Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
You Shall Be Blameless
Deuteronomy 18:9-14
9 When you have come into the land which Yahweh your God gives you, you shall not learn to imitate the abominations of those nations. · WEB
Nine practices are banned in a single list, and what they have in common is an attempt to get information God has not given.
The warning is against learning: you shall not learn to imitate the abominations of those nations Deuteronomy 18:9. The danger is absorption rather than conversion — picking things up because everyone in the new country does them.
The list that follows is the fullest of its kind in Scripture, and it runs to nine items across two verses Deuteronomy 18:10–11.
It opens with the worst: anyone who makes his son or his daughter to pass through the fire. Child sacrifice heads the list, and everything after it is grouped with it.
The rest are techniques for obtaining knowledge — divination, fortune-telling, enchantment, sorcery, charming, consulting a familiar spirit, wizardry, and calling up the dead. Different methods, one purpose. Each is a way of finding out something that has not been disclosed, from a source that is not God.
The last of them is the one Scripture treats at length elsewhere. A king who could get no answer by lawful means went to a woman with a familiar spirit, and the record names that consultation as part of the charge he died under 1 Chronicles 10:13–14. The reason such a channel is closed is not merely that it is forbidden. It is that the dead are not available: the dead don't know anything Ecclesiastes 9:5, and a man's thoughts perish on the day his breath departs Psalms 146:4.
What the practices have in common explains why they sit beside child sacrifice in one list. All of them are attempts to manage the future by technique — to extract an outcome or a secret by the right procedure, from powers that can be worked rather than trusted.
And the alternative is stated in a single line with no method in it at all: you shall be blameless with Yahweh your God Deuteronomy 18:13.
The word is the one used of Noah and of Job Genesis 6:9 Job 1:1, and it means whole rather than sinless — nothing held back, no second arrangement kept in reserve. Against nine techniques for controlling what cannot be known, the law sets a relationship in which the unknown is left with the one who knows it.
The next verse says what Israel gets instead, and it is a person rather than a practice.
settled What this mark means