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Deuteronomy 28:15-68
New English Translation

Curses as Reversal of Blessings

15 “But if you ignore[a] the Lord your God and are not careful to keep all his commandments and statutes I am giving you today, then all these curses will come upon you in full force:[b] 16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the field. 17 Your basket and your mixing bowl will be cursed. 18 Your children[c] will be cursed, as well as the produce of your soil, the calves of your herds, and the lambs of your flocks. 19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.[d]

Curses by Disease and Drought

20 “The Lord will send on you a curse, confusing you and opposing you[e] in everything you undertake[f] until you are destroyed and quickly perish because of the evil of your deeds, in that you have forsaken me.[g] 21 The Lord will plague you with deadly diseases[h] until he has completely removed you from the land you are about to possess. 22 He[i] will afflict you with weakness,[j] fever, inflammation, infection,[k] sword,[l] blight, and mildew; these will attack you until you perish. 23 The[m] sky[n] above your heads will be bronze and the earth beneath you iron. 24 The Lord will make the rain of your land powder and dust; it will come down on you from the sky until you are destroyed.

Curses by Defeat and Deportation

25 “The Lord will allow you to be struck down before your enemies; you will attack them from one direction but flee from them in seven directions and will become an object of terror[o] to all the kingdoms of the earth. 26 Your carcasses will be food for every bird of the sky and wild animal of the earth, and there will be no one to chase them off. 27 The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, eczema, and scabies, all of which cannot be healed. 28 The Lord will also subject you to madness, blindness, and confusion of mind.[p] 29 You will feel your way along at noon like the blind person does in darkness and you will not succeed in anything you do;[q] you will be constantly oppressed and continually robbed, with no one to save you. 30 You will be engaged to a woman, and another man will rape[r] her. You will build a house but not live in it. You will plant a vineyard but not even begin to use it. 31 Your ox will be slaughtered before your very eyes, but you will not eat of it. Your donkey will be stolen from you as you watch and will not be returned to you. Your flock of sheep will be given to your enemies, and there will be no one to save you. 32 Your sons and daughters will be given to another people while you look on in vain all day, and you will be powerless to do anything about it.[s] 33 As for the produce of your land and all your labor, a people you do not know will consume it, and you will be nothing but oppressed and crushed for the rest of your lives. 34 You will go insane from seeing all this. 35 The Lord will afflict you in your knees and on your legs with painful, incurable boils—from the soles of your feet to the top of your head. 36 The Lord will force you and your king[t] whom you will appoint over you to go away to a people whom you and your ancestors have not known, and you will serve other gods of wood and stone there. 37 You will become an occasion of horror, a proverb, and an object of ridicule to all the peoples to whom the Lord will drive you.

The Curse of Reversed Status

38 “You will take much seed to the field but gather little harvest, because locusts will consume it. 39 You will plant vineyards and cultivate them, but you will not drink wine or gather in grapes, because worms will eat them. 40 You will have olive trees throughout your territory, but you will not anoint yourself with olive oil, because the olives will drop off the trees while still unripe.[u] 41 You will bear sons and daughters but not keep them, because they will be taken into captivity. 42 Whirring locusts[v] will take over every tree and all the produce of your soil. 43 The resident foreigners[w] who reside among you will become higher and higher over you, and you will become lower and lower. 44 They will lend to you, but you will not lend to them; they will become the head, and you will become the tail!

45 “All these curses will fall on you, pursuing and overtaking you until you are destroyed, because you would not obey the Lord your God by keeping his commandments and statutes that he has given[x] you. 46 These curses[y] will be a perpetual sign and wonder with reference to you and your descendants.[z]

The Curse of Military Siege

47 “Because you have not served the Lord your God joyfully and wholeheartedly with the abundance of everything you have, 48 instead in hunger, thirst, nakedness, and poverty[aa] you will serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you. They[ab] will place an iron yoke on your neck until they have destroyed you. 49 The Lord will raise up a distant nation against you, one from the other side of the earth[ac] as the eagle flies,[ad] a nation whose language you will not understand, 50 a nation of stern appearance that will have no regard for the elderly or pity for the young. 51 They[ae] will devour the offspring of your livestock and the produce of your soil until you are destroyed. They will not leave you with any grain, new wine, olive oil, calves of your herds,[af] or lambs of your flocks[ag] until they have destroyed you. 52 They will besiege all of your villages[ah] until all of your high and fortified walls collapse—those in which you put your confidence throughout the land. They will besiege all your villages throughout the land the Lord your God has given you. 53 You will then eat your own offspring,[ai] the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you, because of the severity of the siege[aj] by which your enemies will constrict you. 54 The man among you who is by nature tender and sensitive will turn against his brother, his beloved wife, and his remaining children. 55 He will withhold from all of them his children’s flesh that he is eating (since there is nothing else left), because of the severity of the siege by which your enemy will constrict[ak] you in your villages. 56 Likewise, the most[al] tender and delicate of your women, who would never think of putting even the sole of her foot on the ground because of her daintiness,[am] will turn against her beloved husband, her sons and daughters, 57 and will secretly eat her afterbirth[an] and her newborn children[ao] (since she has nothing else),[ap] because of the severity of the siege by which your enemy will constrict you in your villages.

The Curse of Covenant Termination

58 “If you refuse to obey[aq] all the words of this law, the things written in this scroll, and refuse to fear this glorious and awesome name, the Lord your God, 59 then the Lord will increase your punishments and those of your descendants—great and long-lasting afflictions and severe, enduring illnesses. 60 He will infect you with all the diseases of Egypt[ar] that you dreaded, and they will persistently afflict you.[as] 61 Moreover, the Lord will bring upon you every kind of sickness and plague not mentioned in this scroll of commandments,[at] until you have perished. 62 There will be very few of you left, though at one time you were as numerous as the stars in the sky,[au] because you will have disobeyed[av] the Lord your God. 63 This is what will happen: Just as the Lord delighted to do good for you and make you numerous, so he[aw] will also take delight in destroying and decimating you. You will be uprooted from the land you are about to possess. 64 The Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of wood and stone. 65 Among those nations you will have no rest, nor will there be a place of peaceful rest for the soles of your feet, for there the Lord will give you an anxious heart, failing eyesight, and a spirit of despair. 66 Your life will hang in doubt before you; you will be terrified by night and day and will have no certainty of surviving from one day to the next.[ax] 67 In the morning you will say, ‘If only it were evening!’ And in the evening you will say, ‘I wish it were morning!’ because of the things you will fear and the things you will see. 68 Then the Lord will make you return to Egypt by ship, over a route I said to you that you would never see again. There you will sell yourselves to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.”

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Footnotes

  1. Deuteronomy 28:15 tn Heb “do not hear the voice of.”
  2. Deuteronomy 28:15 tn Heb “and overtake you” (so NIV, NRSV); NAB, NLT “and overwhelm you.”
  3. Deuteronomy 28:18 tn Heb “the fruit of your womb” (so NAB, NIV, NRSV).
  4. Deuteronomy 28:19 sn See note on the similar expression in v. 6.
  5. Deuteronomy 28:20 tn Heb “the curse, the confusion, and the rebuke” (NASB and NIV similar); NRSV “disaster, panic, and frustration.”
  6. Deuteronomy 28:20 tn Heb “in all the stretching out of your hand.”
  7. Deuteronomy 28:20 tc For the MT first person common singular suffix (“me”), the LXX reads either “Lord” (Lucian) or third person masculine singular suffix (“him”; various codices). The MT’s more difficult reading probably represents the original text.tn Heb “the evil of your doings wherein you have forsaken me”; CEV “all because you rejected the Lord.”
  8. Deuteronomy 28:21 tn Heb “will cause pestilence to cling to you.”
  9. Deuteronomy 28:22 tn Heb “The Lord.” See note on “he” in 28:8.
  10. Deuteronomy 28:22 tn Or perhaps “consumption” (so KJV, NASB, NRSV). The term is from a verbal root that indicates a weakening of one’s physical strength (cf. NAB “wasting”; NIV, NLT “wasting disease”).
  11. Deuteronomy 28:22 tn Heb “hot fever”; NIV “scorching heat.”
  12. Deuteronomy 28:22 tn Or “drought” (so NIV, NRSV, NLT).
  13. Deuteronomy 28:23 tc The MT reads “Your.” The LXX reads “Heaven will be to you.”
  14. Deuteronomy 28:23 tn Or “heavens” (also in the following verse). The Hebrew term שָׁמַיִם (shamayim) may be translated “heaven(s)” or “sky” depending on the context.
  15. Deuteronomy 28:25 tc The meaningless MT reading זַעֲוָה (zaʿavah) is clearly a transposition of the more commonly attested Hebrew noun זְוָעָה (zevaʿah, “terror”).
  16. Deuteronomy 28:28 tn Heb “heart” (so KJV, NASB).
  17. Deuteronomy 28:29 tn Heb “you will not cause your ways to prosper.”
  18. Deuteronomy 28:30 tc For MT reading שָׁגַל (shagal, “ravish; violate”), the Syriac, Targum, and Vulgate presume the less violent שָׁכַב (shakhav, “lie with”). The unexpected counterpart to betrothal here favors the originality of the MT.
  19. Deuteronomy 28:32 tn Heb “and there will be no power in your hand”; NCV “there will be nothing you can do.”
  20. Deuteronomy 28:36 tc The LXX reads the plural “kings.”
  21. Deuteronomy 28:40 tn Heb “your olives will drop off” (נָשַׁל, nashal), referring to the olives dropping off before they ripen. Elsewhere זַיִת (zayit, “olive”) can refer to an olive, the tree branch, the tree, or the grove. Agriculturally it might make the most sense to mean the olive flower (cf. Job 15:33). Whether the flowers drop off without being fertilized, or the olives drop off while unripe, the harvest is lost.
  22. Deuteronomy 28:42 tn The Hebrew term denotes some sort of buzzing or whirring insect; some have understood this to be a type of locust (KJV, NIV, CEV), but other insects have also been suggested: “buzzing insects” (NAB); “the cricket” (NASB); “the cicada” (NRSV).
  23. Deuteronomy 28:43 tn Heb “the foreigner.” This is a collective singular and has therefore been translated as plural; this includes the pronouns in the following verse, which are also singular in the Hebrew text.
  24. Deuteronomy 28:45 tn Heb “commanded”; NAB, NIV, TEV “he gave you.”
  25. Deuteronomy 28:46 tn Heb “they”; the referent (the curses mentioned previously) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
  26. Deuteronomy 28:46 tn Heb “seed” (so KJV, ASV).
  27. Deuteronomy 28:48 tn Heb “lack of everything.”
  28. Deuteronomy 28:48 tn Heb “he” (also later in this verse). The pronoun is a collective singular referring to the enemies (cf. CEV, NLT). Many translations understand the singular pronoun to refer to the Lord (cf. NAB, NASB, NIV, NCV, NRSV, TEV).
  29. Deuteronomy 28:49 tn Heb “from the end of the earth.”
  30. Deuteronomy 28:49 tn Some translations understand this to mean “like an eagle swoops down” (e.g., NAB, NASB, NIV, NRSV, NLT), comparing the swift attack of an eagle to the attack of the Israelites’ enemies.
  31. Deuteronomy 28:51 tn Heb “it” (so NRSV), a collective singular referring to the invading nation (several times in this verse and v. 52).
  32. Deuteronomy 28:51 tn Heb “increase of herds.”
  33. Deuteronomy 28:51 tn Heb “growth of flocks.”
  34. Deuteronomy 28:52 tn Heb “gates,” also in vv. 55, 57.
  35. Deuteronomy 28:53 tn Heb “the fruit of your womb” (so NAB, NRSV); NASB “the offspring of your own body.”
  36. Deuteronomy 28:53 tn Heb “siege and stress.”
  37. Deuteronomy 28:55 tn Heb “besiege,” redundant with the noun “siege.”
  38. Deuteronomy 28:56 tc The LXX adds σφόδρα (sphodra, “very”) to bring the description into line with v. 54.
  39. Deuteronomy 28:56 tn Heb “delicateness and tenderness.”
  40. Deuteronomy 28:57 tn Heb includes “that which comes out from between her feet.”
  41. Deuteronomy 28:57 tn Heb “her sons that she will bear.”
  42. Deuteronomy 28:57 tn Heb includes “in her need for everything.”
  43. Deuteronomy 28:58 tn Heb “If you are not careful to do.”
  44. Deuteronomy 28:60 sn These are the plagues the Lord inflicted on the Egyptians prior to the exodus which, though they did not fall upon the Israelites, must have caused great terror (cf. Exod 15:26).
  45. Deuteronomy 28:60 tn Heb “will cling to you” (so NIV); NLT “will claim you.”
  46. Deuteronomy 28:61 tn The Hebrew term תּוֹרָה (torah) can refer either (1) to the whole Pentateuch or, more likely, (2) to the book of Deuteronomy or even (3) only to this curse section of the covenant text. “Scroll” better reflects the actual document, since “book” conveys the notion of a bound book with pages to the modern English reader. Cf. KJV, NASB, NRSV “the book of this law”; NIV, NLT “this Book of the Law”; TEV “this book of God’s laws and teachings.”
  47. Deuteronomy 28:62 tn Or “heavens.” The Hebrew term שָׁמַיִם (shamayim) may be translated “heaven(s)” or “sky” depending on the context.
  48. Deuteronomy 28:62 tn Heb “have not listened to the voice of.”
  49. Deuteronomy 28:63 tn Heb “the Lord.” See note on “he” in 28:8.
  50. Deuteronomy 28:66 tn Heb “you will not be confident in your life.” The phrase “from one day to the next” is implied by the following verse.
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Deuteronomy 28:15-68
Common English Bible

Future curses

15 But if you don’t obey the Lord your God’s voice by carefully doing all his commandments and his regulations that I am commanding you right now, all these curses will come upon you and find you. 16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the field. 17 Your basket and kneading bowl will be cursed. 18 Your own fertility, your soil’s produce, your cattle’s young, and your flock’s offspring will be cursed. 19 You will be cursed when you are out and about and cursed when you come back. 20 The Lord will send calamity, confusion, and frustration on you no matter what work you are doing until you are wiped out and until you disappear—it’ll be quick!—because of the evil acts by which you have abandoned him.[a] 21 The Lord will make a plague stick to you until he has totally wiped you off the fertile land you are entering to possess. 22 The Lord will strike you with consumption, fever, and inflammation; with scorching heat and drought;[b] with destruction and disease for your crops.[c] These things will chase you until you are dead and gone. 23 The sky over your head will be as hard as bronze; the earth under your feet will be like iron. 24 The Lord will turn the rain on your land into dust. Only dirt will fall down on you from the sky until you are completely wiped out. 25 The Lord will hand you over defeated to your enemies. You will go out against them by one direction, but you will run for your life away from them in seven different directions. All the earth’s kingdoms will be horrified by you. 26 Your corpses will be food for every bird in the sky and animal on earth; no one will frighten them off. 27 The Lord will afflict you with Egyptian inflammation, hemorrhoids,[d] rash, and itch. You will be untreatable. 28 The Lord will make you go crazy, make you blind, make your mind confused. 29 You will fumble around at high noon as blind people fumble around in darkness. Your plans won’t prosper. Instead, you will be constantly oppressed and taken advantage of without any savior. 30 You might get engaged to a woman, but another man will have sex with her. You might build a house, but you won’t get to live in it. You might plant a vineyard, but you won’t enjoy it. 31 Your ox will be slaughtered while you watch, but you won’t get to eat any of it. Your donkey will be stolen right out from under you, and it won’t come back. Your flocks will be given to your enemies. No one will save you. 32 Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation while you watch; you will long for them constantly, but you won’t have the power to do anything about it. 33 The produce of your land and all your hard work will be consumed by people you don’t know. You will be nothing but oppressed and mistreated constantly. 34 The sights your eyes see will drive you insane. 35 The Lord will strike you with horrible inflammation in your knees and legs, from the sole of your foot to the top of your head. You will be untreatable. 36 The Lord will send you and the king that you appoint over you far away to a nation that neither you nor your ancestors have known. There you will worship other gods made of wood and stone. 37 You will become a horror, fit only for use in proverbs and in insults by all the nations where the Lord drives you. 38 You might scatter a lot of seed on the field, but you will gather almost nothing because the locusts will eat it all. 39 You might plant lots of vineyards and work hard in them, but you won’t drink any wine or harvest the grapes because worms will devour them. 40 You might have many olive trees throughout your territories, but you won’t cover yourself with their oil because your olive trees will fail. 41 You might have sons and daughters, but they won’t be yours for long because they will be taken away as prisoners. 42 Crickets will take over all your trees and your soil’s produce. 43 The immigrants who live among you will be promoted over you, higher and higher! But you will be demoted, lower and lower! 44 They will lend to you, but you will have nothing to lend to them. They will be the head of things; you will be the tail.

45 That’s how all these curses will come over you, pursuing you, reaching you until you are completely wiped out, because you didn’t obey the Lord your God’s voice by keeping his commandments and his regulations that he gave you. 46 These things will be a sign and a wonder on you and your descendants forever. 47 Because you didn’t serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly above all else,[e] 48 you will serve your enemies—the ones the Lord will send against you—during famine, drought, nakedness, and total deprivation. God will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has wiped you out. 49 The Lord will bring a distant nation—one from the far ends of the earth—against you as fast as the eagle flies: a nation that speaks a language you can’t understand, 50 a stern nation that doesn’t go easy on the very old or show pity to the very young. 51 That nation will devour your livestock’s offspring and your soil’s produce until you yourselves are destroyed because you will have no grain, wine, or oil left—nor any young from your cattle or offspring from your flocks—that is, until that nation annihilates you. 52 That nation will attack you in all your cities until your high, reinforced walls that you thought were so safe fall down across your entire countryside. That nation will attack you in all your cities throughout the land the Lord your God has given you. 53 You will eat the offspring of your own womb—the flesh of your own sons and daughters, whom the Lord your God gave you—because of the desperate and dire circumstances that your enemy has brought on you.

54 Even the most gentle and refined man among you will scowl at his brother or his own dear wife, or the last of his surviving children. 55 He won’t want to give them any of his children’s flesh that he will be eating because he has no other food due to the desperate and dire circumstances that your enemy has brought on you in all your cities. 56 Even the most gentle and refined woman among you, who is so refined and gentle she wouldn’t stomp her foot on the ground, will scowl at her own dear husband, her son, or her daughter— 57 not wanting to give them any of the afterbirth she pushed out or the babies she bore, because she will be eating them secretly while starving due to the desperate and dire circumstances that your enemy will bring on you in your cities.

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.[f] 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.

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Footnotes

  1. Deuteronomy 28:20 Or me, in which case the text shifts to direct divine discourse.
  2. Deuteronomy 28:22 Heb uncertain
  3. Deuteronomy 28:22 Or blight and mildew
  4. Deuteronomy 28:27 Qere; Kethib tumors
  5. Deuteronomy 28:47 Heb uncertain
  6. Deuteronomy 28:65 Or resting place for the sole of your foot
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