31 And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee.

32 Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods.

33 They shall not dwell in thy land, lest they make thee sin against me: for if thou serve their gods, it will surely be a snare unto thee.

Israel had been promised the land of Canaan, but in these verses God defines the exact boundaries of their inheritance. One of the bounds given is the very desert that they now wandered through, so they were not yet in the land that God meant for them, but stood upon its border, in limbo, suspended between the death of their old life and full rebirth.

Other scholars have noted that even after coming into the Promised Land Israel’s borders would not extend out to the places described in these verses for many years, but would eventually be reached during the campaigns of David and Solomon. Afterward, those borders would recede. This was therefore a prophetic foretelling of the limits that Israel would reach at its largest point, not what its borders would be at all times. God had set the maximum borders, and Israel would play within those bounds.

Israel is also told that they are to remain a people apart. They are not to make a covenant with the other people of the land, meaning entering into no alliance or contract, nor open their borders to them. This does not seem to be a ban on immigration as God had already detailed how a foreigner might live among them if he or she was assimilated into the faith, like Ruth famously did, but there were not to be pockets of foreign nationalities within God’s own people.