Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
Little by Little
Deuteronomy 7:17-26
17 If you shall say in your heart, “These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them?” · WEB
The fear of being outnumbered is answered with a memory, and the conquest is deliberately slowed so the land does not go wild.
The fear is quoted rather than described: if you shall say in your heart, 'These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them?' Deuteronomy 7:17.
It is the same fear that stopped the previous generation at the border, and their words are almost identical Deuteronomy 1:28. The book knows that this generation is capable of the same failure, and it addresses the thought while it is still in the heart.
The answer is not encouragement. It is an instruction to remember: you shall remember well what Yahweh your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt Deuteronomy 7:18.
Egypt was the strongest state they had ever seen, and it lost. The argument runs from a case already decided to cases not yet opened: so shall Yahweh your God do to all the peoples of whom you are afraid Deuteronomy 7:19. Their fear is not answered with a promise about the future but with a fact from the past.
Then the verse that changes the shape of the whole conquest.
Yahweh your God will cast out those nations before you little by little. You may not consume them at once, lest the animals of the field increase on you Deuteronomy 7:22.
A slow conquest is not a failure of the promise; it is the terms of it. And the reason given is ecological rather than military. A country emptied faster than it can be settled goes back to wilderness, and the wild animals move in — so the pace of the victory is set by the pace at which people can occupy and farm the ground.
That is a remarkable thing to find in a war speech. God is managing the land as well as the campaign, and he will not wreck the country in order to hand it over.
It is also, incidentally, an answer to impatience. Israel would spend generations finishing what was promised here, and the delay was described in advance as deliberate.
The chapter ends with a warning about plunder, and it is precise. The images are to be burned — you shall not covet the silver or the gold that is on them, nor take it for yourself, lest you be snared in it Deuteronomy 7:25.
The metal is valuable and the temptation is obvious: melt it down and the idolatry is gone. The command refuses the compromise, because a man who keeps the gold has decided that the object was worth something after all, and the word used for the danger is a trap. What is brought into the house has a way of staying.
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