Deuteronomy 7:17–24

Deuteronomy 7:17 — The Interior Temptation Moses begins not with an external threat but with an internal one: "If you shall say in your heart." The danger he addresses is the whispered counsel of fear and self-reliance. The nations of Canaan were, by ancient Near Eastern standards, formidable — fortified cities, iron chariots, greater numbers. The question "How can I dispossess them?" is the voice of natural reason unaided by faith, the same voice that caused the ten unfaithful spies to despair at Kadesh-Barnea (Num 13:31–33). Moses does not dismiss the feeling as irrational; he redirects its energy toward theological memory.

Deuteronomy 7:18 — Memory as Antidote to Fear The command "You shall not be afraid" is immediately grounded in anamnesis — living, active remembrance. Zakar (remember) in Hebrew is not merely cognitive recall; it is a participatory re-entry into past saving events. Israel is to remember what Yahweh your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt. The specificity is important: not a vague "God is powerful," but the concrete, named, historical intervention of the Exodus. This is the paradigmatic act of divine deliverance in the Old Testament, and it functions here as the irrefutable premise of a theological argument: if God overcame the superpower of the ancient world, no Canaanite coalition need cause despair.

Deuteronomy 7:19 — The Vocabulary of the Exodus Moses deploys the full liturgical formula of the Exodus: "the great trials… the signs, the wonders, the mighty hand, and the outstretched arm." This identical formula recurs in Deuteronomy's catechetical creed (Deut 26:8) and is the precise language later embedded in the Passover Haggadah. The phrase "outstretched arm" (zeroa netuyah) is an image of royal combat: God as the Divine Warrior who fights on Israel's behalf. The verse closes with a direct promise of analogical action: "So shall Yahweh your God do to all the peoples of whom you are afraid" — the Exodus is not a closed episode but an ongoing pattern of God's saving style.

Deuteronomy 7:20 — The Hornet as Divine Instrument The hornet (tzir'ah) is a striking and enigmatic detail. Whether understood literally as a plague of stinging insects (cf. Ex 23:28; Josh 24:12) or, as some ancient interpreters held, metaphorically as terror or pestilence sent ahead of the army, the theological point is the same: God employs the entirety of creation as an instrument of his covenant purposes. Even those enemies who manage to hide and survive the Israelite advance will not escape; the natural world itself is enlisted in the divine campaign. This anticipates a broader biblical theology of creation as responsive to its Creator's covenantal will (cf. Rom 8:20–21).

Verses 21–22 — A Great and Awesome God Who Works Gradually Verse 21's paired commands — "not scared" (lo ta'arotz, a different Hebrew root from v. 18's fear, evoking a shattering, crushing dread) — are grounded in the divine presence: "Yahweh your God is among you." The Ark of the Covenant, the tabernacle, was the visible sign of this indwelling. Yet verse 22 introduces a pastoral and prudential nuance rarely dwelt upon: God will drive out the nations little by little (me'at me'at). The reason given is surprisingly practical — a sudden depopulation would cause the wilderness to reclaim the land and dangerous wildlife to multiply. Origen and later commentators read this gradualness as deliberately pedagogical: God works at a pace Israel can absorb, not overwhelming them with more victory than they can steward. Conquest is simultaneously a spiritual formation.

Verses 23–24 — Confusion, Destruction, and Total Victory God promises to "confuse them with a great confusion" (mehumah gedolah) — the same term used at Jericho (Josh 10:10) and in Gideon's battle (Judg 7:22), where Israel's enemies turn their swords on one another. Human military plans are scrambled by divine action. The passage reaches its climax in verse 24: even kings — the supreme figures of worldly power in the ancient world — will be delivered into Israel's hand, their very names erased. "Name" (shem) in the ancient world was one's identity, legacy, and continued existence; to perish from under the sky is total annihilation of the threat. The concluding promise — "No one will be able to stand before you" — echoes God's commission to Joshua (Josh 1:5) and frames the entire conquest as a theological, not merely military, event.

Catholic tradition reads this passage on multiple levels simultaneously, none canceling the others.

The Literal-Historical Sense confirms the Church's insistence, reiterated in Dei Verbum §19, that the Old Testament contains "true and enduring value" as the record of God's actual dealings with a historical people. The gradual dispossession (v. 22) reflects what the Catechism calls God's "patient pedagogy" with humanity (CCC §1950; cf. §122), accommodating revelation to the capacity of his people.

The Typological Sense is richly developed by the Fathers. Origen, in his Homilies on Joshua, reads the Canaanite nations as figures of the vices that inhabit the soul. The "gradual" conquest is not divine half-heartedness but the very structure of the spiritual life: we are not delivered from all sin at once, but progressively, so that we can govern what has been freed in us. Augustine (City of God XV) similarly sees the conquest as an image of the pilgrim Church making her way through a world of competing loyalties, not by force but by divine promise.

The Anagogical Sense points toward the eschatological Kingdom. The kings whose names perish (v. 24) prefigure every power — sin, death, the devil — annihilated at the final victory of Christ (1 Cor 15:24–26). The promise "no one will stand before you" anticipates the definitive triumph of Christ, the true Divine Warrior (Rev 19:11–16).

Divine Providence and Human Courage are held together here in a way that resonates with the Catechism's teaching that God's providential plan "embraces all things" while human freedom and prudential action remain fully engaged (CCC §§302–314). Fear is not condemned as sinful; it is redirected by memory and divine promise into courage.

Contemporary Catholics face their own version of verse 17's interior whisper: "These forces arrayed against faith are too great — secularism, moral confusion, institutional scandal, cultural hostility. How can we prevail?" Moses's prescription is startlingly concrete: do not begin with strategy; begin with memory. The regular Catholic practice of recalling saving events — the Exodus fulfilled in Christ, the Resurrection, the sacraments received, personal moments of divine intervention — is not nostalgia. It is the cognitive and spiritual training that keeps fear from metastasizing into paralysis or apostasy.

The "little by little" of verse 22 speaks directly to Catholics struggling with persistent sin or overwhelmed by the scope of the Church's evangelizing task. God does not demand that we win every battle at once. He asks for faithfulness in the next small step, trusting that the territory he has already freed in us is territory we must now learn to inhabit and govern wisely. The gradualness is not a consolation prize; it is the actual shape of grace operating in creaturely time. Spiritual directors in the tradition of Ignatius of Loyola have long recognized this dynamic: discernment and progress in virtue are typically incremental, punctuated by moments of sudden grace — exactly the rhythm of Deuteronomy 7.