Leviticus 26:18

26:18 “‘If, in spite of all these things, ¹  you do not obey me, I will discipline you seven times more on account of your sins. ² 

Deuteronomy 28:15-68

Curses as Reversal of Blessings

28:15 “But if you ignore ³  the Lord your God and are not careful to keep all his commandments and statutes I am giving you today, then all these curses will come upon you in full force: ⁴  28:16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the field. 28:17 Your basket and your mixing bowl will be cursed. 28:18 Your children ⁵  will be cursed, as well as the produce of your soil, the calves of your herds, and the lambs of your flocks. 28:19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out. ⁶ 

Curses by Disease and Drought

28:20 “The Lord will send on you a curse, confusing you and opposing you ⁷  in everything you undertake ⁸  until you are destroyed and quickly perish because of the evil of your deeds, in that you have forsaken me. ⁹  28:21 The Lord will plague you with deadly diseases ¹⁰  until he has completely removed you from the land you are about to possess. 28:22 He ¹¹  will afflict you with weakness, ¹²  fever, inflammation, infection, ¹³  sword, ¹⁴  blight, and mildew; these will attack you until you perish. 28:23 The ¹⁵  sky ¹⁶  above your heads will be bronze and the earth beneath you iron. 28:24 The Lord will make the rain of your land powder and dust; it will come down on you from the sky until you are destroyed.

Curses by Defeat and Deportation

28:25 “The Lord will allow you to be struck down before your enemies; you will attack them from one direction but flee from them in seven directions and will become an object of terror ¹⁷  to all the kingdoms of the earth. 28:26 Your carcasses will be food for every bird of the sky and wild animal of the earth, and there will be no one to chase them off. 28:27 The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, eczema, and scabies, all of which cannot be healed. 28:28 The Lord will also subject you to madness, blindness, and confusion of mind. ¹⁸  28:29 You will feel your way along at noon like the blind person does in darkness and you will not succeed in anything you do; ¹⁹  you will be constantly oppressed and continually robbed, with no one to save you. 28:30 You will be engaged to a woman and another man will rape ²⁰  her. You will build a house but not live in it. You will plant a vineyard but not even begin to use it. 28:31 Your ox will be slaughtered before your very eyes but you will not eat of it. Your donkey will be stolen from you as you watch and will not be returned to you. Your flock of sheep will be given to your enemies and there will be no one to save you. 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. ²¹  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 ²²  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. ²³  28:41 You will bear sons and daughters but not keep them, because they will be taken into captivity. 28:42 Whirring locusts ²⁴  will take over every tree and all the produce of your soil. 28:43 The foreigners ²⁵  who reside among you will become higher and higher over you and you will become lower and lower. 28:44 They will lend to you but you will not lend to them; they will become the head and you will become the tail!

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 ²⁶  you. 28:46 These curses ²⁷  will be a perpetual sign and wonder with reference to you and your descendants. ²⁸ 

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 ²⁹  you will serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you. They ³⁰  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 ³¹  as the eagle flies, ³²  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 ³³  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, ³⁴  or lambs of your flocks ³⁵  until they have destroyed you. 28:52 They will besiege all of your villages ³⁶  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. 28:53 You will then eat your own offspring, ³⁷  the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you, because of the severity of the siege ³⁸  by which your enemies will constrict you. 28:54 The man among you who is by nature tender and sensitive will turn against his brother, his beloved wife, and his remaining children. 28:55 He will withhold from all of them his children’s flesh that he is eating (since there is nothing else left), because of the severity of the siege by which your enemy will constrict ³⁹  you in your villages. 28:56 Likewise, the most ⁴⁰  tender and delicate of your women, who would never think of putting even the sole of her foot on the ground because of her daintiness, ⁴¹  will turn against her beloved husband, her sons and daughters, 28:57 and will secretly eat her afterbirth ⁴²  and her newborn children ⁴³  (since she has nothing else), ⁴⁴  because of the severity of the siege by which your enemy will constrict you in your villages.

The Curse of Covenant Termination

28:58 “If you refuse to obey ⁴⁵  all the words of this law, the things written in this scroll, and refuse to fear this glorious and awesome name, the Lord your God, 28:59 then the Lord will increase your punishments and those of your descendants – great and long-lasting afflictions and severe, enduring illnesses. 28:60 He will infect you with all the diseases of Egypt ⁴⁶  that you dreaded, and they will persistently afflict you. ⁴⁷  28:61 Moreover, the Lord will bring upon you every kind of sickness and plague not mentioned in this scroll of commandments, ⁴⁸  until you have perished. 28:62 There will be very few of you left, though at one time you were as numerous as the stars in the sky, ⁴⁹  because you will have disobeyed ⁵⁰  the Lord your God. 28:63 This is what will happen: Just as the Lord delighted to do good for you and make you numerous, he ⁵¹  will take delight in destroying and decimating you. You will be uprooted from the land you are about to possess. 28:64 The Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of wood and stone. 28:65 Among those nations you will have no rest nor will there be a place of peaceful rest for the soles of your feet, for there the Lord will give you an anxious heart, failing eyesight, and a spirit of despair. 28:66 Your life will hang in doubt before you; you will be terrified by night and day and will have no certainty of surviving from one day to the next. ⁵²  28:67 In the morning you will say, ‘If only it were evening!’ And in the evening you will say, ‘I wish it were morning!’ because of the things you will fear and the things you will see. 28:68 Then the Lord will make you return to Egypt by ship, over a route I said to you that you would never see again. There you will sell yourselves to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.”

Jeremiah 17:27

17:27 But you must obey me and set the Sabbath day apart to me. You must not carry any loads in through ⁵³  the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. If you disobey, I will set the gates of Jerusalem on fire. It will burn down all the fortified dwellings in Jerusalem and no one will be able to put it out.’”

Lamentations 1:18

Jerusalem Speaks:

צ (Tsade)

1:18 The Lord is right to judge me! ⁵⁴ 

Yes, I rebelled against his commands. ⁵⁵ 

Please listen, all you nations, ⁵⁶ 

and look at my suffering!

My young women and men

have gone into exile.

Lamentations 2:17

ע (Ayin)

2:17 The Lord has done what he planned;

he has fulfilled ⁵⁷  his promise ⁵⁸ 

that he threatened ⁵⁹  long ago: ⁶⁰ 

He has overthrown you without mercy ⁶¹ 

and has enabled the enemy to gloat over you;

he has exalted your adversaries’ power. ⁶² 

Malachi 2:2

2:2 If you do not listen and take seriously ⁶³  the need to honor my name,” says the Lord who rules over all, “I will send judgment ⁶⁴  on you and turn your blessings into curses – indeed, I have already done so because you are not taking it to heart.

Acts 3:23

3:23 Every person ⁶⁵  who does not obey that prophet will be destroyed and thus removed ⁶⁶  from the people.’ ⁶⁷ 

Hebrews 12:25

12:25 Take care not to refuse the one who is speaking! For if they did not escape when they refused the one who warned them on earth, how much less shall we, if we reject the one who warns from heaven?

[26:18]  ¹ tn Heb “And if until these.”

[26:18]  ² tn Heb “I will add to discipline you seven [times] on your sins.”

[28:15]  ³ tn Heb “do not hear the voice of.”

[28:15]  ⁴ tn Heb “and overtake you” (so NIV, NRSV); NAB, NLT “and overwhelm you.”

[28:18]  ⁵ tn Heb “the fruit of your womb” (so NAB, NIV, NRSV).

[28:19]  ⁶ sn See note on the similar expression in v. 6.

[28:20]  ⁷ tn Heb “the curse, the confusion, and the rebuke” (NASB and NIV similar); NRSV “disaster, panic, and frustration.”

[28:20]  ⁸ tn Heb “in all the stretching out of your hand.”

[28:20]  ⁹ tc For the MT first person common singular suffix (“me”), the LXX reads either “Lord” (Lucian) or third person masculine singular suffix (“him”; various codices). The MT’s more difficult reading probably represents the original text.

[28:21]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “will cause pestilence to cling to you.”

[28:22]  ¹¹ tn Heb “The Lord.” See note on “he” in 28:8.

[28:22]  ¹² tn Or perhaps “consumption” (so KJV, NASB, NRSV). The term is from a verbal root that indicates a weakening of one’s physical strength (cf. NAB “wasting”; NIV, NLT “wasting disease”).

[28:22]  ¹³ tn Heb “hot fever”; NIV “scorching heat.”

[28:22]  ¹⁴ tn Or “drought” (so NIV, NRSV, NLT).

[28:23]  ¹⁵ tc The MT reads “Your.” The LXX reads “Heaven will be to you.”

[28:23]  ¹⁶ tn Or “heavens” (also in the following verse). The Hebrew term שָׁמַיִם (shamayim) may be translated “heaven(s)” or “sky” depending on the context.

[28:25]  ¹⁷ tc The meaningless MT reading זַעֲוָה (za’avah) is clearly a transposition of the more commonly attested Hebrew noun זְוָעָה (zÿva’ah, “terror”).

[28:28]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “heart” (so KJV, NASB).

[28:29]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “you will not cause your ways to prosper.”

[28:30]  ²⁰ tc For MT reading שָׁגַל (shagal, “ravish; violate”), the Syriac, Targum, and Vulgate presume the less violent שָׁכַב (shakhav, “lie with”). The unexpected counterpart to betrothal here favors the originality of the MT.

[28:32]  ²¹ tn Heb “and there will be no power in your hand”; NCV “there will be nothing you can do.”

[28:36]  ²² tc The LXX reads the plural “kings.”

[28:40]  ²³ tn Heb “your olives will drop off” (נָשַׁל, nashal), referring to the olives dropping off before they ripen.

[28:42]  ²⁴ tn The Hebrew term denotes some sort of buzzing or whirring insect; some have understood this to be a type of locust (KJV, NIV, CEV), but other insects have also been suggested: “buzzing insects” (NAB); “the cricket” (NASB); “the cicada” (NRSV).

[28:43]  ²⁵ tn Heb “the foreigner.” This is a collective singular and has therefore been translated as plural; this includes the pronouns in the following verse, which are also singular in the Hebrew text.

[28:45]  ²⁶ tn Heb “commanded”; NAB, NIV, TEV “he gave you.”

[28:46]  ²⁷ tn Heb “they”; the referent (the curses mentioned previously) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

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

[28:48]  ²⁹ tn Heb “lack of everything.”

[28:48]  ³⁰ 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]  ³¹ tn Heb “from the end of the earth.”

[28:49]  ³² 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]  ³³ tn Heb “it” (so NRSV), a collective singular referring to the invading nation (several times in this verse and v. 52).

[28:51]  ³⁴ tn Heb “increase of herds.”

[28:51]  ³⁵ tn Heb “growth of flocks.”

[28:52]  ³⁶ tn Heb “gates,” also in vv. 55, 57.

[28:53]  ³⁷ tn Heb “the fruit of your womb” (so NAB, NRSV); NASB “the offspring of your own body.”

[28:53]  ³⁸ tn Heb “siege and stress.”

[28:55]  ³⁹ tn Heb “besiege,” redundant with the noun “siege.”

[28:56]  ⁴⁰ tc The LXX adds σφόδρα (sfodra, “very”) to bring the description into line with v. 54.

[28:56]  ⁴¹ tn Heb “delicateness and tenderness.”

[28:57]  ⁴² tn Heb includes “that which comes out from between her feet.”

[28:57]  ⁴³ tn Heb “her sons that she will bear.”

[28:57]  ⁴⁴ tn Heb includes “in her need for everything.”

[28:58]  ⁴⁵ tn Heb “If you are not careful to do.”

[28:60]  ⁴⁶ sn These are the plagues the Lord inflicted on the Egyptians prior to the exodus which, though they did not fall upon the Israelites, must have caused great terror (cf. Exod 15:26).

[28:60]  ⁴⁷ tn Heb “will cling to you” (so NIV); NLT “will claim you.”

[28:61]  ⁴⁸ tn The Hebrew term תּוֹרָה (torah) can refer either (1) to the whole Pentateuch or, more likely, (2) to the book of Deuteronomy or even (3) only to this curse section of the covenant text. “Scroll” better reflects the actual document, since “book” conveys the notion of a bound book with pages to the modern English reader. Cf. KJV, NASB, NRSV “the book of this law”; NIV, NLT “this Book of the Law”; TEV “this book of God’s laws and teachings.”

[28:62]  ⁴⁹ tn Or “heavens.” The Hebrew term שָׁמַיִם (shamayim) may be translated “heaven(s)” or “sky” depending on the context.

[28:62]  ⁵⁰ tn Heb “have not listened to the voice of.”

[28:63]  ⁵¹ tn Heb “the Lord.” See note on “he” in 28:8.

[28:66]  ⁵² tn Heb “you will not be confident in your life.” The phrase “from one day to the next” is implied by the following verse.

[17:27]  ⁵³ tn Heb “carry loads on the Sabbath and bring [them] in through.” The translation treats the two verbs “carry” and “bring in” are an example of hendiadys (see the note on “through” in 17:21).

[1:18]  ⁵⁴ tn Heb “The Lord himself is right.” The phrase “to judge me” is not in the Hebrew, but is added in the translation to clarify the expression.

[1:18]  ⁵⁵ tn Heb “His mouth.” The term “mouth” (פֶּה, peh) is a metonymy of instrument (= mouth) for the product (= words). The term פֶּה (peh) often stands for spoken words (Ps 49:14; Eccl 10:3; Isa 29:13), declaration (Gen 41:40; Exod 38:21; Num 35:30; Deut 17:6; Ezra 1:1) and commands of God (Exod 17:1; Num 14:41; 22:18; Josh 15:13; 1 Sam 15:24; 1 Chr 12:24; Prov 8:29; Isa 34:16; 62:2). When the verb מָרָה (marah, “to rebel”) is used with the accusative direct object פֶּה (peh, “mouth”) to connote disobedience to God’s commandments (Num 20:24; 1 Sam 12:14, 15; 1 Kgs 13:21) (BDB 805 s.v. פֶּה 2.c).

[1:18]  ⁵⁶ tc The Kethib is written עַמִּים (’ammim, “peoples”), but the Qere, followed by many medieval Hebrew mss and the ancient versions (LXX and Aramaic Targum), read הָעַמִּים (ha’ammim, “O peoples”). The Qere is probably the original reading.

[2:17]  ⁵⁷ tn The verb בָּצַע (batsa’) has a broad range of meanings: (1) “to cut off, break off,” (2) “to injure” a person, (3) “to gain by violence,” (4) “to finish, complete” and (5) “to accomplish, fulfill” a promise.

[2:17]  ⁵⁸ tn Heb “His word.” When used in collocation with the verb בָּצַע (batsa’, “to fulfill,” see previous tn), the accusative noun אִמְרָה (’imrah) means “promise.”

[2:17]  ⁵⁹ tn Heb “commanded” or “decreed.” If a reference to prophetic oracles is understood, then “decreed” is preferable. If understood as a reference to the warnings in the covenant, then “threatened” is a preferable rendering.

[2:17]  ⁶⁰ tn Heb “from days of old.”

[2:17]  ⁶¹ tn Heb “He has overthrown and has not shown mercy.” The two verbs חָרַס וְלֹא חָמָל (kharas vÿlo’ khamal) form a verbal hendiadys in which the first retains its verbal sense and the second functions adverbially: “He has overthrown you without mercy.” וְלֹא חָמָל (vÿlo’ khamal) alludes to 2:2.

[2:17]  ⁶² tn Heb “He has exalted the horn of your adversaries.” The term “horn” (קֶרֶן, qeren) normally refers to the horn of a bull, one of the most powerful animals in ancient Israel. This term is often used figuratively as a symbol of strength, usually in reference to the military might of an army (Deut 33:17; 1 Sam 2:1, 10; 2 Sam 22:3; Pss 18:3; 75:11; 89:18, 25; 92:11; 112:9; 1 Chr 25:5; Jer 48:25; Lam 2:3; Ezek 29:21), just as warriors are sometimes figuratively described as “bulls.” To lift up the horn often means to boast and to lift up someone else’s horn is to give victory or cause to boast.

[2:2]  ⁶³ tn Heb “and if you do not place upon [the] heart”; KJV, NAB, NRSV “lay it to heart.”

[2:2]  ⁶⁴ tn Heb “the curse” (so NASB, NRSV); NLT “a terrible curse.”

[3:23]  ⁶⁵ tn Grk “every soul” (here “soul” is an idiom for the whole person).

[3:23]  ⁶⁶ tn Or “will be completely destroyed.” In Acts 3:23 the verb ἐξολεθρεύω (exoleqreuw) is translated “destroy and remove” by L&N 20.35.

[3:23]  ⁶⁷ sn A quotation from Deut 18:19, also Lev 23:29. The OT context of Lev 23:29 discusses what happened when one failed to honor atonement. One ignored the required sacrifice of God at one’s peril.