The Fewest of All Peoples
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; 2 and when Yahweh your God delivers them up before you, and you strike them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them. 3 You shall not make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to his son, nor shall you take his daughter for your son. 4 For that would turn away your sons from following me, that they may serve other gods. So Yahweh’s anger would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. 5 But you shall deal with them like this: you shall break down their altars, dash their pillars in pieces, cut down their Asherah poles, and burn their engraved images with fire. 6 For you are a holy people to Yahweh your God. Yahweh your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, above all peoples who are on the face of the earth. 7 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; 8 but because Yahweh loves you, and because he desires to keep the oath which he swore to your fathers, Yahweh has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. 9 Know therefore that Yahweh your God himself is God, the faithful God, who keeps covenant and loving kindness to a thousand generations with those who love him and keep his commandments, 10 and repays those who hate him to their face, to destroy them. He will not be slack to him who hates him. He will repay him to his face. 11 You shall therefore keep the commandments, the statutes, and the ordinances which I command you today, to do them. 12 It shall happen, because you listen to these ordinances and keep and do them, that Yahweh your God will keep with you the covenant and the loving kindness which he swore to your fathers. 13 He will love you, bless you, and multiply you. He will also bless the fruit of your body and the fruit of your ground, your grain and your new wine and your oil, the increase of your livestock and the young of your flock, in the land which he swore to your fathers to give you. 14 You will be blessed above all peoples. There won’t be male or female barren among you, or among your livestock. 15 Yahweh will take away from you all sickness; and he will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which you know, on you, but will lay them on all those who hate you. 16 You shall consume all the peoples whom Yahweh your God shall deliver to you. Your eye shall not pity them. You shall not serve their gods; for that would be a snare to you.
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;
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