²³ Be careful, therefore, lest you forget the covenant which the Lord, your God, has made with you, and fashion for yourselves against his command an idol in any form whatsoever.^{(A) 24} For the Lord, your God, is a consuming fire, a jealous God.^[a](B)

God’s Fidelity and Love. ^25 (C)When you have children and children’s children, and have grown old in the land, should you then act corruptly by fashioning an idol in the form of anything, and by this evil done in his sight provoke the Lord, your God, ²⁶ I call heaven and earth this day to witness against you, that you shall all quickly perish from the land which you are crossing the Jordan to possess. You shall not live in it for any length of time but shall be utterly wiped out.^(D)

¹⁹ But if you do forget the Lord, your God, and go after other gods, serving and bowing down to them,^(A) I bear witness to you this day that you will perish utterly. ²⁰ Like the nations which the Lord destroys before you, so shall you too perish for not listening to the voice of the Lord, your God.

^16 (A)But be careful lest your heart be so lured away that you serve other gods and bow down to them.^{(B) 17} For then the anger of the Lord will flare up against you and he will close up the heavens, so that no rain will fall, and the soil will not yield its crops, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you.

²⁸ a curse if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, but turn aside from the way I command you today, to go after other gods, whom you do not know.^(A)

¹⁸ if any such persons, after hearing the words of this curse, should congratulate themselves, saying in their hearts, “I am safe, even though I walk in stubbornness of heart,” thereby sweeping away moist and dry alike,^{[a](A) 19} the Lord will never consent to pardon them. Instead, the Lord’s burning wrath will flare up against them; every curse written in this book will pounce on them, and the Lord will blot out their names from under the heavens.^{(B) 20} The Lord will single them out from all the tribes of Israel for doom, in keeping with all the curses of the covenant written in this book of the law.

Punishment for Idolatry. ^21 (C)Future generations, your descendants who will rise up after you, as well as the foreigners who will come here from distant lands, when they see the calamities of this land and the ills the Lord has inflicted upon it— ²² all its soil burned out by sulphur and salt, unsown and unfruitful, without a blade of grass, like the catastrophe of Sodom and Gomorrah,^(D) Admah and Zeboiim,^[b] which the Lord overthrew in his furious wrath— ^23 (E)they and all the nations will ask, “Why has the Lord dealt thus with this land? Why this great outburst of wrath?” ²⁴ And they will say, “Because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, which he had made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt, ²⁵ and they went and served other gods and bowed down to them, gods whom they did not know and whom he had not apportioned to them.^{(F) 26 (G)}So the anger of the Lord flared up against this land and brought on it every curse written in this book. ²⁷ The Lord uprooted them from their soil in anger, fury, and great wrath, and cast them out into another land, as they are today.” ²⁸ The hidden things^[c] belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things are for us and for our children forever, to observe all the words of this law.