Deuteronomy 28:32-41

28:32 Your sons and daughters will be given to another people while you look on in vain all day, and you will be powerless to do anything about it. ¹  28:33 As for the produce of your land and all your labor, a people you do not know will consume it, and you will be nothing but oppressed and crushed for the rest of your lives. 28:34 You will go insane from seeing all this. 28:35 The Lord will afflict you in your knees and on your legs with painful, incurable boils – from the soles of your feet to the top of your head. 28:36 The Lord will force you and your king ²  whom you will appoint over you to go away to a people whom you and your ancestors have not known, and you will serve other gods of wood and stone there. 28:37 You will become an occasion of horror, a proverb, and an object of ridicule to all the peoples to whom the Lord will drive you.

The Curse of Reversed Status

28:38 “You will take much seed to the field but gather little harvest, because locusts will consume it. 28:39 You will plant vineyards and cultivate them, but you will not drink wine or gather in grapes, because worms will eat them. 28:40 You will have olive trees throughout your territory but you will not anoint yourself with olive oil, because the olives will drop off the trees while still unripe. ³  28:41 You will bear sons and daughters but not keep them, because they will be taken into captivity.

¹ tn Heb “and there will be no power in your hand”; NCV “there will be nothing you can do.”

² tc The LXX reads the plural “kings.”

³ tn Heb “your olives will drop off” (נָשַׁל, nashal), referring to the olives dropping off before they ripen.