A fire is kindled by my anger: God’s anger is compared to a fire that destroys everything before it (see 4.24). Good News Translation uses a simile: “My anger will flame up like fire.” We may also say “I will be very angry, and just like fire flares up, my anger will burn.” Contemporary English Version uses another picture: “I will breathe out fire that….”

It burns to the depths of Sheol: God’s fire burns all the way through the surface of the earth to the very bottom of the world of the dead.

Devours the earth and its increase: that is, the earth and everything that grows on it; New International Version translates “the earth and its harvests.”

Notice that Good News Translation, logically enough, reverses the order of these two lines, beginning with the earth, and then going down to the roots of the mountains and the world of the dead.

The foundations of the mountains: in the Hebrew concept of the universe, the sky was a flat disk supported by the mountains, whose roots reached down to the depths of Sheol (see Psa 18.7-8; Amos 7.4). Good News Translation may serve as a model for this verse.

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Deuteronomy. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2000. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .