Deuteronomy 27
Deuteronomy 27 is the law made tangible. On the very day Israel crosses the Jordan, Moses and the elders command that great stones be set up, coated white with plaster, and inscribed with all the words of this law, plain enough for anyone to read (vv. 2-3, 8). The law is not to be a secret kept by priests or a scroll locked in a sanctuary; it is to stand in the open, in the land, where every person who enters can see it. And on mount Ebal an altar is to be built - not of cut and polished blocks but of whole stones, on which no iron tool is ever lifted (vv. 5-6). On that altar burnt offerings and peace offerings are made, and the people eat there, and rejoice before the LORD (v. 7). Then Moses says the thing the whole ceremony is for: this day thou art become the people of the LORD thy God (v. 9).3
Then the nation is arranged for a great call and response. Six tribes are stationed on mount Gerizim to bless the people, and six on mount Ebal to curse (vv. 12-13); between the two peaks the Levites lift up their voice with a loud voice (v. 14), and the whole assembly answers. Twelve curses are pronounced, and they reach for the sins the law cares about most: the idol made in secret, contempt for father and mother, the moving of a neighbour's landmark, the misleading of the blind, the perverting of justice for the stranger and fatherless and widow, the breaking of the body's sacred boundaries, the blow struck in the dark, and the hand sold to kill the innocent. Each curse is sealed not by the Levites but by the people themselves: And all the people shall say, Amen.
The list rises to a final curse that gathers up all the rest and lands with crushing weight: Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them (v. 26). Not some of the words - all. This is the curse that the whole chapter has been building toward, the one beneath every other, and the assembly says Amen to it with full knowledge of what they are owning. It is the verse Paul will later quote to show that the law, by its own mouth, places everyone under curse who does not keep the whole of it - and then to announce that Christ stepped into that very curse on our behalf. The chapter does not soften the demand or rush past the weight of cursed is every one. It lets the justice of the covenant stand at full height first - and only afterward does the mercy already hidden in it, an altar raised on the mountain of cursing, come into view.2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Deuteronomy 27:1-10The Law Written Plain · An Altar of Whole Stone
1And Moses with the elders of Israel commanded the people, saying, Keep all the commandments which I command you this day. 2And it shall be on the day when ye shall pass over Jordan unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, that thou shalt set thee up great stones, and plaister them with plaister: 3And thou shalt write upon them all the words of this law, when thou art passed over, that thou mayest go in unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, a land that floweth with milk and honey; as the LORD God of thy fathers hath promised thee.
The chapter opens with a single, total demand: Keep all the commandments which I command you this day (v. 1). The little word all is the seed of everything that follows; by the time the curses end, that one word will have grown into the heaviest sentence in the chapter. But first comes a striking instruction about where the law is to live. The moment Israel crosses the Jordan, they are to set up great stones, coat them with plaster, and write upon them all the words of this law (vv. 2-3). This is the law made public and permanent. It is not whispered to an inner circle of priests or sealed away in a sanctuary where only a few may approach. It is inscribed on great stones, in the open air, in the land itself, plain enough that any Israelite crossing over can read it. A people about to receive a land flowing with milk and honey are first shown the terms on which they hold it - not hidden terms, but terms standing in plain sight where no one can later claim not to have known.3
The detail of the plaster is worth pausing over. The stones are plaistered - coated with white lime - so that the engraved words stand out, dark against white, legible from a distance. Nothing is encoded; nothing is reserved for the initiated. Verse 8 will repeat the point with deliberate force: thou shalt write upon the stones all the words of this law very plainly. The law of God is not a riddle to be decoded by experts. It is meant to be read, by ordinary people, with their own eyes. This quietly resists a lie every generation is tempted to believe - that the will of God is obscure, accessible only to specialists, too complicated for an ordinary conscience to grasp. Deuteronomy answers: the words are written plain, whitewashed and legible, set where the whole people pass. The boundaries that hold a life together - honour father and mother, do not steal, do not pervert justice, keep the body sacred - are not buried treasure a person must dig for. They are inscribed in the open. The honest question is never whether they can be found, but whether a person will stop and read them.
4Therefore it shall be when ye be gone over Jordan, that ye shall set up these stones, which I command you this day, in mount Ebal, and thou shalt plaister them with plaister. 5And there shalt thou build an altar unto the LORD thy God, an altar of stones: thou shalt not lift up any iron tool upon them. 6Thou shalt build the altar of the LORD thy God of whole stones: and thou shalt offer burnt offerings thereon unto the LORD thy God: 7And thou shalt offer peace offerings, and shalt eat there, and rejoice before the LORD thy God. 8And thou shalt write upon the stones all the words of this law very plainly.
Now a detail that the rest of the chapter will make extraordinary: the altar is to be built in mount Ebal (v. 4). Within a few verses Ebal will be named as the mountain of cursing - the six tribes who stand there stand there to curse (v. 13). And it is precisely there, on the mountain of curse, that God commands an altar of sacrifice, burnt offerings, peace offerings, eating, and rejoicing (vv. 6-7). Hold that together for a moment, because it is one of the quiet wonders of the chapter. The place where the curses are read aloud is the place where a way of mercy is opened. The mountain of condemnation is also the mountain of the altar. God does not leave the people alone with the curse; in the very shadow of it He provides a place to draw near, to make peace, even to rejoice. The structure of the chapter is itself a kind of preaching: judgment is pronounced, and in the midst of judgment a sacrifice is given.
The altar must be made of whole stones, and over them thou shalt not lift up any iron tool (vv. 5-6). The stones are taken as God gives them - unshaped, unpolished, unimproved by human craft. This is an old principle in the law of the altar: what God receives at the place of sacrifice is not the product of human refinement but what He Himself provides, received whole. There is a humility built into it. A person cannot come to this altar dragging his own cleverness, his own chiseling, his own contribution that makes the offering more presentable. The stones are accepted exactly as they came from the ground. And then, on that altar of unworked stone, two kinds of offering are made: burnt offerings, which ascend wholly to God, and peace offerings, which are shared in a meal of fellowship. After the curses are read, the people do not scatter in fear; they eat there, and rejoice before the LORD (v. 7). The covenant has teeth, but it also has a table. Those who own the standard and draw near by sacrifice are not left trembling; they are fed, and they are glad.
9And Moses and the priests the Levites spake unto all Israel, saying, Take heed, and hearken, O Israel; this day thou art become the people of the LORD thy God. 10Thou shalt therefore obey the voice of the LORD thy God, and do his commandments and his statutes, which I command thee this day.
Moses and the Levites now name what the whole ceremony is for: this day thou art become the people of the LORD thy God (v. 9). The phrase lands with weight. Israel had been God's people in promise since Abraham, and in deliverance since the exodus - yet here, at the threshold of the land, in the act of taking the covenant on themselves publicly, something is renewed and made present: this day they become His people afresh. Belonging to God is not a settled fact a person can drift through unaware; it is a relationship entered and re-entered, owned in the present tense. And notice the order of the two verses. First comes the gift - thou art become the people of the LORD thy God; only then the obligation - thou shalt therefore obey the voice of the LORD (v. 10). Obedience is not how Israel earns the relationship; it is how Israel lives out a relationship already given. They obey because they have become His, not in order to become His. The therefore is the hinge: identity first, then the life that answers to it.
Deuteronomy 27:11-14Two Mountains: Blessing and Curse
11And Moses charged the people the same day, saying, 12These shall stand upon mount Gerizim to bless the people, when ye are come over Jordan; Simeon, and Levi, and Judah, and Issachar, and Joseph, and Benjamin: 13And these shall stand upon mount Ebal to curse; Reuben, Gad, and Asher, and Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali. 14And the Levites shall speak, and say unto all the men of Israel with a loud voice,
The whole nation is now arranged into a living diagram of the choice before it. Six tribes climb mount Gerizim to bless the people; six climb mount Ebal to curse (vv. 12-13). The two mountains face each other across the valley of Shechem, and Israel is split between them - one half facing the words of blessing, one half the words of curse. This is not an arbitrary stage setting. It is the covenant made visible: two paths, two outcomes, the whole people positioned to see both at once. Blessing and curse are not abstractions; they are mountains a person can stand on, directions a person can face. And between the two stand the Levites - the tribe with no land of its own, set apart for the service of God - who speak… with a loud voice (v. 14) so that every person on both slopes hears. The arrangement quietly insists that no one in Israel is a spectator. Each tribe has a mountain. Each person is standing somewhere. The only question the scene leaves open is which way a given heart is actually turned.
Deuteronomy 27:15-26The Twelve Curses · And All the People Shall Say, Amen
Now the heart of the chapter. Twelve times the Levites pronounce a curse, and twelve times the formula closes the same way: And all the people shall say, Amen. This is not a reading the people merely overhear; it is a vow they take on themselves. Each Amen is the whole assembly agreeing, out loud and together, that this line is real and that crossing it is rightly cursed. And look at what kind of sins the list singles out. With only a couple of exceptions, these are the sins a person can commit in secret - the idol hidden in a back room, the boundary stone shifted in the dark, the blind man sent the wrong way down an empty road, the blow struck where no witness stands. These are precisely the wrongs that no court could catch and no neighbour could see. Which means the curses are aimed at the conscience itself. They reach past what can be policed to what only God can see - and they ask the people to say Amen to a justice that searches the hidden places of the heart.
15Cursed be the man that maketh any graven or molten image, an abomination unto the LORD, the work of the hands of the craftsman, and putteth it in a secret place. And all the people shall answer and say, Amen.
The first curse falls on idolatry done in a secret place (v. 15) - and the placement is deliberate. The list does not begin with the idol that stands openly in a rival temple; it begins with the one hidden in the dark, the private allegiance no community could detect. A person may keep a respectable face before everyone and yet harbour, in some concealed corner of the heart and the house, a god of his own. The curse names that secret devotion for what it is: an abomination unto the LORD. And it is fitting that this heads the list, because every other sin in the chapter grows from a heart whose deepest loyalty has quietly slipped. Note too the one verbal variation in this verse: the people answer and say, Amen - the fullest form of the formula, as though the whole nation rouses itself for the first solemn assent and then keeps it up, eleven more times, to the end.
16Cursed be he that setteth light by his father or his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen. 17Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour's landmark. And all the people shall say, Amen.
The second curse strikes at the one who setteth light by his father or his mother (v. 16) - who treats a parent as a thing of small weight, holds them in contempt, robs them of honour. That this comes so high on the list, second only to secret idolatry, says something about how the law sees the household. The bond between parent and child is the first society anyone knows, the seedbed of all the others; where it is despised, something foundational has already broken. To “set light by” is the quiet opposite of the command to honour; it is the contempt that does not need to strike a blow to do its damage. The law guards the dignity of the people most easily taken for granted by those who owe them the most.
The third curse falls on the one who removeth his neighbour's landmark (v. 17). A landmark was a boundary stone, the agreed marker of where one family's land ended and another's began. To move it - a little, in the night, when no one is watching - is to steal land by stealth, to take what is not yours while keeping your hands apparently clean. It is theft committed against the very agreement that made neighbours able to trust one another. The wrong is small enough to be deniable and quiet enough to escape notice, which is exactly why it makes the list. The curses keep circling back to the hidden sin, the one that leaves no public mark - and they keep insisting that what no neighbour can see, God sees, and counts.
18Cursed be he that maketh the blind to wander out of the way. And all the people shall say, Amen. 19Cursed be he that perverteth the judgment of the stranger, fatherless, and widow. And all the people shall say, Amen.
Two curses now guard the helpless. The first falls on the one who maketh the blind to wander out of the way (v. 18) - who exploits a person's helplessness, steering someone who cannot see into danger and confusion for sport or for gain. It is cruelty aimed precisely at the point where another is defenceless. The second names the three figures the law returns to again and again as the most exposed: the stranger, who has no tribe or local standing; the fatherless, who has no advocate; and the widow, who has lost the one who defended her (v. 19). To pervert the judgment of these is to twist the courts against the very people the courts exist to protect - to use the machinery of justice as a weapon against the weak. The law reserves a curse for it because there is a particular darkness in harming those who cannot fight back, and a particular dignity in a society that refuses to. How a people treats its most defenceless is, to the law, a test of whether it fears God at all.
20Cursed be he that lieth with his father's wife; because he uncovereth his father's skirt. And all the people shall say, Amen. 21Cursed be he that lieth with any manner of beast. And all the people shall say, Amen. 22Cursed be he that lieth with his sister, the daughter of his father, or the daughter of his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen. 23Cursed be he that lieth with his mother in law. And all the people shall say, Amen.
Four curses now guard the boundaries of the body and the family (vv. 20-23). The body is sacred, and the relationships within a household are sacred; these verses name the lines that, when crossed, tear the fabric that makes a family - and through the family, a whole people - able to hold together in trust. Each of these acts is done in private, away from any witness, which is why they belong in this chapter of hidden sins; and each violates a bond that ought to have been a place of safety. The law treats the household not as a private zone beyond moral reach but as the very ground where holiness is either honoured or betrayed. To keep these boundaries is not prudishness; it is the protection of the people's most intimate trust. To break them is to corrupt the one place a person should be safest. And the assembly says Amen to each - agreeing that the sanctity of the body and the home is worth the covenant's most solemn defence.
24Cursed be he that smiteth his neighbour secretly. And all the people shall say, Amen. 25Cursed be he that taketh reward to slay an innocent person. And all the people shall say, Amen.
The curse of verse 24 falls on the one who smiteth his neighbour secretly - violence done in the dark, the blow struck from behind, the harm inflicted where no eye can see and no court can convict. It is cowardice married to cruelty: the willingness to injure another precisely because one believes one will never be caught. The whole point of the secrecy is to escape human accountability - and the whole point of the curse is to declare that there is no escaping the accountability of God. What is hidden from every neighbour is open before Him. The assembly's Amen is, again, the conscience agreeing that the unseen blow is seen and judged.
The eleventh curse names a particularly cold evil: the one who taketh reward to slay an innocent person (v. 25). This is murder for hire - the hand sold to spill innocent blood for a price. Two of the gravest wrongs the law knows are fused here: the shedding of innocent blood and the corruption of justice by money. The hired killer has put a price on a life that was not his to sell, and has let greed override the most basic prohibition of all. It is the perversion of a person's very strength - turned, for payment, against the defenceless. That this stands just before the final, summarizing curse is fitting: it is one of the darkest specific sins imaginable, and the chapter places it on the threshold of the verse that will gather every sin together.
26Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them. And all the people shall say, Amen.
The twelfth curse stands apart from the other eleven, and it is the heaviest of all: Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them (v. 26). The first eleven each named a single, specific sin. This one names no particular act - it names the failure to keep the whole. The word all, planted back in verse 1, now bears its full and crushing fruit. To fall under this curse, a person need not commit one of the named atrocities; he need only fail to confirm and do the entire law, every word of it, without exception. And here the chapter springs a trap that the rest of Scripture will not let the reader miss. For who, having said Amen to the previous eleven, can honestly say he has kept all things? The very assembly ratifying this curse is, by their own word, placed under it - because not one of them has kept the whole. The law's own mouth pronounces a curse that none of its hearers can escape. This is precisely why no one can finally be made right by the law: the standard is all, and no one meets it. The verse does not soften the blow; it lets the full weight of cursed is every one come down. And it is exactly there, with the curse resting honestly on every head, that the gospel will have something to say.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 27 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for arur (the word “cursed” that opens every one of the twelve pronouncements, vv. 15-26), for amen (the people's sealing word, “firm, faithful, so be it”), and for the command to build the altar of whole stones with no iron tool lifted upon them (vv. 5-6).
- Deuteronomy 27 ↔ Galatians 3 · 2 Corinthians 1 · Joshua 8Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Deuteronomy 27 to the rest of Scripture - the final curse on whoever confirmeth not all the words of this law (v. 26) quoted in Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things… to do them (Gal. 3:10) and answered by Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13), the people's Amen read beside in him Amen (2 Cor. 1:20), and the ceremony itself carried out at Ebal and Gerizim in Joshua 8:30-35.
- Deuteronomy 27 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Deuteronomy 27 - the plastered stones inscribed with the law (vv. 2-4, 8), the unhewn-stone altar on which no iron tool is raised (vv. 5-6), the assigning of the tribes to the two mountains (vv. 12-13), and the formula of the twelve curses each answered by the assembly (vv. 15-26).
Where this echoes in Scripture
The Law Written Plain · An Altar of Whole Stone
- Exodus 20:25if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.The law of the unhewn altar behind verses 5-6 - nothing of human shaping added to what God receives.
- Joshua 8:30-32Then Joshua built an altar... in mount Ebal... an altar of whole stones, over which no man hath lift up any iron.The command of verses 4-8 carried out exactly - the altar built and the law written on the stones.
- Deuteronomy 11:29thou shalt put the blessing upon mount Gerizim, and the curse upon mount Ebal.The two mountains named in advance - the setting verses 4 and 12-13 now put to use.
- Exodus 19:5-6ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people... and an holy nation.The identity declared in verse 9 - Israel becoming, in covenant, the people of the LORD.
- Hebrews 9:22without shedding of blood is no remission.The altar set even on the mount of cursing (vv. 5-7) - a way of mercy opened only through sacrifice.
Two Mountains: Blessing and Curse
- Deuteronomy 30:19I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life.The choice the two mountains embody (vv. 12-13) - blessing and cursing set before the whole people.
- Joshua 8:33-35half of them over against mount Gerizim, and half of them over against mount Ebal... he read all the words of the law, the blessings and cursings.The arrangement of verses 11-14 carried out - the tribes on the two mountains, the law read aloud.
- Galatians 3:10Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them.The covenant word <em>arur</em> taken up by Paul - the curse the assembly here ratifies with Amen.
- Numbers 6:24-26The LORD bless thee, and keep thee... and give thee peace.The blessing side of the two mountains (v. 12) - the words the tribes on Gerizim were stationed to speak.
- John 1:17the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.The law spoken with a loud voice between the mountains (v. 14) - the demand that Christ would answer with grace.
The Twelve Curses · And All the People Shall Say, Amen
- Galatians 3:13Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.The answer to the final curse of verse 26 - the One who bore the Amen-ratified curse in our place.
- 2 Corinthians 1:20all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us.The people’s sealing word (vv. 15-26) answered in a Person - in Him, the Amen.
- Exodus 22:22-24Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child... my wrath shall wax hot.The protection of the vulnerable behind verse 19 - the stranger, fatherless, and widow under God’s special care.
- Romans 3:19-20by the law is the knowledge of sin... that every mouth may be stopped.The point of the all-encompassing curse of verse 26 - the law revealing that none can keep the whole of it.
- Leviticus 18:6-9None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness.The body’s sacred boundaries guarded in verses 20-23 - the household held holy.