Deuteronomy 28:58-68

Common English Bible

⁵⁸ If you don’t carefully keep all the words of this Instruction that are written in this scroll, by fearing the awesome and glorious name of the Lord your God— ⁵⁹ the Lord will overwhelm you and your descendants with severe and chronic afflictions, and with terrible and untreatable sicknesses. ⁶⁰ He’ll put on you all the Egyptian diseases about which you were so afraid; they will stick to you! ⁶¹ What’s more, the Lord will bring on you all the other diseases and plagues that aren’t written in this Instruction scroll until you are completely wiped out. ⁶² Once as countless as the stars in the night sky, only a few of you will be left alive—all because you didn’t obey the Lord your God’s voice. ⁶³ And just as before, the Lord enjoyed doing good things for you and increasing your numbers, now the Lord will enjoy annihilating and destroying you. You will be torn off the very fertile land you are entering to possess. ⁶⁴ The Lord will scatter you among every nation, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will serve other gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known—gods of wood and stone. ⁶⁵ Among those nations you will have no rest and no place to call your own.^[a] There the Lord will give you an agitated mind, failing eyes, and a depressed spirit. ⁶⁶ Your life will seem to dangle before your very eyes. You will be afraid night and day. You won’t be able to count on surviving for long. ⁶⁷ In the morning you will say: “I wish it was nighttime,” but at nighttime you will say, “I wish it was morning”—on account of your tortured mind, which will be terrified, and because of the horrible sights that your eyes will see. ⁶⁸ Finally, the Lord will take you back to Egypt in ships, by the route I promised you would never see again. There you will try to sell yourselves as slaves—both male and female—but no one will want to buy you.