King James Bible
"And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish."
Moses warns of spiritual amnesia—forgetting God's past deliverance and provision in the wilderness. The emphatic Hebrew construction ('forget, you will forget') stresses the gravity of abandoning covenant loyalty after experiencing God's faithfulness. Three progressive verbs describe deepening apostasy: following, serving, then worshipping foreign deities. In Canaan's polytheistic context, this sequence reflects how casual religious curiosity could escalate into full idolatrous devotion. Moses invokes formal legal language as a covenant witness, making this warning juridically binding. The doubled verb form ('perish, you will perish') mirrors the covenant curses, affirming that rejecting Yahweh leads to the same destruction faced by Canaan's current inhabitants.