1–2  7 When God, your God, brings you into the country that you are about to enter and take over, he will clear out the superpowers that were there before you: the Hittite, the Girgashite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite. Those seven nations are all bigger and stronger than you are. God, your God, will turn them over to you and you will conquer them. You must completely destroy them, offering them up as a holy destruction to God.

Don’t make a treaty with them.

Don’t let them off in any way.

3–4  Don’t marry them: Don’t give your daughters to their sons and don’t take their daughters for your sons—before you know it they’d involve you in worshiping their gods, and God would explode in anger, putting a quick end to you.

5  Here’s what you are to do:

Tear apart their altars stone by stone,

smash their phallic pillars,

chop down their sex-and-religion Asherah groves,

set fire to their carved god-images.

6  Do this because you are a people set apart as holy to God, your God. God, your God, chose you out of all the people on Earth for himself as a cherished, personal treasure.