Comentário sobre Êxodo 23:32

THOU SHALT MAKE NO COVENANT WITH THEM, NOR WITH THEIR GODS. He warned here against making a covenant with them [the seven nations] to save them and keep them alive; nor with their gods, this being a warning against making a covenant with the nations to leave them their idols, but instead we are to destroy them and break their pillars in pieces.⁴⁶⁰Verse 24. It is possible that the verse is stating that we are not to make a covenant with them and their gods together, but we are to destroy them and break their idols in pieces, and the intention is to state that as long as they worship their gods we are not to make any covenant with them, but if they accepted upon themselves not to worship the idols, we may leave them unharmed.

לא תכרות להם..ברית, "Do not enter into a covenant with them and their deities." Why does the Torah have to prohibit such covenants since G'd had already commanded the Jewish people (verse 24) to destroy these people? Besides, what would be the purpose of concluding a covenant with the deities rather than the people?

לא תכרות להם ולאלוהיהם ברית, “You must not enter into any covenant with them or their deities.” The plain meaning is that the inhabitants will not be promised that their lives will be spared if they surrender, and there will be no understanding that the Israelites will accept any part of their religious practices. Nachmanides writes that one could also interpret the Torah as meaning that no agreement of any kind with the local inhabitants must include retaining any of their religious practices. In other words, as long as the local inhabitants have not completely abandoned their idolatrous practices. In the event that the inhabitants convert to Judaism they may be allowed to survive.

Actually, we must understand the verse as teaching us that the entire prohibition of concluding treaties with the Gentile nations is applicable only as long as the Gentile nations still adhere to their deities. Once they have denied their former deities this prohibition becomes void. This is why the Torah linked the prohibition by the words להם ולאלוהיהם, "with them and their deities."

The wording of the prohibition also indicates that G'd views anyone who enters into a covenant with an idol worshiper as if he had made a covenant with idolatry. There are two reasons for this. 1) In the end the Jew will stumble and become guilty of idol worship as a result of obligations he took upon himself; the Torah spells this out in verse 33: "lest they will cause you to sin." 2) The second consideration is that the clothing worn by pagans reflects and symbolises their deities. When making a covenant with such people it appears as if one makes the covenant with their beliefs, G'd forbid. It is not sufficient that one had intended to conclude the deal only with the person and not with his beliefs. If the Torah had been content with that, the wording would have been: לא תכרות להם ברית ולאלוהיהם instead of the word ולאלוהיהם appearing before the word ברית, covenant. The mention of the word "covenant" at the end of the verse confirms our opinion that the prohibition is valid only when the Gentiles still recognise these deities. It is perfectly permissible to conclude a covenant with an atheist, for instance. This is why the covenant with the Gibeonites was perfectly admissible. If the Israelites subsequently felt cheated and had remorse about that covenant this is explained by the Jerusalem Talmud Shevi-it chapter 6. The Gibeonites originally were in a position of rebels against the Israelites and were guilty of death under the directive: "do not allow anyone to survive" (Deut. 20,16).