Deuteronomy 4:2 — Adding to His Word or Taking Away

Deuteronomy 4:2 gives the command in both directions at once: nothing added to the word, nothing diminished from it. The Hebrew for add is yasaph (H3254); diminish is gara (H1639), to cut short or take away. The verse also states its purpose, “that ye may keep the commandments of Yahuah your God.” The word is left whole so that it can be kept. Deuteronomy 12:32 repeats the command at the close of a warning against asking how the nations served their gods and doing likewise (12:30–31). The addition in view is worship borrowed from outside and carried in to Yahuah. Proverbs 30:5–6 names the result: “Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.”

Judges 21:25 shows what follows once the word stops being the measure: “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Yahushua held the opposite line in Matthew 5:18. Not one jot, the smallest letter, and not one tittle, the smallest stroke, passes from the law till heaven and earth pass. Peter holds prophecy to the same line: “no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation” (2 Peter 1:20). A parable or a prophecy explained with nothing from the Law and the Prophets standing behind it is an addition, however familiar it sounds from the pulpit.

Revelation 22:18–19 closes the book with both halves of Deuteronomy 4:2. To the man who adds, Yahuah adds the plagues written in the book. From the man who takes away, He takes away his part. The KJV reads “book of life,” but the Greek manuscripts read xulon (G3586), tree: the tree of life, which Genesis 3:22 names as the way to “live for ever.” Five verses earlier stands the condition for reaching it: “Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life” (Revelation 22:14). The man who takes from the word loses the very tree promised to the one who keeps it.