Your sons and daughters will be shipped off to foreigners; you’ll wear your eyes out looking vainly for them, helpless to do a thing. Your crops and everything you work for will be eaten and used by foreigners; you’ll spend the rest of your lives abused and knocked around. What you see will drive you crazy.
GOD will hit you with painful boils on your knees and legs and no healing or relief from head to foot.
GOD will lead you and the king you set over you to a country neither you nor your ancestors have heard of; there you’ll worship other gods, no-gods of wood and stone. Among all the peoples where GOD will take you, you’ll be treated as a lesson or a proverb—a horror!
You’ll plant sacks and sacks of seed in the field but get almost nothing—the grasshoppers will devour it. You’ll plant and hoe and prune vineyards but won’t drink or put up any wine—the worms will devour them. You’ll have groves of olive trees everywhere, but you’ll have no oil to rub on your face or hands—the olives will have fallen off. You’ll have sons and daughters but they won’t be yours for long—they’ll go off to captivity. Locusts will take over all your trees and crops.
The foreigner who lives among you will climb the ladder, higher and higher, while you go deeper and deeper into the hole. He’ll lend to you; you won’t lend to him. He’ll be the head; you’ll be the tail.
All these curses are going to come on you. They’re going to hunt you down and get you until there’s nothing left of you because you didn’t obediently listen to the Voice of GOD, your God, and diligently keep his commandments and guidelines that I commanded you. The curses will serve as signposts, warnings to your children ever after.
Because you didn’t serve GOD, your God, out of the joy and goodness of your heart in the great abundance, you’ll have to serve your enemies whom GOD will send against you. Life will be famine and drought, rags and wretchedness; then he’ll put an iron yoke on your neck until he’s destroyed you.
Yes, GOD will raise up a faraway nation against you, swooping down on you like an eagle, a nation whose language you can’t understand, a mean-faced people, cruel to grandmothers and babies alike. They’ll ravage the young of your animals and the crops from your fields until you’re destroyed. They’ll leave nothing behind: no grain, no wine, no oil, no calves, no lambs—and finally, no you. They’ll lay siege to you while you’re huddled behind your town gates. They’ll knock those high, proud walls flat, those walls behind which you felt so safe. They’ll lay siege to your fortified cities all over the country, this country that GOD, your God, has given you.
And you’ll end up cannibalizing your own sons and daughters that GOD, your God, has given you. When the suffering from the siege gets extreme, you’re going to eat your own babies. The most gentle and caring man among you will turn hard, his eye evil, against his own brother, his cherished wife, and even the rest of his children who are still alive, refusing to share with them a scrap of meat from the cannibal child-stew he is eating. He’s lost everything, even his humanity, in the suffering of the siege that your enemy mounts against your fortified towns.
And the most gentle and caring woman among you, a woman who wouldn’t step on a wildflower, will turn hard, her eye evil, against her cherished husband, against her son, against her daughter, against even the afterbirth of her newborn infants; she plans to eat them in secret—she does eat them!—because she has lost everything, even her humanity, in the suffering of the siege that your enemy mounts against your fortified towns.
If you don’t diligently keep all the words of this Revelation written in this book, living in holy awe before This Name glorious and terrible, GOD, your God, then GOD will pound you with catastrophes, you and your children, huge interminable catastrophes, hideous interminable illnesses. He’ll bring back and stick you with every old Egyptian malady that once terrorized you. And yes, every disease and catastrophe imaginable—things not even written in the Book of this Revelation—GOD will bring on you until you’re destroyed.
Because you didn’t listen obediently to the Voice of GOD, your God, you’ll be left with a few pitiful stragglers in place of the dazzling stars-in-the-heavens multitude you had become.
And this is how things will end up: Just as GOD once enjoyed you, took pleasure in making life good for you, giving you many children, so GOD will enjoy getting rid of you, clearing you off the Earth. He’ll weed you out of the very soil that you are entering in to possess. He’ll scatter you to the four winds, from one end of the Earth to the other. You’ll worship all kinds of other gods, gods neither you nor your parents ever heard of, wood and stone no-gods. But you won’t find a home there, you’ll not be able to settle down. GOD will give you a restless heart, longing eyes, a homesick soul. You will live in constant jeopardy, terrified of every shadow, never knowing what you’ll meet around the next corner.
In the morning you’ll say, “I wish it were evening.” In the evening you’ll say, “I wish it were morning.” Afraid, terrorized at what’s coming next, afraid of the unknown, because of the sights you’ve witnessed.
GOD will ship you back to Egypt by a road I promised you’d never see again. There you’ll offer yourselves for sale, both men and women, as slaves to your enemies. And not a buyer to be found.
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