1“And it shall be, if you truly heed the voice of the LORD your God to keep to do all His commands that I charge you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. 2And all these blessings will come upon you and overtake you when you heed the voice of the LORD your God. 3Blessed you will be in the town and blessed you will be in the field. 4Blessed the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your soil and the fruit of your beasts, the get of your herds and the offspring of your flock. 5Blessed your basket and your kneading pan. 6Blessed you will be when you come in and blessed you will be when you go out. 7The LORD will render your enemies who rise against you routed before you. On one way they will sally forth toward you and on seven ways they will flee before you. 8The LORD will ordain the blessing with you in your granaries and in all that your hand reaches, and He will bless you in the land that the LORD your God is about to give you. 9The LORD will set you up for Him as a holy people as He has sworn to you when you keep the command of the LORD your God and walk in His ways. 10And all the peoples of the earth will see that the name of the LORD is called over you and they will fear you. 11And the LORD will give you an extra measure for the good in the fruit of your womb and in the fruit of your beasts and in the fruit of your soil on the soil that the LORD swore to your fathers to give to you. 12The LORD will open for you His goodly treasure, the heavens, to give your land’s rain in its season and to bless all your handiwork, and you will put many nations in your debt and you will not be a debtor. 13And the LORD will set you as head and not as tail, and you will be only above and you will not be below when you heed the command of the LORD your God which I charge you today to keep and to do. 14And you shall not swerve from all the words that I charge you today to the right or to the left to go after other gods to worship them.
15“And it shall be, if you do not heed the voice of the LORD your God to keep to do all His commands and His statutes that I charge you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you. 16Cursed you will be in the town and cursed you will be in the field. 17Cursed your basket and your kneading pan. 18Cursed the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your soil, the get of your herds and the offspring of your flock. 19Cursed you will be when you come in and cursed you will be when you go out. 20The LORD will send against you blight and panic and disaster in all that your hand reaches, that you do, until you are destroyed and until you perish swiftly because of the evil of your acts, as you will have forsaken Me. 21The LORD will make the plague cling to you until He wipes you out from the face of the soil to which you are coming to take hold of it. 22The LORD will strike you with consumption and with fever and with inflammation and with burning and with desiccation and with emaciation and with jaundice, and they will pursue you till you perish. 23And your heavens that are over your head will be bronze and the earth that is under you iron. 24The LORD will turn your land’s rain into dust, and dirt from the heavens will come down upon you until you are destroyed. 25The LORD will render you routed before your enemies. On one way you will sally forth toward him, and on seven ways you will flee before him. And you will be a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. 26And your carcass will become food for the birds of the heavens and for the beasts of the earth, with none to make them afraid. 27The LORD will strike you with the burning rash of Egypt and with hemorrhoids and with boils and with scabs from which you will not be able to be healed. 28The LORD will strike you with madness and with blindness and with confounding of the heart. 29And you will grope at noon as the blind man gropes in darkness, and you will not make your ways prosper, and you will be only exploited and robbed always with no rescuer. 30A woman you will betroth and another man will bed her. A house you will build and you will not dwell in it. A vineyard you will plant and you will not enjoy its fruits. 31Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes and you will not eat of it. Your donkey will be robbed from you and will not come back to you. Your sheep will be given to your enemies and you will have no rescuer. 32Your sons and your daughters will be given to another people with your own eyes seeing and wasting away for them all day long, and your hand will be powerless. 33The fruit of your soil and all your enterprise a people that you knew not will eat up, and you will be only exploited and crushed always. 34And you will be crazed by the sight of your eyes that you will see. 35The LORD will strike you with evil burning rash on the knees and on the thighs, you will not be able to be cured, from the sole of your foot to your pate. 36The LORD will lead you and your king whom you set up over you to a nation that you knew not, neither you nor your fathers, and you will worship there other gods, wood and stone. 37And you will become a derision, a byword, and an adage among all the peoples where the LORD will drive you. 38Much seed the field will bring forth and little will you gather, for the locust will consume it. 39Vineyards you will plant and work, but wine you will not drink and will not store up, for the worm will eat them. 40Olive trees you will have throughout your territory but no oil will you rub on, for your olives will drop away. 41Sons and daughters you will beget, but you will not have them, for they will go off in captivity. 42All your trees and the fruit of your soil the grasshopper will despoil. 43The sojourner who is in your midst will rise up high above you and you will go down far below. 44He will put you in debt and you will not put him in debt. He will become the head and you will become the tail. 45And all these curses will come upon you and pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed. For you will not have heeded the voice of the LORD your God to keep His commands and His statutes which He charged you. 46And they will be a sign and a portent in you and in your seed for all time. 47Inasmuch as you will not have served the LORD your God in joy and with a good heart out of an abundance of all things, 48you will serve your enemies whom the LORD will send against you in hunger and in thirst and in nakedness and in the lack of all things, and he will put an iron yoke on your neck until you are destroyed. 49The LORD will carry against you a nation from afar, from the end of the earth, as the eagle swoops, a nation whose tongue you will not understand, 50a fierce-faced nation that will show no favorable face to an old man and will not pity a lad. 51And he will eat the fruit of your beasts and the fruit of your soil until you are destroyed, as he will not leave you grain, wine, and oil, the get of your herds and the offspring of your flock, until he makes you perish. 52And he will besiege you in all your gates until your high and fortified walls in which you trust come down throughout your land, and he will besiege you in all your gates throughout your land which the LORD your God gave you. 53And you will eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your sons and your daughters whom the LORD your God gave you, in the siege and in the straits in which your enemy will press you. 54The tender and delicate man among you, his eye will be cast meanly on his brother and on the wife of his bosom and on the remnant of his children that he will have left, 55not to give to a single one of them from his children’s flesh that he will eat because he will have nothing left in the siege and in the straits in which your enemy will press you in your gates. 56The tender and delicate woman among you, who has not ventured to set the sole of her foot on the ground from delicacy and from tenderness, her eye will be cast meanly on the husband of her bosom and on her son and on her daughter 57and on her afterbirth coming out from between her legs and on her children whom she will bear, for she will eat them in the lack of all things and in secret, in the siege and in the straits in which your enemy will press you in your gates. 58If you do not keep to do all the words of this teaching written in this book to fear this solemn and fearsome name, the LORD your God, 59the LORD will make your plagues and the plagues of your seed astounding, great and relentless plagues, evil and relentless illnesses. 60And He will bring back to you all the ailments of Egypt which you dreaded, and they will cling to you. 61What’s more, every illness and every plague that is not written in this book of teaching the LORD will bring down upon you until you are destroyed. 62And you will remain a scant few instead of your being like the stars of the heavens in multitude, for you will not have heeded the voice of the LORD your God. 63And it shall be, as the LORD exulted over you to do well with you and to multiply you, so will the LORD exult over you to make you perish, to destroy you, and you will be torn from the soil to which you are coming to take hold of it. 64And the LORD will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other, and you will worship there other gods that you did not know, neither you nor your fathers, wood and stone. 65And among those nations you will have no quiet and the sole of your foot will have no resting place, and the LORD will give you there a quaking heart and a wasting away of the eyes and an anguished spirit. 66And your life will dangle before you, and you will be afraid night and day and will have no faith in your life. 67In the morning you will say, ‘Would that it were evening,’ and in the evening you will say, ‘Would that it were morning,’ from your heart’s fright with which you will be afraid and from the sight of your eyes that you will see. 68And the LORD will bring you back to Egypt in ships, on the way that I said to you, ‘You shall not see it again,’ and you will put yourselves up for sale there to your enemies as male slaves and slavegirls, and there will be no buyer.”
69These are the words of the Covenant that the LORD charged Moses to seal with the Israelites in the land of Moab, besides the Covenant that He sealed with them at Horeb.
CHAPTER 28 NOTES
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1. set you high above all the nations of the earth. The parallel statements of divine favor to the Israelite people in Exodus stress the act of election itself and the grant of the promised land but not this idea of supremacy—verses 7 and 12 make clear that this means military and economic supremacy—over all other nations. The immediate political background for this conditional pronouncement is a period in which powerful nations to the east periodically threatened Israel’s national existence.
2. overtake you. The verb is a little surprising because it is the word used for catching up with someone who is fleeing. The idea is that an unimaginable profusion of bounties will come down on the Israelite in ways he could scarcely expect, but the usage is also obviously dictated by the need to create a precise verbal parallelism with verse 15, “all these curses will come upon you and overtake you.”
7. On one way . . . on seven ways. This formulaic numerical increase, sometimes found between the two versets in lines of poetry, offers, as Rashi notes, a vivid image of the unity of the attack, the disarray of the retreat.
10. the name of the LORD is called over you. According to the biblical conception of naming, this means that the LORD has a special proprietary relationship with the people, and will protect them.
12. His goodly treasure, the heavens, to give your land’s rain in its season. Moses’s speech has already called attention to the strict dependence of agriculture in the land of Israel upon rainfall (11:11).
15. these curses. Famously, four times more space is devoted to the curses than to the blessings. Historically, the implementation of the curses seemed much more imminent in the seventh century B.C.E. than the fulfillment of the blessings. In any case, the chief function of the entire verbal enactment of this stupendous ceremony of blessings and curses is admonition, so it is not surprising that a long catalogue of bloodcurdling catastrophes far outweighs the list of happier events.
20. The LORD will send against you blight. After verses 15–19, which mirror verbatim the formulation of the blessings in verses 2–6, the pronouncement of curses begins its own vivid elaborations of possibilities of disaster. The order of the terms in verses 4–5 is reversed in verses 17–18, forming a kind of chiasm.
until you perish. This phrase, or a close equivalent, becomes a kind of refrain in the recitation of curses. The point is that not only will catastrophes visit the people but they will end by destroying its very national existence.
22. desiccation. Although the term ḥerev looks like the ordinary word for “sword,” a long tradition of interpreters, going back to Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, plausibly understands it in the present context of physical pathologies as a variant of ḥorev, the condition of being parched.
23. your heavens . . . bronze . . . the earth . . . iron. This tremendous image of devastating sterility is borrowed from the treaty of the Assyrian emperor Assarhadon with his vassals (672 B.C.E.). Other phrases in the list of curses, as Moshe Weinfeld has observed, also seem to have been inspired by the language of that treaty, such as the acts of cannibalism against one’s own near kin in time of siege, the sightless stumbling, and the ravishing of the women by the enemy.
24. turn your land’s rain into dust. Without rain, as Abraham ibn Ezra notes, the winds would whip up vast clouds of dust that would cover the land. The similarity of this particular disaster with one of the Ten Plagues is pointed, and in verse 27 “the burning rash of Egypt” will be explicitly mentioned.
26. your carcass will become food for the birds. To be denied burial and consumed as carrion is an ultimate curse throughout the Mediterranean, including Greece. Equivalents of this phrase abound in the Prophets.
with none to make them afraid. That is, there will be no one to drive off the vultures.
28. madness . . . blindness . . . confounding of the heart. All the physical afflictions are followed, causally, by the psychological devastation of the afflicted.
30. A woman . . . A house . . . A vineyard. As several commentators have noted, this list of unfulfillments echoes the one in chapter 20 for which exemption from military service is granted.
35. evil burning rash on the knees and on the thighs. Before the culminating political disaster of exile, and after a reiteration of the curse of madness, the list reverts to an intolerable inflammation of the skin, here located on specific parts of the body, as though the physical immediacy of the skin, as in the Job story, were the best way to make suffering palpable.
36. you will worship there other gods, wood and stone. From the viewpoint of Deuteronomy’s militant monotheism, the ultimate curse is not exile itself but being driven into a place where the exiles will be forced to turn into pagans or, indeed, fetishists.
43. The sojourner who is in your midst will rise up high. At first blush, this may seem odd because the sojourner has not elsewhere been regarded as a hostile element in the population. The sojourner, however, is repeatedly mentioned as legally and economically vulnerable, dependent on the benevolence of the native Israelites. Now he will have the upper hand, and perhaps there is a hint of the idea that an occupying force, having abrogated Israelite national sovereignty, will grant special privilege and power to the aliens residing in the land.
45. come upon you and pursue you and overtake you. In a pattern of intensifying incremental repetition, “pursue” is now added to the previous iterations of this formula.
48. he will put an iron yoke on your neck. In a characteristic move of biblical Hebrew from plural to singular, “he” refers to “your enemy,” which in the previous clause was a plural.
50. a fierce-faced nation that will show no favorable face to an old man. Showing no favorable face (literally, “lifting face”), i.e., showing no special consideration, is played off against the “fierce-faced” appearance of the invaders, whose very language is unintelligible to their helpless victims.
52. your high and fortified walls in which you trust. The implication—standard doctrine in the Bible—is that it is futile to trust in fortifications or weapons; God alone can guarantee the nation’s security.
53. the flesh of your sons and your daughters. Such ghastly acts of cannibalism did in fact occur in the desperation of starvation in time of siege, as they would occur in other times and places (e.g., during the religious wars in France in the sixteenth century).
55. not to give to a single one of them. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “from giving to a single one of them.”
56. who has not ventured. In the Hebrew, the subject of the verb is “sole of the foot.”
61. What’s more, every illness and every plague that is not written. Lest the long catalogue of terrifying plagues and disasters be incomplete, this clause is added at the end to make it clear that all other conceivable plagues and disasters are included by implication.
65. a quaking heart and a wasting away of the eyes and an anguished spirit. Physical suffering, bereavement, and finally exile are capped by the most unbearable inner torment. The closest analogue in the Bible to what is said here and in the next two verses (especially, “In the morning you will say, ‘Would that it were evening’ . . .”) occurs in Job 7.
68. bring you back to Egypt in ships. The reference to ships is not entirely clear. Perhaps, since all this constitutes a reversal of the narrative of national liberation in Exodus, the idea of an arduous trek on foot up out of Egypt is contrasted by the notion here of a rapid voyage by sea along the Mediterranean coast back to Egypt.
you will put yourselves up for sale there. This clause is obviously an ironic recollection of Joseph, the first Hebrew to be sold down to Egypt as a slave, and also invokes the enslavement of the whole people recounted at the beginning of Exodus. Jeffrey H. Tigay proposes as a rationale for the attempted sale that the Israelites, presumably after having taken flight by sea to Egypt, will find themselves in a condition of such utter destitution that they will try to sell themselves as slaves. The sardonic conclusion of this curse is that no one will want to buy them—perhaps because they have become known throughout the earth as “a derision, a byword, and an adage,” scarcely fit even for slavery.