- Deuteronomy
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- 28
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28
1 If you truly obey what the Lord your God tells you, and carefully follow all his commandments that I'm giving you today, then the Lord your God will place you high above all the nations of the earth.
2 You will have all the following blessings and even more, if you do what the Lord your God says.
3 You will be blessed when you're in the town; you will be blessed when you're in the countryside. 4 You will be blessed with many children. You will be blessed with good harvests. You will be blessed with livestock—your cattle will have many calves, and your sheep will have many lambs. 5 You will be blessed with plenty of bread.*Literally, “your basket and kneading bowl will be blessed.” Similarly the opposite in verse 17. 6 You will be blessed wherever you go and in everything you do.
7 The Lord will defeat the enemies who come to attack you. They will come at you from one direction, but they will scatter seven different ways. 8 The Lord will bless your income†Literally, “order a blessing on your barns.” and everything you do. The Lord your God will bless you in the country he is giving you. 9 The Lord will make you his holy people, just as he promised you, if you obey the Lord your God's commandments and follow his ways. 10 Then everyone on earth will see that the Lord has chosen you to be his,‡Literally, “called by the name of the Lord.” and they will be afraid of you.
11 The Lord will make you very prosperous. You will have many children, your livestock will produce plenty of young, and your land will grow good harvests—all this in the country the Lord promised your forefathers he would give you. 12 The Lord will provide rain for your land at the right time from his heavenly storehouse to bless all your work growing crops. You will lend money to many nations but you won't need to borrow from any of them. 13 The Lord will put you in first place, not the last. You will only go up, never down, as long as you listen to and follow carefully the commandments of the Lord your God that I'm giving you today. 14 Don't deviate from any of my instructions today. Don't go and worship other gods.
15 But if you don't obey the Lord your God by following carefully all his commandments and regulations I'm giving you today, then you will experience all the following curses and more: 16 You will be cursed when you're in the town; you will be cursed when you're in the countryside. 17 You will be cursed by not having bread. 18 You will be cursed by not having children, and by not having good harvests, and by your cattle not having calves, and your sheep not having lambs. 19 You will be cursed wherever you go and in everything you do.
20 The Lord will send you curses, making you confused and frustrated in everything you do, until you are brought down and die quickly because of the evil that you've done by abandoning him.§“Him”: Hebrew “me.” 21 The Lord will give you infectious diseases until he has wiped you out from the country you are entering. 22 Then the Lord will hit you with sickness that makes you waste away, with a severe fever and swelling like you're burning up, while your crops are damaged by drought and blight and mildew. These will attack you until you die. 23 The sky above you will be like bronze, and the earth beneath you will be like iron. 24 The Lord will change the rain of your land into dust and sand; it will fall from the sky on you until you're destroyed.
25 The Lord will have your enemies defeat you. You will attack them from one direction, but you will scatter seven different ways. Everyone on earth will be horrified at what happens to you. 26 Your dead bodies will be food for birds of prey and wild animals, and there won't be anyone to scare them away. 27 The Lord will give you boils like he did to the Egyptians, with swellings and scabs and skin rashes that can't be cured. 28 The Lord will drive you mad; he will blind you and confuse you 29 so that even at noon you will be groping around like a blind man in the dark. You won't be successful in what you do. You'll be persecuted and robbed the whole time, and no one will come and save you.
30 You will be engaged to marry a woman, but another man will sleep with her. You will build a house but you won't live in it. You will plant a vineyard but won't benefit from any harvest. 31 Your ox will be slaughtered right in front of you, but you won't eat any of it. Your donkey will be taken away and won't be returned to you. Your sheep will be taken by your enemies, and no one will come and save you. 32 Your sons and daughters will be taken away as slaves to other nations while you watch, and you'll wear your eyes out crying over them, but there won't be anything you can do about it. 33 A foreign nation you've never heard of will eat all the crops you worked so hard to grow. You will be continually persecuted and downtrodden. 34 What you see will drive you mad. 35 The Lord will give you painful boils that can't be cured on your knees and thighs, in fact from head to toe.
36 The Lord will exile you and your chosen king to a foreign nation that neither you nor your forefathers have ever heard of. There you will worship other gods, idols made of wood and stone. 37 You will be something that horrifies all the nations where you've been exiled by the Lord. They will laugh at you and ridicule you.
38 You will sow a lot of seed in the field, but harvest very little because the locusts will destroy it. 39 You will plant vineyards and care for them, but you won't harvest the grapes or drink the wine, because the grapes will be eaten by maggots. 40 You will have olive trees all over the country but you won't have any olive oil to use,*“Use”: literally, “anoint,” the process of applying olive oil to the skin. because the olives will drop early from the trees. 41 You will have sons and daughters, but you won't have them for long, because they will be taken off into captivity as slaves. 42 Locust swarms will destroy all your trees and crops. 43 Foreigners who live with you will rise higher and higher in status above you, while you sink lower and lower. 44 They will lend to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the first, and you will be the last.
45 All these curses will come down on you. They will chase after you and attack you until you die because you did not obey the Lord your God and keep the commandments and regulations he gave you. 46 They will be lasting evidence, visible signs of what happened to you and your descendants. 47 Because you did not serve the Lord your God with happiness and with a joyful attitude, 48 you will serve your enemies that the Lord sends to attack you. You will be hungry, thirsty, naked, and poor. He will tie an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.
49 The Lord will bring a nation to attack you from a long way off, from the ends of the earth. They will swoop down upon you like an eagle, this nation whose language you won't understand. 50 They are a ruthless nation that doesn't have respect for the old and doesn't have mercy on the young. 51 They will eat your lambs and calves and the crops you've grown until you are destroyed. They won't leave you any grain or new wine or olive oil, no calves from your herds or lambs from your flocks, so you'll die of starvation. 52 They will besiege all the towns in your country, until the high, fortified walls that you trust in have fallen. They will besiege all your towns in your country that the Lord your God has given you. 53 You'll end up eating your children, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God gave you, because of the siege and the suffering that your enemy will cause you.
54 The kindest and most sensitive man among you will refuse to share his food with his brother, the wife he loves, and those of his own children who are left. 55 He will refuse to share with any of them the flesh of his children that he's forced to eat because he doesn't have anything else because of the siege and suffering your enemy has caused you in all your towns.
56 The kindest and most sensitive woman among you, so kind and sensitive she wouldn't ever go barefoot on the ground, will refuse to share her food, a baby and its afterbirth, with the husband she loves and her own son and daughter. 57 She will even secretly eat the babies she gives birth to, as well as the afterbirth, since she doesn't have anything else because of the siege and the suffering your enemy has caused in all your towns,
58 If you don't carefully observe all these laws written down in this book so that you may show respect for this glorious and awesome Lord your God, 59 he will bring down on you and your descendants unbelievable disasters, intense and long-lasting diseases, and terrible and incurable sicknesses. 60 He will give you all the diseases you were terrified of in Egypt, and they will stay with you. 61 The Lord will also give you every sickness and disease, even those not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed. 62 You who grew as numerous as the stars in the sky will end up as only a few, because you would not obey what Lord your God told you. 63 In the same way as he wanted to make you prosperous and increase in number, so now he will wipe you out and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the country you are going in to own.
64 The Lord will scatter you among the nations all over the earth, and there you will worship other gods, gods made of wood and stone, which you and your fathers had never heard of. 65 You won't find any place to rest among those nations, no place of your own. The Lord will make you anxious, with failing eyesight and a mind full of despair. 66 You will see your life hanging in the balance as you doubt. You will be afraid day and night, terrified you won't survive. 67 In the morning you'll say, “I wish it was evening!” and in the evening you'll say, “I wish it was morning!” because you're so frightened by the terrifying things you see.
68 The Lord will send you back to Egypt in ships to a place that I said you weren't ever meant to see again. You will put yourselves on sale there to your enemies as male and female slaves, but nobody will want to buy you.

- Deuteronomy
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- 28
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*28:5 Literally, “your basket and kneading bowl will be blessed.” Similarly the opposite in verse 17.

†28:8 Literally, “order a blessing on your barns.”

‡28:10 Literally, “called by the name of the Lord.”

§28:20 “Him”: Hebrew “me.”

*28:40 “Use”: literally, “anoint,” the process of applying olive oil to the skin.

© 2018 Dr. Jonathan Gallagher