The Allotment of the Nations

"When the Most High apportioned the nations… he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. For Yahweh's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance" (Deuteronomy 32:8-9). The oldest manuscript evidence for this passage — the Dead Sea Scrolls, agreeing with the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament — reads "sons of God" here. Most Bibles in print today follow a later Hebrew textual tradition that instead reads "sons of Israel," a wording textual scholars widely judge to be the later variant, since Israel did not yet exist as a nation at the moment being described.
Read either way, the theological shape of the passage is the same: this is a pivotal moment in which the nations of the earth are placed under the authority of other, lesser spiritual beings, while Israel alone remains Yahweh's own direct portion. The text is not describing Yahweh giving away part of his own inheritance — he does not relinquish Israel to anyone. It describes every other nation being handed to a delegated, subordinate authority instead of continuing under Yahweh's own direct rule. Deuteronomy 4:19-20 states this explicitly and without the manuscript complication: the sun, moon, and stars — the heavenly host — "Yahweh your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole sky," while Israel he "has taken… out of the iron-smelting furnace" to be "the people of his inheritance." The same structure, two different vantage points on one event.
This is the moment cosmic geography begins. From here forward, the nations are not spiritually neutral territory, and Israel's later, ferocious resistance to worshiping the gods of surrounding peoples is not cultural stubbornness — it is loyalty to the one people group still directly, personally claimed by Yahweh himself, while every other nation waits, disinherited, for the day that claim widens to include them too.