Deuteronomy 28:45-52

28:45 All these curses will fall on you, pursuing and overtaking you until you are destroyed, because you would not obey the Lord your God by keeping his commandments and statutes that he has given ¹  you. 28:46 These curses ²  will be a perpetual sign and wonder with reference to you and your descendants. ³ 

The Curse of Military Siege

28:47 “Because you have not served the Lord your God joyfully and wholeheartedly with the abundance of everything you have, 28:48 instead in hunger, thirst, nakedness, and poverty ⁴  you will serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you. They ⁵  will place an iron yoke on your neck until they have destroyed you. 28:49 The Lord will raise up a distant nation against you, one from the other side of the earth ⁶  as the eagle flies, ⁷  a nation whose language you will not understand, 28:50 a nation of stern appearance that will have no regard for the elderly or pity for the young. 28:51 They ⁸  will devour the offspring of your livestock and the produce of your soil until you are destroyed. They will not leave you with any grain, new wine, olive oil, calves of your herds, ⁹  or lambs of your flocks ¹⁰  until they have destroyed you. 28:52 They will besiege all of your villages ¹¹  until all of your high and fortified walls collapse – those in which you put your confidence throughout the land. They will besiege all your villages throughout the land the Lord your God has given you.

[28:45]  ¹ tn Heb “commanded”; NAB, NIV, TEV “he gave you.”

[28:46]  ² tn Heb “they”; the referent (the curses mentioned previously) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[28:46]  ³ tn Heb “seed” (so KJV, ASV).

[28:48]  ⁴ tn Heb “lack of everything.”

[28:48]  ⁵ tn Heb “he” (also later in this verse). The pronoun is a collective singular referring to the enemies (cf. CEV, NLT). Many translations understand the singular pronoun to refer to the Lord (cf. NAB, NASB, NIV, NCV, NRSV, TEV).

[28:49]  ⁶ tn Heb “from the end of the earth.”

[28:49]  ⁷ tn Some translations understand this to mean “like an eagle swoops down” (e.g., NAB, NASB, NIV, NRSV, NLT), comparing the swift attack of an eagle to the attack of the Israelites’ enemies.

[28:51]  ⁸ tn Heb “it” (so NRSV), a collective singular referring to the invading nation (several times in this verse and v. 52).

[28:51]  ⁹ tn Heb “increase of herds.”

[28:51]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “growth of flocks.”

[28:52]  ¹¹ tn Heb “gates,” also in vv. 55, 57.