I fell down before Yahweh as at the first, forty days and forty nights; I did not eat bread or drink water because of all your sin that you sinned, in doing what was evil in the eyes of Yahweh
and making him angry.
“making him angry.” The NET text note on Deuteronomy 4:25 gets the sense of the verse correctly when it says, “The infinitive construct [in the Hebrew text] is understood here as indicating the result, not the intention of their actions.” The Israelites would not do what they did in worshipping idols with the intent to provoke God, but the result of their idolatry was that God was provoked. In English, “provoke” is usually used when someone intentionally does something that upsets the other person, and that is not what happened with Israel’s idolatry.
