Deuteronomy 7

1 “And when the Lord your God brings you into the land you are going into to hold, and clears great nations out of your way — the Hittite and the Girgashite and the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite, seven nations more numerous and stronger than you — 2 and the Lord your God hands them over into your hands, then you are to strike them down. You are to devote them to destruction. You are not to make a covenant with them, and you are not to pity them. [a] 3 And you are not to make marriages with them: you are not to give your daughter to his son, and you are not to take his daughter for your son. 4 For he will draw your son away from me, and he will serve other gods; and the Lord will be very angry with you and will quickly destroy you. 5 This is what you are to do to them instead: tear down their altars, and break their pillars, and cut down their sacred groves, and burn the carved images of their gods with fire.

6 For you are a holy people to the Lord your God, and the Lord your God chose you to be a people of his own out of all the nations on the face of the earth. [b] 7 It was not because you were more numerous than all the other nations that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you — for you are fewer than all the other nations. 8 It was because the Lord loved you, and because he was keeping the oath he swore to your fathers, that the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand and an uplifted arm and ransomed you from the house of slavery, out of the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. [c] 9 So know that the Lord your God, he is God — the faithful God, who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love him and keep his commands, 10 and who pays back those who hate him to their face, to destroy them; he will not be slow with the one who hates him — he will pay him back to his face. 11 So keep the commands and the rules and these judgments that I am commanding you today to do.

12 And when you have heard these rules and kept them and done them, the Lord your God will keep for you the covenant and the mercy he swore to your fathers. 13 And he will love you and bless you and make you many; and he will bless the children of your body and the fruit of your land — your grain and your wine and your oil, the herds of your oxen and the flocks of your sheep — on the land the Lord swore to your fathers to give you. 14 You will be blessed beyond all the nations; there will not be a man or a woman among you unable to have children, nor among your cattle. 15 And the Lord your God will take away every sickness from you, and he will not lay on you any of the evil diseases of Egypt that you have seen and know of; he will lay them on all who hate you. 16 And you are to consume all the plunder of the nations the Lord your God gives you; your eye is not to spare them, and you are not to serve their gods, because that is a snare to you.

17 But if you say in your heart, ‘This nation is greater than I am; how will I be able to destroy them?’ — 18 do not be afraid of them. Remember well everything the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all the Egyptians: 19 the great testings your own eyes saw, those signs and great wonders, the strong hand and the uplifted arm, and how the Lord your God brought you out. The Lord our God will do the same to all the nations you are afraid to face. 20 And the Lord your God will send hornets against them, until those who are left and those hidden from you are destroyed. 21 You will not be broken in front of them, because the Lord your God among you is a great and powerful God. 22 And the Lord your God will clear these nations away in front of you little by little. You will not be able to finish them off quickly, or the land would go to waste and the wild animals of the field would become too many for you. 23 And the Lord your God will hand them over into your hands, and he will destroy them with a great destruction, until they are wiped out. 24 And he will hand their kings over into your hands, and you will wipe out their name from that place; no one will stand up against you until you have destroyed them.

25 You are to burn the carved images of their gods with fire. You are not to set your desire on the silver on them, and you are not to take their gold for yourself, in case you are trapped by it — because it is a detestable thing to the Lord your God. 26 And you are not to bring a detestable thing into your house, or you will be a thing devoted to destruction like it. You are to hate it utterly and detest it completely, because it is a thing devoted to destruction.” [d]