Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
The Fewest of All Peoples
Deuteronomy 7:1-16
1 When Yahweh your God brings you into the land where you go to possess it, and casts out many nations before you—the Hittite, the Girgashite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite—seven nations greater and mightier than you; · WEB
The election is detached from every quality in the elect: they were chosen because they were loved, and for no other reason given.
The chapter opens with the hardest commands in the book, and they should not be softened. Seven nations are named, and the instruction is total destruction, no covenant, no mercy, and no intermarriage Deuteronomy 7:1–3.
The reason given for the marriage ban is not race. It is stated in one clause and it is entirely religious: for that would turn away your sons from following me, that they may serve other gods Deuteronomy 7:4. What is feared is the next generation's worship, and the same reasoning is why the first act commanded on entry is against objects rather than people — altars broken, pillars smashed, poles cut, images burned Deuteronomy 7:5.
That this is about allegiance rather than ancestry is confirmed by the book itself, which elsewhere commands love for the resident foreigner Deuteronomy 10:19 and admits foreigners into the assembly by generation Deuteronomy 23:7–8. And by the wider record: a Moabite woman becomes the great-grandmother of David Ruth 4:17, and a Canaanite household in Jericho is spared and kept Joshua 6:25. The line drawn is around the worship, and it was crossable.
Then the statement about election, and it is one of the most important in Scripture.
Yahweh didn't set his love on you nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all peoples Deuteronomy 7:7.
The obvious explanation is ruled out, and the true one is not flattering. They were the smallest. Whatever the choice was based on, it was not their weight in the world.
And the actual reason is circular in a way that closes off every other answer: but because Yahweh loves you, and because he desires to keep the oath which he swore to your fathers Deuteronomy 7:8.
He chose them because he loved them. No prior quality is offered — not righteousness, not size, not promise. The only other ground named is a promise God made to men centuries dead, which pushes the question back a generation and gets the same answer.
A people told this cannot congratulate themselves on being chosen, because the choosing has been explicitly detached from anything about them. Two chapters later the point is made again, more bluntly: not for your righteousness Deuteronomy 9:5.
What follows the election is a description of God rather than of Israel: the faithful God, who keeps covenant and loving kindness to a thousand generations with those who love him Deuteronomy 7:9. The reliability being urged is his, and the blessings promised — harvests, herds, health, children Deuteronomy 7:13–15 — are the ordinary contents of a good life in a farming country.
settled What this mark means