"The Mighty One — God — the Lord! The Mighty One — God — the Lord! He knows. And let Israel know too. If this was rebellion — if we built this altar to turn away from the Lord — then don't spare us. If we built it to offer burnt offerings or grain offerings or sacrifices on it, let the Lord himself take vengeance on us.
But that's not why we built it.
We built it because we were afraid. We were afraid that someday, in the future, your children would say to our children: 'What do you have to do with the Lord, the God of Israel? The Jordan is the boundary between us. You people of Reuben and Gad — you have no portion in the Lord.' And your children would make our children stop worshiping the Lord.
So we said: let's build an altar. Not for burnt offerings. Not for sacrifice. As a witness. A witness between us and you, and between our children and yours, that we do serve the Lord — with our offerings, our sacrifices, and our peace offerings — so that no one can ever say to our descendants, 'You don't belong.'
We thought: if anyone ever says that to us or to our children in the future, we can point to it and say, 'Look — there's the copy of the Lord's altar that our fathers built. Not for sacrifice. For a witness between us and you.'
We would never rebel against the Lord. We would never turn away from him by building an altar for offerings or sacrifice apart from the altar of the Lord our God that stands before his tabernacle."