Deuteronomy 28:17-27

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.
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; with destruction and disease for your crops. 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, rash, and itch. You will be untreatable.

Deuteronomy 28:17-27 Meaning and Commentary

INTRODUCTION TO DEUTERONOMY 28

In this chapter Moses enlarges on the blessings and the curses which belong, the one to the doers, the other to the transgressors of the law; the blessings, De 28:1-14; the curses, some of which concern individual persons, others the whole nation and body of people, and that both under the former and present dispensations, and which had their fulfilment in their former captivities, and more especially in their present dispersion, De 28:15-68.

Footnotes 4

  • [a]. Or me, in which case the text shifts to direct divine discourse.
  • [b]. Heb uncertain
  • [c]. Or blight and mildew
  • [d]. Qere; Kethib tumors
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