Deuteronomy 28-30
New Living Translation
Blessings for Obedience
28 “If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully keep all his commands that I am giving you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the world. 2 You will experience all these blessings if you obey the Lord your God:
3 Your towns and your fields
will be blessed.
4 Your children and your crops
will be blessed.
The offspring of your herds and flocks
will be blessed.
5 Your fruit baskets and breadboards
will be blessed.
6 Wherever you go and whatever you do,
you will be blessed.
7 “The Lord will conquer your enemies when they attack you. They will attack you from one direction, but they will scatter from you in seven!
8 “The Lord will guarantee a blessing on everything you do and will fill your storehouses with grain. The Lord your God will bless you in the land he is giving you.
9 “If you obey the commands of the Lord your God and walk in his ways, the Lord will establish you as his holy people as he swore he would do. 10 Then all the nations of the world will see that you are a people claimed by the Lord, and they will stand in awe of you.
11 “The Lord will give you prosperity in the land he swore to your ancestors to give you, blessing you with many children, numerous livestock, and abundant crops. 12 The Lord will send rain at the proper time from his rich treasury in the heavens and will bless all the work you do. You will lend to many nations, but you will never need to borrow from them. 13 If you listen to these commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today, and if you carefully obey them, the Lord will make you the head and not the tail, and you will always be on top and never at the bottom. 14 You must not turn away from any of the commands I am giving you today, nor follow after other gods and worship them.
Curses for Disobedience
15 “But if you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and do not obey all the commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come and overwhelm you:
16 Your towns and your fields
will be cursed.
17 Your fruit baskets and breadboards
will be cursed.
18 Your children and your crops
will be cursed.
The offspring of your herds and flocks
will be cursed.
19 Wherever you go and whatever you do,
you will be cursed.
20 “The Lord himself will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in everything you do, until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and abandoning me. 21 The Lord will afflict you with diseases until none of you are left in the land you are about to enter and occupy. 22 The Lord will strike you with wasting diseases, fever, and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, and with blight and mildew. These disasters will pursue you until you die. 23 The skies above will be as unyielding as bronze, and the earth beneath will be as hard as iron. 24 The Lord will change the rain that falls on your land into powder, and dust will pour down from the sky until you are destroyed.
25 “The Lord will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will attack your enemies from one direction, but you will scatter from them in seven! You will be an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. 26 Your corpses will be food for all the scavenging birds and wild animals, and no one will be there to chase them away.
27 “The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, scurvy, and the itch, from which you cannot be cured. 28 The Lord will strike you with madness, blindness, and panic. 29 You will grope around in broad daylight like a blind person groping in the darkness, but you will not find your way. You will be oppressed and robbed continually, and no one will come to save you.
30 “You will be engaged to a woman, but another man will sleep with her. You will build a house, but someone else will live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will never enjoy its fruit. 31 Your ox will be butchered before your eyes, but you will not eat a single bite of the meat. Your donkey will be taken from you, never to be returned. Your sheep and goats will be given to your enemies, and no one will be there to help you. 32 You will watch as your sons and daughters are taken away as slaves. Your heart will break for them, but you won’t be able to help them. 33 A foreign nation you have never heard about will eat the crops you worked so hard to grow. You will suffer under constant oppression and harsh treatment. 34 You will go mad because of all the tragedy you see around you. 35 The Lord will cover your knees and legs with incurable boils. In fact, you will be covered from head to foot.
36 “The Lord will exile you and your king to a nation unknown to you and your ancestors. There in exile you will worship gods of wood and stone! 37 You will become an object of horror, ridicule, and mockery among all the nations to which the Lord sends you.
38 “You will plant much but harvest little, for locusts will eat your crops. 39 You will plant vineyards and care for them, but you will not drink the wine or eat the grapes, for worms will destroy the vines. 40 You will grow olive trees throughout your land, but you will never use the olive oil, for the fruit will drop before it ripens. 41 You will have sons and daughters, but you will lose them, for they will be led away into captivity. 42 Swarms of insects will destroy your trees and crops.
43 “The foreigners living among you will become stronger and stronger, while you become weaker and weaker. 44 They will lend money to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the head, and you will be the tail!
45 “If you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and to obey the commands and decrees he has given you, all these curses will pursue and overtake you until you are destroyed. 46 These horrors will serve as a sign and warning among you and your descendants forever. 47 If you do not serve the Lord your God with joy and enthusiasm for the abundant benefits you have received, 48 you will serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you. You will be left hungry, thirsty, naked, and lacking in everything. The Lord will put an iron yoke on your neck, oppressing you harshly until he has destroyed you.
49 “The Lord will bring a distant nation against you from the end of the earth, and it will swoop down on you like a vulture. It is a nation whose language you do not understand, 50 a fierce and heartless nation that shows no respect for the old and no pity for the young. 51 Its armies will devour your livestock and crops, and you will be destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine, olive oil, calves, or lambs, and you will starve to death. 52 They will attack your cities until all the fortified walls in your land—the walls you trusted to protect you—are knocked down. They will attack all the towns in the land the Lord your God has given you.
53 “The siege and terrible distress of the enemy’s attack will be so severe that you will eat the flesh of your own sons and daughters, whom the Lord your God has given you. 54 The most tenderhearted man among you will have no compassion for his own brother, his beloved wife, and his surviving children. 55 He will refuse to share with them the flesh he is devouring—the flesh of one of his own children—because he has nothing else to eat during the siege and terrible distress that your enemy will inflict on all your towns. 56 The most tender and delicate woman among you—so delicate she would not so much as touch the ground with her foot—will be selfish toward the husband she loves and toward her own son or daughter. 57 She will hide from them the afterbirth and the new baby she has borne, so that she herself can secretly eat them. She will have nothing else to eat during the siege and terrible distress that your enemy will inflict on all your towns.
58 “If you refuse to obey all the words of instruction that are written in this book, and if you do not fear the glorious and awesome name of the Lord your God, 59 then the Lord will overwhelm you and your children with indescribable plagues. These plagues will be intense and without relief, making you miserable and unbearably sick. 60 He will afflict you with all the diseases of Egypt that you feared so much, and you will have no relief. 61 The Lord will afflict you with every sickness and plague there is, even those not mentioned in this Book of Instruction, until you are destroyed. 62 Though you become as numerous as the stars in the sky, few of you will be left because you would not listen to the Lord your God.
63 “Just as the Lord has found great pleasure in causing you to prosper and multiply, the Lord will find pleasure in destroying you. You will be torn from the land you are about to enter and occupy. 64 For the Lord will scatter you among all the nations from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship foreign gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods made of wood and stone! 65 There among those nations you will find no peace or place to rest. And the Lord will cause your heart to tremble, your eyesight to fail, and your soul to despair. 66 Your life will constantly hang in the balance. You will live night and day in fear, unsure if you will survive. 67 In the morning you will say, ‘If only it were night!’ And in the evening you will say, ‘If only it were morning!’ For you will be terrified by the awful horrors you see around you. 68 Then the Lord will send you back to Egypt in ships, to a destination I promised you would never see again. There you will offer to sell yourselves to your enemies as slaves, but no one will buy you.”
29 [a]These are the terms of the covenant the Lord commanded Moses to make with the Israelites while they were in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant he had made with them at Mount Sinai.[b]
Moses Reviews the Covenant
2 [c]Moses summoned all the Israelites and said to them, “You have seen with your own eyes everything the Lord did in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to his whole country— 3 all the great tests of strength, the miraculous signs, and the amazing wonders. 4 But to this day the Lord has not given you minds that understand, nor eyes that see, nor ears that hear! 5 For forty years I led you through the wilderness, yet your clothes and sandals did not wear out. 6 You ate no bread and drank no wine or other alcoholic drink, but he provided for you so you would know that he is the Lord your God.
7 “When we came here, King Sihon of Heshbon and King Og of Bashan came out to fight against us, but we defeated them. 8 We took their land and gave it to the tribes of Reuben and Gad and to the half-tribe of Manasseh as their grant of land.
9 “Therefore, obey the terms of this covenant so that you will prosper in everything you do. 10 All of you—tribal leaders, elders, officers, all the men of Israel—are standing today in the presence of the Lord your God. 11 Your little ones and your wives are with you, as well as the foreigners living among you who chop your wood and carry your water. 12 You are standing here today to enter into the covenant of the Lord your God. The Lord is making this covenant, including the curses. 13 By entering into the covenant today, he will establish you as his people and confirm that he is your God, just as he promised you and as he swore to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
14 “But you are not the only ones with whom I am making this covenant with its curses. 15 I am making this covenant both with you who stand here today in the presence of the Lord our God, and also with the future generations who are not standing here today.
16 “You remember how we lived in the land of Egypt and how we traveled through the lands of enemy nations as we left. 17 You have seen their detestable practices and their idols[d] made of wood, stone, silver, and gold. 18 I am making this covenant with you so that no one among you—no man, woman, clan, or tribe—will turn away from the Lord our God to worship these gods of other nations, and so that no root among you bears bitter and poisonous fruit.
19 “Those who hear the warnings of this curse should not congratulate themselves, thinking, ‘I am safe, even though I am following the desires of my own stubborn heart.’ This would lead to utter ruin! 20 The Lord will never pardon such people. Instead his anger and jealousy will burn against them. All the curses written in this book will come down on them, and the Lord will erase their names from under heaven. 21 The Lord will separate them from all the tribes of Israel, to pour out on them all the curses of the covenant recorded in this Book of Instruction.
22 “Then the generations to come, both your own descendants and the foreigners who come from distant lands, will see the devastation of the land and the diseases the Lord inflicts on it. 23 They will exclaim, ‘The whole land is devastated by sulfur and salt. It is a wasteland with nothing planted and nothing growing, not even a blade of grass. It is like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord destroyed in his intense anger.’
24 “And all the surrounding nations will ask, ‘Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why was he so angry?’
25 “And the answer will be, ‘This happened because the people of the land abandoned the covenant that the Lord, the God of their ancestors, made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt. 26 Instead, they turned away to serve and worship gods they had not known before, gods that were not from the Lord. 27 That is why the Lord’s anger has burned against this land, bringing down on it every curse recorded in this book. 28 In great anger and fury the Lord uprooted his people from their land and banished them to another land, where they still live today!’
29 “The Lord our God has secrets known to no one. We are not accountable for them, but we and our children are accountable forever for all that he has revealed to us, so that we may obey all the terms of these instructions.
A Call to Return to the Lord
30 “In the future, when you experience all these blessings and curses I have listed for you, and when you are living among the nations to which the Lord your God has exiled you, take to heart all these instructions. 2 If at that time you and your children return to the Lord your God, and if you obey with all your heart and all your soul all the commands I have given you today, 3 then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes. He will have mercy on you and gather you back from all the nations where he has scattered you. 4 Even though you are banished to the ends of the earth,[e] the Lord your God will gather you from there and bring you back again. 5 The Lord your God will return you to the land that belonged to your ancestors, and you will possess that land again. Then he will make you even more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors!
6 “The Lord your God will change your heart[f] and the hearts of all your descendants, so that you will love him with all your heart and soul and so you may live! 7 The Lord your God will inflict all these curses on your enemies and on those who hate and persecute you. 8 Then you will again obey the Lord and keep all his commands that I am giving you today.
9 “The Lord your God will then make you successful in everything you do. He will give you many children and numerous livestock, and he will cause your fields to produce abundant harvests, for the Lord will again delight in being good to you as he was to your ancestors. 10 The Lord your God will delight in you if you obey his voice and keep the commands and decrees written in this Book of Instruction, and if you turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and soul.
The Choice of Life or Death
11 “This command I am giving you today is not too difficult for you, and it is not beyond your reach. 12 It is not kept in heaven, so distant that you must ask, ‘Who will go up to heaven and bring it down so we can hear it and obey?’ 13 It is not kept beyond the sea, so far away that you must ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to bring it to us so we can hear it and obey?’ 14 No, the message is very close at hand; it is on your lips and in your heart so that you can obey it.
15 “Now listen! Today I am giving you a choice between life and death, between prosperity and disaster. 16 For I command you this day to love the Lord your God and to keep his commands, decrees, and regulations by walking in his ways. If you do this, you will live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you and the land you are about to enter and occupy.
17 “But if your heart turns away and you refuse to listen, and if you are drawn away to serve and worship other gods, 18 then I warn you now that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live a long, good life in the land you are crossing the Jordan to occupy.
19 “Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live! 20 You can make this choice by loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and committing yourself firmly to him. This[g] is the key to your life. And if you love and obey the Lord, you will live long in the land the Lord swore to give your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
Footnotes
- 29:1a Verse 29:1 is numbered 28:69 in Hebrew text.
- 29:1b Hebrew Horeb, another name for Sinai.
- 29:2 Verses 29:2-29 are numbered 29:1-28 in Hebrew text.
- 29:17 The Hebrew term (literally round things) probably alludes to dung.
- 30:4 Hebrew of the heavens.
- 30:6 Hebrew circumcise your heart.
- 30:20 Or He.
Deuteronomy 28-30
GOD’S WORD Translation
Blessings from the Lord
28 Carefully obey the Lord your God, and faithfully follow all his commands that I’m giving you today. If you do, the Lord your God will place you high above all the other nations in the world. 2 These are all the blessings that will come to you and stay close to you because you obey the Lord your God:
3 You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.
4 You will be blessed. You will have children. Your land will have crops. Your animals will have offspring. Your cattle will have calves, and your flocks will have lambs and kids.
5 The grain you harvest and the bread you bake will be blessed.
6 You will be blessed when you come and blessed when you go.
7 The Lord will defeat your enemies when they attack you. They will attack you from one direction but run away from you in seven directions.
8 The Lord will bless your barns and everything you do. The Lord your God will bless you in the land that he is giving you.
9 You will be the Lord’s holy people, as he promised you with an oath. He will do this if you obey the commands of the Lord your God and follow his directions. 10 Then all the people in the world will see that you are the Lord’s people, and they will be afraid of you. 11 The Lord will give you plenty of blessings: You will have many children. Your animals will have many offspring. Your soil will produce many crops in the land the Lord will give you, as he swore to your ancestors.
12 The Lord will open the heavens, his rich storehouse, for you. He will send rain on your land at the right time and bless everything you do. You will be able to make loans to many nations but won’t need to borrow from any. 13 The Lord will make you the head, not the tail. You will always be at the top, never at the bottom, if you faithfully obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today. 14 Do everything I’m commanding you today. Never worship other gods or serve them.
Curses from the Lord
15 Obey the Lord your God, and faithfully follow all his commands and laws that I am giving you today. If you don’t, all these curses will come to you and stay close to you:
16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.
17 The grain you harvest and the bread you bake will be cursed.
18 You will be cursed. You will have few children. Your land will have few crops. Your cattle will be cursed with few calves, and your flocks will have few lambs and kids.
19 You will be cursed when you come and cursed when you go.
20 The Lord will send you curses, panic, and frustration in everything you do until you’re destroyed and quickly disappear for the evil you will do by abandoning the Lord. 21 The Lord will send one plague after another on you until he wipes you out of the land you’re about to enter and take possession of. 22 The Lord will strike you with disease, fever, and inflammation; heat waves,[a] drought,[b] scorching winds,[c] and ruined crops. They will pursue you until you die. 23 The sky above will look like bronze, and the ground below will be as hard as iron. 24 The Lord will send dust storms and sandstorms on you from the sky until you’re destroyed.
25 The Lord will let your enemies defeat you. You will attack them from one direction but run away from them in seven directions. You will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms in the world. 26 Your dead bodies will be food for all the birds and wild animals. There will be no one to scare them away. 27 The Lord will strike you with the same boils that plagued the Egyptians. He will strike you with hemorrhoids,[d] sores,[e] and itching that won’t go away. 28 The Lord will strike you with madness, blindness, and panic. 29 You will grope in broad daylight as blind people grope in their blindness. You won’t be successful in anything you do.[f] As long as you live, you will be oppressed and robbed with no one to rescue you.
30 You will be engaged to a woman, but another man will have sex with her. You will build a house, but you won’t live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you won’t enjoy the grapes. 31 Your ox will be butchered as you watch, but you won’t eat any of its meat. You will watch as your donkey is stolen from you, but you’ll never get it back. Your flock will be given to your enemies, and no one will rescue it. 32 You will watch with your own eyes as your sons and daughters are given to another nation. You will strain your eyes looking for them all day long, but there will be nothing you can do. 33 People you never knew will eat what your land and your hard work have produced. As long as you live, you will know nothing but oppression and abuse. 34 The things you see will drive you mad. 35 The Lord will afflict your knees and legs with severe boils that can’t be cured. The boils will cover your whole body from the soles of your feet to the top of your head.
36 The Lord will lead you and the king you choose to a nation that you and your ancestors never knew. There you will worship gods made of wood and stone. 37 You will become a thing of horror. All the nations where the Lord will send you will make an example of you and ridicule you.
38 You will plant many crops in your fields, but harvest little because locusts will destroy your crops. 39 You will plant vineyards and take care of them, but you won’t drink any wine or gather any grapes, because worms will eat them. 40 You will have olive trees everywhere in your country but no olive oil to rub on your skin, because the olives will fall off the trees. 41 You will have sons and daughters, but you won’t be able to keep them because they will be taken as prisoners of war. 42 Crickets will swarm all over your trees and the crops in your fields.
43 The ⌞standard of living for the⌟ foreigners who live among you will rise higher and higher, while your ⌞standard of living⌟ will sink lower and lower. 44 They will be able to make loans to you, but you won’t be able to make loans to them. They will be the head, and you will be the tail.
45 All these curses will come to you. They will pursue you and stay close to you until you’re destroyed, because you didn’t obey the Lord your God or follow his commands and laws, which I’m giving you. 46 These curses will be a sign and an amazing thing to warn you and your descendants forever. 47 You didn’t serve the Lord your God with a joyful and happy heart when you had so much. 48 So you will serve your enemies, whom the Lord will send against you. You will serve them even though you are already hungry, thirsty, naked, and in need of everything. The Lord will put a heavy burden of hard work on you until he destroys you.
49 The Lord will bring against you a nation from far away, from the ends of the earth. The nation will swoop down on you like an eagle. It will be a nation whose language you won’t understand. 50 Its people will be fierce-looking. They will show no respect for the old and no pity for the young. 51 They’ll eat the offspring of your animals and the crops from your fields until you’re destroyed. They’ll leave you no grain, no new wine, no olive oil, no calves from your herds, and no lambs or kids from your flocks. They’ll continue to do this until they’ve completely ruined you. 52 They will blockade all your cities until the high, fortified walls in which you trust come down everywhere in your land. They’ll blockade all the cities everywhere in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
53 Because of the hardships your enemies will make you suffer during the blockade, you will eat the flesh of your own children, the sons and daughters, whom the Lord your God has given you. 54 Even the most tender and sensitive man among you will become stingy toward his brother, the wife he loves, and the children he still has left. 55 He will give none of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all that he has left, because of the hardships your enemies will make you suffer during the blockade of all your cities. 56 The most tender and sensitive woman among you—so sensitive and tender that she wouldn’t even step on an ant—will become stingy toward the husband she loves or toward her own son or daughter. 57 She won’t share with them the afterbirth from her body and the children she gives birth to. She will secretly eat them out of dire necessity, because of the hardships your enemies will make you suffer during the blockade of your cities.
58 You might not faithfully obey every word of the teachings that are written in this book. You might not fear this glorious and awe-inspiring name: the Lord your God. 59 If so, the Lord will strike you and your descendants with unimaginable plagues. They will be terrible and continuing plagues and severe and lingering diseases. 60 He will again bring all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you. 61 The Lord will also bring you every kind of sickness and plague not written in this Book of Teachings. They will continue until you’re dead. 62 At one time you were as numerous as the stars in the sky. But only a few of you will be left, because you didn’t obey the Lord your God. 63 At one time the Lord was more than glad to make you prosperous and numerous. Now the Lord will be more than glad to destroy you and wipe you out. You will be torn out of the land you’re about to enter and take possession of.
64 Then the Lord will scatter you among all the people of the world, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will serve gods made of wood and stone that neither you nor your ancestors ever knew. 65 Among those nations you will find no peace, no place to call your own. There the Lord will give you an unsettled mind, failing eyesight, and despair. 66 Your life will always be hanging by a thread. You will live in terror day and night. You will never feel sure of your life. 67 In the morning you’ll say, “If only it were evening!” And in the evening you’ll say, “If only it were morning!” You’ll talk this way because of the things that will terrify you and because of the things you’ll see. 68 The Lord will bring you back to Egypt in ships [g] on a journey that I said you would never take again. There you will try to sell yourselves as slaves to your enemies, but no one will buy you.
Israel’s Past, Present, and Future
29 [h]These are the terms of the promise [i] that the Lord commanded Moses to give to the Israelites in Moab. This was in addition to the promise the Lord gave them at Mount Horeb.
2 Moses summoned all the people of Israel and said to them:
You’ve seen with your own eyes everything that the Lord did in Egypt to Pharaoh, to all his officials, and to his whole country. 3 You also saw those terrible plagues, those miraculous signs, and those spectacular, amazing things. 4 But to this day the Lord hasn’t given you a mind that understands, eyes that see, or ears that hear. 5 For 40 years I led you through the desert. During that time your clothes and shoes never wore out. 6 You ate no bread and drank no wine or liquor. I did this so that you would know that I am the Lord your God.
7 When you came to this place, King Sihon of Heshbon and King Og of Bashan came out to fight us, but we defeated them. 8 We took their land and gave it to the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of the tribe of Manasseh as their property. 9 Faithfully obey the terms of this promise. Then you will be successful in everything you do.
10 All of you are standing here today in the presence of the Lord your God. The heads of your tribes,[j] your leaders, your officers, and all the men of Israel are here. 11 Your children, your wives, and the foreigners who cut wood and carry water in your camp are also here. 12 You are ready to accept the terms and conditions of the promise that the Lord your God is giving you today. 13 With this promise the Lord will confirm today that you are his people and that he is your God. This is what he told you, and this is what he promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with an oath. 14 You aren’t the only people to receive this promise and its conditions. 15 It is for those of you who are standing here with us today in the presence of the Lord our God and also for those who are not here today.
16 You know how we lived in Egypt and how we passed through other countries on our way here. 17 You saw their disgusting gods and idols made of wood, stone, silver, and gold. 18 Make sure there is no man, woman, family, or tribe among you today who turns from the Lord our God to worship the gods of those nations. Make sure that no one among you is the source of this kind of bitter poison.
19 Someone may hear the conditions of this promise. He may think that he is so blessed that he can say, “I’ll be safe even if I go my own stubborn way. After all, ⌞the Lord would never⌟ sweep away well-watered ground along with dry ground.” 20 The Lord will never be willing to forgive that person, because the Lord’s burning anger will smolder against him. All the curses described in this book will happen to him. The Lord will erase ⌞every memory of⌟ that person’s name from the earth. 21 And the Lord will single him out from all the tribes of Israel for disaster based on all the conditions of the promise written in this Book of the Teachings.
22 Then the next generation of your children and foreigners who come from distant countries will see the plagues that have happened in this land and the diseases the Lord sent here. 23 They will see all the soil poisoned with sulfur and salt. Nothing will be planted. Nothing will be growing. There will be no plants in sight. It will be as desolate as Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, cities the Lord destroyed in fierce anger. 24 Then all the other nations in the world will ask, “Why has the Lord done this to their land? Why is he so angry?”
25 The answer will be, “Because they abandoned the promise of the Lord God of their ancestors. He made this promise to them when he brought them out of Egypt. 26 They worshiped other gods and bowed down to them. These were gods they never heard of, gods the Lord didn’t permit them to have. 27 So the Lord became angry with this land and brought on it all the curses described in this book. 28 In his fierce anger and fury the Lord uprooted these people from their land and deported them to another country, where they still are today.”
29 Some things are hidden. They belong to the Lord our God. But the things that have been revealed in these teachings belong to us and to our children forever. We must obey every word of these teachings.
30 All these blessings and curses I have spoken about will happen to you. Take them to heart when you are among all the nations where the Lord your God will scatter you. 2 If you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul, doing everything I command you today, 3 he will restore your fortunes. He will have mercy on you and gather you from all the nations of the world where he will scatter you. 4 Even if you are scattered to the most distant country in the world, the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back from there. 5 The Lord your God will bring you to the land your ancestors owned. You will take possession of it, and the Lord will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors were.
6 The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants. You will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and you will live. 7 Then the Lord your God will put all these curses on your enemies, those who hate you and persecute you. 8 You will again obey the Lord and follow all his commands that I’m giving you today. 9 The Lord your God will give you many blessings in everything you do: You will have many children. Your animals will have many offspring. Your soil will produce many crops. The Lord will again delight in making you as prosperous as he made your ancestors. 10 He will do this if you obey him and follow his commands and laws that are written in this Book of Teachings and return to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
11 This command I’m giving you today isn’t too hard for you or beyond your reach. 12 It’s not in heaven. You don’t have to ask, “Who will go to heaven to get this command for us so that we can hear it and obey it?” 13 This command isn’t on the other side of the sea. You don’t have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it for us so that we can hear it and obey it?” 14 No, these words are very near you. They’re in your mouth and in your heart so that you will obey them.
Choose between Life and Death
15 Today I offer you life and prosperity or death and destruction. 16 This is what I’m commanding you today: Love the Lord your God, follow his directions, and obey his commands, laws, and rules. Then you will live, your population will increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you’re about to enter and take possession of.
17 But your hearts might turn away, and you might not listen. You might be tempted to bow down to other gods and worship them. 18 If you do, I tell you today that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live for a long time in the land that you’re going to take possession of when you cross the Jordan River.
19 I call on heaven and earth as witnesses today that I have offered you life or death, blessings or curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants will live. 20 Love the Lord your God, obey him, and be loyal to him. This will be your way of life, and it will mean a long life for you [k] in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Footnotes
- 28:22 Or “uncontrolled fever.”
- 28:22 Latin; Masoretic Text “warfare.”
- 28:22 Or “blight.”
- 28:27 Or “boils.”
- 28:27 Or “scurvy.”
- 28:29 Or “darkness, but you won’t be able to find your way.”
- 28:68 Or “in sorrow.”
- 29:1 Deuteronomy 29:1–29 in English Bibles is Deuteronomy 28:69–29:28 in the Hebrew Bible.
- 29:1 Or “covenant.”
- 29:10 Syriac, Greek, Targum; Masoretic Text “your heads, your tribes.”
- 30:20 Or “He is your life, and he will let you live for a long time.”
Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
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