole nation together and starts with what they have seen. God broke Egypt in front of their eyes, led them for forty years without their clothes or their sandals wearing out, kept them alive without ordinary bread or wine, and handed them victory over two kings east of the Jordan.

Then he says something hard. After all of that, God has still not given them a heart that understands it. So they are to keep this covenant and do it.

Everyone is standing there. Moses names them from the tribal chiefs down to the foreigner who cuts the firewood and the servant who fetches the water, along with the wives and the small children. They are there to enter God’s covenant and his oath, and the result is that they become his own people. The oath binds more than the people in front of him. It reaches those who are absent that day and the generations still to be born.

Moses then names the danger. Israel has seen the idols of Egypt and of every nation they marched past. If one man, one woman, one family or one tribe turns away in private, that person grows in the middle of the nation like a root bearing bitter fruit.

The worst case is a man who hears the oath spoken, congratulates himself, and decides he will be fine while he goes his own way. Moses says God will not spare that man.

The chapter ends with what a broken covenant would leave behind. The land is scorched, people born long afterwards and strangers from far countries ask what happened, and the answer comes back plainly: Israel walked away from the covenant and served gods it had never known. Moses closes on the line between what God keeps to himself and what he has said out loud.

One Word Summary

• Renewal: the Horeb covenant is sworn again by a second generation (29:1).
• Everyone: wives, children and foreigners included (29:10-11).
• Root: the danger grows out of sight (29:18).

In One Sentence

Moses binds every Israelite in Moab, from the tribal chiefs to the servant drawing water, and their unborn children too, by oath to the covenant God made at Horeb, warning that one person turning away in private can ruin a nation.

Theme of Deuteronomy 29

Deuteronomy 29 is about a covenant that binds everybody and rests on a heart nobody can produce. Two ideas run with it: memory, because Moses grounds the oath in what God has already done, and secrecy, because the threat comes from inside the camp. God answers it by seeing what no one else can, by making the ruin he warns of plain to strangers, and by having already said everything his people need.

Deuteronomy 29 Outline

• Deuteronomy 29:1: A heading naming what follows as the covenant God commanded Moses to make in Moab, alongside the one made at Horeb.
• Deuteronomy 29:2-4: Moses recalls what Israel watched God do to Pharaoh and Egypt, then says God has not yet given them a heart to understand it.
• Deuteronomy 29:5-8: He lists forty years of provision, clothes and shoes that did not wear out, and the defeat of Sihon and Og whose land went to Reuben, Gad and half of Manasseh.
• Deuteronomy 29:9: Moses charges the nation to keep the words of this covenant and do them.
• Deuteronomy 29:10-13: He names everyone standing there, from tribal chiefs to the wood-cutter and the water-carrier, and states why they stand: to enter God’s covenant and his oath.
• Deuteronomy 29:14-15: The oath binds those present that day and those who are not.
• Deuteronomy 29:16-17: Moses recalls the idols of wood, stone, silver and gold that Israel saw in Egypt and among the nations they passed.
• Deuteronomy 29:18-19: He warns against any person, family or tribe turning away, and against the man who hears the oath and tells himself he is safe.
• Deuteronomy 29:20-21: God will not spare that man, and will lay the curses of the book on him and blot out his name.
• Deuteronomy 29:22-24: A later generation and foreign travellers see a scorched land and ask what caused it.
• Deuteronomy 29:25-28: The answer comes back: Israel abandoned the covenant, served other gods, and was uprooted into another land.
• Deuteronomy 29:29: Moses closes on the secret things that belong to God and the revealed things that belong to his people.

The Covenant in Moab

Deuteronomy 29 is set out like a legal agreement, with parties, terms and a stated purpose.

When God made the covenant at Sinai, Moses sprinkled the blood of the covenant on the people (Exodus 24:8). Nothing is sacrificed on the plains of Moab, and that is one reason many Bible teachers read this as the same covenant being renewed rather than a second one being made.

Observations from Deuteronomy 29

Israel Saw Everything and Still Could Not See (29:2-4)

Moses says twice that their eyes have seen, and then says God has not given them eyes to see. Seeing an event and understanding it are two separate things, and Scripture says the second is something God gives (Proverbs 20:12). That is a hard thing to say just before asking a nation to swear an oath, and it tells you what the oath is up against.

The List Reaches the Man Who Draws the Water (29:10-11)

Moses starts at the top with the tribal chiefs and finishes at the bottom with the foreigner cutting firewood and the servant carrying water. Naming the top and the bottom is how Hebrew writers include everybody in between.

Many commentators identify those foreigners with the mixed multitude that came out of Egypt alongside Israel (Exodus 12:38), and the same wood-and-water pairing later describes the Gibeonites, who were spared under a treaty and put to that work (Joshua 9:21). Nobody in the camp is outside this oath, and that is exactly why one person’s private turning becomes the whole nation’s problem seven verses later.

The Chapter Is Nailed to a Single Day (29:4-28)

Some form of “this day” or “to day” appears in seven verses of this chapter: 4, 10, 12, 13, 15, 18 and 28. Six of them fix the reader in the moment of the oath. The last one, in verse 28, is spoken from inside a judgment that has not happened yet: God “cast them into another land, as it is this day.” The phrase that pins the covenant to one morning ends up describing an exile.

Moses Stages a Conversation That Has Not Happened Yet (29:22-28)

Moses does not just predict the judgment. He writes a scene. A generation not yet born and travellers from a far country look at burnt ground, ask what caused it, and get an answer in full (29:24-28). God wants the ruin to be readable, so that anyone walking past can tell what happened, and Daniel, praying from exile centuries later, confesses that the curse and the oath written in the law of Moses had fallen on Israel (Daniel 9:11).

Difficult Verses Explained

Deuteronomy 29:4: Did God Refuse to Give Israel Understanding and Then Blame Them for It?

Moses is not excusing Israel here, and he is not accusing God. Matthew Henry, Albert Barnes and other commentators read the verse the same way: Israel lacked the understanding because they never felt the lack and never asked for it.

Scripture says plainly that the seeing eye and the hearing ear are God’s to give (Proverbs 20:12), and it also holds people responsible for shutting them. Paul draws on this verse when he writes about his own people in Romans 11:8, and he says the covering over their reading “is done away in Christ” (2 Corinthians 3:14).

Deuteronomy 29:9: Is “That Ye May Prosper” a Promise of Wealth?

The Hebrew verb behind “prosper” carries the sense of acting wisely as well as succeeding, and commentators have long noted the two ideas sitting together in the word. Moses is telling Israel that keeping this covenant is the intelligent thing to do, and that wise conduct is what leads to a settled life in the land. Reading the verse as a guarantee of money asks it to say something it never says.

Deuteronomy 29:19: What Does “To Add Drunkenness to Thirst” Mean?

This is a proverb, and its exact sense has been argued over for centuries. The Greek Old Testament renders it one way, the Aramaic paraphrases another, and English commentators offer at least three readings. What every reading agrees on is the picture: the man is not drifting into sin by accident, he is feeding an appetite he already knows is wrong, and pouring more on top of what he has already taken.

Deuteronomy 29:20: Does “Blot Out His Name From Under Heaven” Mean God Had Him Killed?

The verse does not say that. What it says is that the LORD will not spare him, that the curses written in the book will settle on him, and that his name will be erased. Verse 21 adds that God will separate him from the tribes of Israel.

Some teachers take the phrase to include the death penalty, but the chapter itself describes a man cut off from the covenant people and from any memory of him, which is a heavier thing than it first sounds.

Common Misunderstandings

• That the ceremony on Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim happens in this chapter. It does not. That ceremony belongs to Deuteronomy 27, and neither mountain is named anywhere in Deuteronomy 29.
• That Deuteronomy 29:5 says their feet did not swell. That line is Deuteronomy 8:4. Deuteronomy 29:5 says their clothes and their shoes did not wear out, and it says nothing about their feet.
• That verse 29 means “the secret things of God are revealed to us.” The Hebrew will not carry that reading, as Calvin and John Gill both point out. The verse sets two things against each other: what God has kept, and what God has told us. Some Jewish commentators take the secret things to be hidden sins that God alone punishes, which is a real reading of the words, though it leaves the verse saying nothing about the exile Moses has just described.
• That Deuteronomy 29 replaces the covenant made at Sinai. Verse 1 says this covenant is made “beside” the one at Horeb, and the missing sacrifice noted above points the same way. Bible teachers do differ here, and some hold that chapters 29 and 30 form a distinct covenant about the land, so it is worth knowing the question exists rather than treating either answer as settled.

Christ Connection

Deuteronomy 29 binds a nation by oath to a covenant, and the chapter has just told them that God still withholds the heart they would need to understand it. That leaves two problems, the curse the covenant carries and the heart the people lack, and Christ answers both. The summary curse of this law is stated a chapter earlier, “Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them” (Deuteronomy 27:26).

Anyone who does not carry out the whole law falls under that curse, and Paul quotes the verse in Galatians 3:10 before answering it in Galatians 3:13: “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.” The curse this law pronounces on the covenant-breaker is the curse Christ took on himself.

The chapter points forward in three more ways:

• The heart God had not given. Deuteronomy 29:4 states the lack, and Deuteronomy 30:6 promises the cure one chapter later: “the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart.” God undertakes to change the heart himself. Jeremiah 31:33 calls that a new covenant with the law written inside, Ezekiel 36:26 calls it a heart of flesh in place of stone, and Hebrews 8:6 calls Christ the mediator of that better covenant. Luke 24:45 shows the risen Jesus opening his disciples’ understanding: “Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.”
• The shape of the promise. Verse 13 says God binds himself “that he may be unto thee a God.” Hebrews 8:10 states the same relationship in the New Covenant: “I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people.”
• The people who were not there. Verse 15 puts those absent that day under the same oath. Peter uses the same reach at Pentecost: “For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call” (Acts 2:39).

One more echo needs stating with care, because the New Testament never quotes Deuteronomy 29:18 about it. The root Moses warns of bears gall, and gall is what was handed to Jesus at the cross: “They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall” (Matthew 27:34). That answers the line in Psalm 69:21, “They gave me also gall for my meat.” The bitterness a covenant-breaker grows echoes the bitterness the Lord was handed.

When, Where, and Why

• When: The fortieth year after Israel left Egypt, in the eleventh month, on the first day (Deuteronomy 1:3). Moses dies before the nation crosses the Jordan (Deuteronomy 34:5).
• Where: The plains of Moab, east of the Jordan River and opposite Jericho (Numbers 22:1). The nation is close enough to the land to see it and has not entered it.
• Why: The generation that swore the covenant at Horeb had died in the wilderness. Moses records this ceremony because a covenant sworn by dead men does not hold a living nation, and the people about to cross the Jordan had to bind themselves to it in their own names. He also does not leave them on the warning, because the next chapter promises that God will gather them back even from exile (Deuteronomy 30:1-5).

Key Verses

“That he may establish thee to day for a people unto himself, and that he may be unto thee a God, as he hath said unto thee, and as he hath sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” (Deuteronomy 29:13)

God states his own side of the covenant here: he will make them his people and be their God, keeping the promise he swore to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The whole ceremony rests on a promise God made centuries before anyone in the camp was born.

“But with him that standeth here with us this day before the LORD our God, and also with him that is not here with us this day.”

Deuteronomy 29:15

The oath covers people who were nowhere near Moab that morning. That line makes Deuteronomy 29 a chapter about the reader’s own generation rather than a scene from someone else’s history.

“Lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away this day from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood.”

Deuteronomy 29:18

Moses is warning against a heart that turns away from God to serve other gods, and he scales the warning from one man or woman up to a whole tribe. Gall and wormwood are two bitter plants, so what this turned heart finally produces is something nobody would willingly swallow.

“The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.”

Deuteronomy 29:29

Some things God has kept to himself, and what he has told us belongs to us and to our children permanently. The last clause is the part most often left off: what God has revealed is given so that we may do it. In Hebrew manuscripts scribes placed small dots above the words “unto us and to our children,” and their meaning is still uncertain.

Key Lessons from Deuteronomy 29

• Seeing what God has done and understanding it are two different things, and Israel had the first without the second (29:2-4).
• God’s covenant took in the children, the wives, the foreigner and the servant carrying water along with the leaders (29:10-11).
• A heart can turn away in private and still put a whole nation at risk (29:18).
• Telling yourself “I shall have peace” while walking your own way is the exact self-deception Moses warns about (29:19).
• God has told his people what they need in order to obey him, and he has not told them everything they would like to know (29:29).

For the wider picture of where this chapter sits, see The Book of Deuteronomy Summary by Chapter. To go deeper into the lessons from this chapter, read our full study: Lessons from Deuteronomy 29.

Bible Study Questions

1. Why does Moses spend verses 2 to 8 recalling Egypt and the wilderness before he asks Israel for anything in verse 9?
2. Read the list of people in verses 10 and 11. Why does Moses include everyone from the tribal chiefs to the water-carrier?
3. Verse 15 binds people who were not present. How should that change the way a reader today hears this chapter?
4. What is the difference between the root Moses describes in verse 18 and an open act of rebellion?
5. What exactly is the man in verse 19 trusting when he tells himself he will have peace?
6. Why does Moses picture foreign travellers looking at the ruined land in verses 22 to 28, asking what caused it, and being given a full answer?
7. Verse 29 says the revealed things are given “that we may do all the words of this law.” What does that tell you to do with the questions God has not answered?

Frequently Asked Questions

Deuteronomy 29, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference, or read Deuteronomy 29 in full at Bible Gateway.

1 These are the words of the covenant, which the LORD commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, beside the covenant which he made with them in Horeb.

2 And Moses called unto all Israel, and said unto them, Ye have seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt unto Pharaoh, and unto all his servants, and unto all his land;

3 The great temptations which thine eyes have seen, the signs, and those great miracles:

4 Yet the LORD hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day.

5 And I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot.

6 Ye have not eaten bread, neither have ye drunk wine or strong drink: that ye might know that I am the LORD your God.

7 And when ye came unto this place, Sihon the king of Heshbon, and Og the king of Bashan, came out against us unto battle, and we smote them:

8 And we took their land, and gave it for an inheritance unto the Reubenites, and to the Gadites, and to the half tribe of Manasseh.

9 Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do.

10 Ye stand this day all of you before the LORD your God; your captains of your tribes, your elders, and your officers, with all the men of Israel,

11 Your little ones, your wives, and thy stranger that is in thy camp, from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water:

12 That thou shouldest enter into covenant with the LORD thy God, and into his oath, which the LORD thy God maketh with thee this day:

13 That he may establish thee to day for a people unto himself, and that he may be unto thee a God, as he hath said unto thee, and as he hath sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

14 Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath;

15 But with him that standeth here with us this day before the LORD our God, and also with him that is not here with us this day:

16 (For ye know how we have dwelt in the land of Egypt; and how we came through the nations which ye passed by;

17 And ye have seen their abominations, and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which were among them:)

18 Lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away this day from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood;

19 And it come to pass, when he heareth the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart, to add drunkenness to thirst:

20 The LORD will not spare him, but then the anger of the LORD and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the LORD shall blot out his name from under heaven.

21 And the LORD shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law:

22 So that the generation to come of your children that shall rise up after you, and the stranger that shall come from a far land, shall say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses which the LORD hath laid upon it;

23 And that the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning, that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein, like the overthrow of Sodom, and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, which the LORD overthrew in his anger, and in his wrath:

24 Even all nations shall say, Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great anger?

25 Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt:

26 For they went and served other gods, and worshipped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given unto them:

27 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against this land, to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book:

28 And the LORD rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day.

29 The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.