Deuteronomy 28:1-68
28 “And if you obey your God Jehovah, taking care to live up to all his commandments which I am enjoining on you today, your God Jehovah will set you high over all the nations on earth,
2 and all these blessings will come true for you and overtake you, because you obey your God Jehovah:
3 Blessed shall you be in the city and blessed the field.
4 Blessed shall be your fruit of body and your fruit of soil and your fruit of cattle, the propagation of your kine and of your sheep.
5 Blessed shall be your basket and your mixing-bowl.
6 Blessed shall you be when you come in and blessed when you go out.
7 Jehovah will give your enemies who stand up against you to be beaten by you: they shall come out at you on one road and run from you on seven.
8 Jehovah will bid the blessing accompany you into your barns and into all your undertakings, and will bless you in the country your God Jehovah is giving you.
9 Jehovah will adopt you as his own holy people, as he swore to you, when you keep all your God Jehovah’s commandments and walk in his ways;
10 and all the peoples of the earth will see that you wear Jehovah’s name and be afraid of you.
11 And Jehovah will make you affluent in fruit of body and fruit of cattle and fruit of soil on the soil Jehovah swore to your fathers to give you.
12 Jehovah will open for you his good treasury the sky, giving your country its rain seasonably and blessing all your doings; and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow.
13 And Jehovah will make you head and never tail, and you will constantly be up and never down, when you listen to your God Jehovah’s commandments which I am enjoining on you today, taking care to live up to them,
14 and do not deviate to right or to left from any of the things I am enjoining on you today, following other gods to worship them.
15 “But if you do not obey your God Jehovah, taking care to live up to all his commandments and usages which I am enjoining on you today, all these maledictions will come true for you and overtake you:
16 Cursed shall you be in the city and cursed in the field.
17 Cursed shall be your basket and your mixing-bowl.
18 Cursed shall be your fruit of body and your fruit of soil, the propagation of your kine and of your sheep.
19 Cursed shall you be when you come in and cursed when you go out.
20 * Jehovah will send upon you curse and confusion and condemnation in every action you undertake, until you are ruined and perish quickly for the viciousness of your behavior in leaving me.
21 Jehovah will make pestilence persistent among you till he exterminates you off the soil you are going to to take possession of it.
22 Jehovah will smite you with slow fever and quick fever, with ague and with influenza, and with drought and blasting and mildew, and they will follow you up till you perish.
23 And your sky over your heads will be bronze, and the earth under your feet iron;
24 * Jehovah will make the rain of your country dust and powder coming down on you out of the sky till you are ruined.
25 Jehovah will give you to be beaten by your enemies: you will go out at them on one road and run from them on seven; and you will be victims to all kingdoms on earth.
26 And your bodies will be food for all the birds of the air and all the beasts on the earth, with nobody scaring them.
27 “Jehovah will smite you with the Egyptian pustule and with buboes and the scab and the itch incurably.
28 Jehovah will smite you with insanity and blindness and imbecility,
29 and you will be groping noon as a blind man gropes in the gloom, and not succeed in your pursuits; and you will be just robbed and refused justice all the time and have no one to take your part.
30 You will betroth a woman and another man will embrace her; you will build a house and not live in it; you will plant a vineyard and not eat fruit from it.
31 Your bull will be slaughtered before your eyes and you not eat any of it, your donkey stolen in your presence and you not get it back, your sheep be given to your enemy and you have no one to take your part;
32 your sons and daughters will be given to another people with your eyes seeing it and pining for them all day, and you be helpless;
33 a people that you do not know will eat the fruit of your soil and all that comes of your toil, and you will be simply persecuted and refused justice all the time;
34 and you will go insane at the sights you see.
35 Jehovah will smite you with virulent pustules in your legs and thighs, infecting you incurably from head to foot.
36 * Jehovah will consign you and your king whom you set up over you to a nation that you and your fathers had never known, and there you will worship other gods, wood and stone.
37 And you will be a horror, a byword, and a jeer among all the peoples to which Jehovah will drive you.
38 “You will carry much seed out to the field and get in little because the grasshoppers gnaw it down.
39 You will plant and work vineyards and not drink wine nor pack away raisins, because the worms eat it up.
40 You will have olive-trees all through your territory and not rub yourself with oil, because your olive-trees drop their fruit.
41 You will beget children and not have them, because they go into foreign slavery.
42 * All your trees and crops the crickets will appropriate.
43 The immigrant among you will come up and up over you, and you go down and down;
44 he will lend to you and you not lend to him; he will come to be head and you to be tail.
45 And all these curses will come true for you, and follow you up and overtake you till you are ruined, because you did not obey your God Jehovah, keeping his commandments and usages which he enjoined upon you;
46 and they will be a token and a portent on you and on your descendants forever.
47 * “In return for not having worshiped Jehovah in cheer and jollity over abundance of everything,
48 you will slave for your enemy whom Jehovah sends upon you in hunger and thirst and nakedness and destitution of everything, and he will put on your neck an iron yoke till he exterminates you.
49 Jehovah will fetch a nation against you from afar, from the edge of the earth, as a vulture swoops down: a nation whose language you do not understand,
50 a hard-faced nation that shows no respect to old man nor favor to child;
51 and it will eat the fruit of your cattle and of your soil till you are ruined because it does not leave you grain, grape-juice, nor oil, the propagation of your kine nor of your sheep, till it destroys you.
52 And it will besiege you in all your localities till your high castled walls in which you trust go down throughout your country; and it will besiege you in all your localities throughout your country that your God Jehovah has given you,
53 and you will eat the fruit of your body, the flesh of your children whom your God Jehovah has given you, in the hard-pressed siege with which your enemy presses you:
54 the very daintiest and most delicate man among you will be too stingy with his brother and his bosom wife and the rest of his children whom he lets be left
55 to give one of them any of his children’s flesh that he eats, because he has nothing left at all in the hard-pressed siege with which your enemy presses you in all your localities.
56 The daintiest and most delicate woman among you, who for delicacy and daintiness has not tried her foot for resting her weight on the ground, will be stingy with her bosom husband and her son and daughter
57 * over her afterbirth that comes out of her own body and her children that she gives birth to, when for lack of everything she eats them in secret in the hard-pressed siege with which your enemy presses you in your localities.
58 “If you do not take care to live up to all the points of this code, which are written in this book, fearing this glorious and fearful name YOUR GOD JEHOVAH,
59 * Jehovah will deal extraordinary blows at you and at your descendants, great and sure blows and malignant and obstinate diseases,
60 and send back on you all the Egyptian distempers before which you quailed, and they will persist among you.
61 * Jehovah will also bring down on you every disease and every blow that is not written in the book of this code till you are ruined;
62 and you will remain a few people, whereas you had been like the stars of the sky in number, because you did not obey your God Jehovah;
63 and as Jehovah had delighted in doing you good and multiplying you, so Jehovah will delight in destroying you and ruining you, and you will be torn off from the soil you are going to to take possession of it.
64 And Jehovah will scatter you through all the peoples from end to end of the earth, and there you will worship other gods that neither you nor your fathers knew, wood and stone;
65 and among those nations you will not take your ease and will get no resting-place for your feet, but Jehovah will give you there an unquiet heart and consuming eyes and a despairing soul.
66 And your life will be dangling before your face, and you will be in dread night and day and have no confidence in your life.
67 In the morning you will say ‘O for evening!’ and in the evening ‘O for morning!’ for the dread at heart that you feel and the sights that you see.
68 And Jehovah will send you back to Egypt on ships over the road that I told you you should never see again; and there you will offer to sell yourselves to your enemies as slaves and there will be no buyer.”
Footnotes
^ 28:20 Lit. every undertaking you do
^ 28:24 (dust and powder) The Hebrew words mean properly dust flying and dust lying
^ 28:36 Codd.* Jehovah consign you
^ 28:42 (crickets) Unc.
^ 28:47-48 Worship and slave for are the same word in the Hebrew
^ 28:57 Lit. out of between her legs
^ 28:59 Sure and obstinate here are the same word in the Hebrew
^ 28:61 Lit. bring up on you
