Deuteronomy 29:16-29

Evangelical Heritage Version

¹⁶ You yourselves know how we lived in the land of Egypt and how we passed through the midst of the various nations we encountered. ¹⁷ You saw their detestable things and their filthy idols of wood and stone and silver and gold that were with them.

¹⁸ Make sure that there is not among you a man, a woman, a family, or a tribe whose heart today is turning away from the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of those nations. Make sure that there is among you no root that is producing a poison plant and bitter wormwood. ¹⁹ When such a person hears the words of this oath, he might congratulate himself in his heart and say, “I’ll be safe, even though I’m proceeding in my stubborn way.” By acting this way he will destroy the watered ground as well as the parched.

²⁰ The Lord will not be willing to forgive him, but rather the anger and jealousy of the Lord will smoke against that man, and all the curses written in this document will come to rest on him, and the Lord will wipe away his name from under the heavens. ²¹ The Lord will single him out from all the tribes of Israel for disaster, in keeping with all the curses of the covenant that are written in this Book of the Law.

²² And when the next generation, your children who will come after your time, and the foreigner who will come from a distant land have seen the plagues on that land and the sicknesses with which the Lord struck it, they will say, ²³ “Sulfur and salt, conflagration for all of its land! No planting, no sprouting, no maturing crop in it! It will be like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in his fierce anger!”

²⁴ Then all the nations will say, “Why did the Lord do something like that to this land? What is the reason for this burning, this fierce anger?”

²⁵ Then they will say, “It is because they forsook the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt. ²⁶ They went and served other gods and bowed down to them, gods that they had not known and that he had not allotted to them. ²⁷ So the anger of the Lord burned against that land to bring on it the entire curse written in this book. ²⁸ The Lord uprooted them from their land in anger, in rage, and in his great wrath, and he hurled them into another land, as it is to this day.”

²⁹ The hidden things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever, so that we carry out all the words of this law.