As elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, the “angel” might refer to God himself—in any case, the people must obey the angel as if he were God. These commands look ahead to Israel’s eventual conquest of the promised land of Canaan. Perhaps the most important is that the Israelites must not take on the religious beliefs of the people currently living in Canaan. Adopting these would destroy Israel’s distinctiveness as a people. Doing so would also be a failure to acknowledge God as the very one who led the Israelites into the promised land. The “sea of the Philistines” is the Mediterranean Sea, and the “wilderness” refers to the desert south of Israel.