Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will grow tired looking for them every day, but there will be nothing you can do. People you don’t know will eat the crops your land and hard work have produced. You will be mistreated and abused all your life. The things you see will cause you to go mad. The LORD will give you sore boils on your knees and legs that cannot be cured, and they will go from the soles of your feet to the tops of your heads.
The LORD will send you and your king away to a nation neither you nor your ancestors know, where you will serve other gods made of wood and stone. You will become a hated thing to the nations where the LORD sends you; they will laugh at you and make fun of you.
You will plant much seed in your field, but your harvest will be small, because locusts will eat the crop. You will plant vineyards and work hard in them, but you will not pick the grapes or drink the wine, because the worms will eat them. You will have olive trees in all your land, but you will not get any olive oil, because the olives will drop off the trees. You will have sons and daughters, but you will not be able to keep them, because they will be taken captive. Locusts will destroy all your trees and crops.
The foreigners who live among you will get stronger and stronger, and you will get weaker and weaker. Foreigners will lend money to you, but you will not be able to lend to them. They will be like the head, and you will be like the tail.
All these curses will come upon you. They will chase you and catch you and destroy you, because you did not obey the LORD your God and keep the commands and laws he gave you. The curses will be signs and miracles to you and your descendants forever. You had plenty of everything, but you did not serve the LORD your God with joy and a pure heart, so you will serve the enemies the LORD sends against you. You will be hungry, thirsty, naked, and poor, and the LORD will put a load on you until he has destroyed you.
The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away, from the end of the world, and it will swoop down like an eagle. You won’t understand their language, and they will look mean. They will not respect old people or feel sorry for the young. They will eat the calves from your herds and the harvest of your field, and you will be destroyed. They will not leave you any grain, new wine or oil, or any calves from your herds or lambs from your flocks. You will be ruined. That nation will surround and attack all your cities. You trust in your high, strong walls, but they will fall down. That nation will surround all your cities everywhere in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
Your enemy will surround you. Those people will make you starve so that you will eat your own babies, the bodies of the sons and daughters the LORD your God gave you. Even the most gentle and kind man among you will become cruel to his brother, his wife whom he loves, and his children who are still alive. He will not even give them any of the flesh of his children he is eating, because it will be all he has left. Your enemy will surround you and make you starve in all your cities. The most gentle and kind woman among you, so gentle and kind she would hardly even walk on the ground, will be cruel to her husband whom she loves and to her son and daughter. She will give birth to a baby, but she will plan to eat the baby and what comes after the birth itself. She will eat them secretly while the enemy surrounds the city. Those people will make you starve in all your cities.
Be careful to obey everything in these teachings that are written in this book. You must respect the glorious and wonderful name of the LORD your God, or the LORD will give terrible diseases to you and your descendants. You will have long and serious diseases, and long and miserable sicknesses. He will give you all the diseases of Egypt that you dread, and the diseases will stay with you. The LORD will also give you every disease and sickness not written in this Book of the Teachings, until you are destroyed. You people may have outnumbered the stars, but only a few of you will be left, because you did not obey the LORD your God. Just as the LORD was once happy with you and gave you good things and made you grow in number, so then the LORD will be happy to ruin and destroy you, and you will be removed from the land you are entering to take as your own.
Then the LORD will scatter you among the nations—from one end of the earth to the other. There you will serve other gods of wood and stone, gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known. You will have no rest among those nations and no place that is yours. The LORD will make your mind worried, your sight weak, and your soul sad. You will live with danger and be afraid night and day. You will not be sure that you will live. In the morning you will say, “I wish it were evening,” and in the evening you will say, “I wish it were morning.” Terror will be in your heart, and the things you have seen will scare you. The LORD will send you back to Egypt in ships, even though I, Moses, said you would never go back to Egypt. And there you will try to sell yourselves as slaves to your enemies, but no one will buy you.
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