Blessings of Obedience
1Do not make idols for yourselves; do not set up a carved image or a sacred pillar, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down to it, for I am Yahweh your God. 2Keep my sabbaths and revere my sanctuary. I am Yahweh. 3If you walk in my statutes and keep my commandments and carry them out, 4I will give you rain in its season, the land will yield its produce, and the trees of the field will yield their fruit. 5Your threshing will continue until the grape harvest, and the grape harvest will continue until sowing time; you will eat your bread until you are satisfied, and you will live securely in your land. 6I will give peace in the land, and you will lie down with no one to frighten you. I will remove dangerous animals from the land, and no sword will pass through your land. 7You will pursue your enemies, and they will fall before you by the sword. 8Five of you will pursue a hundred, and a hundred of you will pursue ten thousand; your enemies will fall before you by the sword. 9I will turn toward you and make you fruitful and multiply you, and I will establish my covenant with you. 10You will eat the old store from the previous harvest, and you will clear out the old to make room for the new. 11I will set my dwelling among you, and my soul will not despise you. 12I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people. 13I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt so that you would no longer be their slaves. I broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk upright.
The Curses Begin
14But if you do not listen to me and do not carry out all these commandments, 15if you reject my statutes and despise my ordinances so that you do not carry out all my commandments, breaking my covenant, 16then this is what I will do to you: I will bring on you sudden terror, wasting disease, and fever that will destroy your eyes and drain away your life. You will sow your seed in vain, for your enemies will eat it. 17I will set my face against you, and you will be struck down before your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is chasing you. 18If after all this you still do not listen to me, I will punish you seven times over for your sins. 19I will break down your proud strength; I will make your sky like iron and your earth like bronze. 20Your strength will be spent for nothing, for your land will not yield its produce, and the trees of the land will not yield their fruit. 21If you continue to defy me and refuse to listen to me, I will strike you seven times over with plagues, according to your sins. 22I will send wild animals against you, and they will rob you of your children, destroy your livestock, and reduce your numbers until your roads lie deserted. 23If in spite of this you are not corrected by me but continue to defy me, 24then I myself will defy you, and I will strike you seven times over for your sins. 25I will bring a sword against you to avenge the covenant. When you gather together in your cities, I will send a plague among you, and you will be handed over to the enemy. 26When I cut off your supply of bread, ten women will bake your bread in a single oven and dole it out to you by weight; you will eat, but you will not be satisfied.
Escalating Judgment and Exile
27If in spite of this you do not listen to me but continue to defy me, 28then in furious defiance I will oppose you, and I myself will punish you seven times over for your sins. 29You will eat the flesh of your sons, and you will eat the flesh of your daughters. 30I will destroy your high places, cut down your incense altars, and pile your corpses on the corpses of your idols. My soul will despise you. 31I will turn your cities into ruins and lay your sanctuaries waste, and I will not smell the pleasing aroma of your offerings. 32I myself will make the land desolate, and your enemies who live there will be appalled at it. 33I will scatter you among the nations and unsheathe the sword against you. Your land will become desolate and your cities will lie in ruins. 34Then the land will enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate and you are in the land of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. 35As long as it lies desolate it will have the rest it never had during the sabbaths when you lived in it. 36As for those of you who survive, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. They will flee as one flees a sword, and they will fall though no one is pursuing them. 37They will stumble over one another as if fleeing the sword, though no one is pursuing them, and you will have no power to stand before your enemies. 38You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you. 39Those of you who survive will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their own iniquity, and also because of the iniquities of their ancestors, they will waste away with them.
Confession and the Remembered Covenant
40But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their ancestors, the treachery they committed against me, and also how they defied me, 41so that I in turn defied them and brought them into the land of their enemies — if then their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they pay for their iniquity, 42then I will remember my covenant with Jacob, my covenant with Isaac, and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land. 43For the land will be abandoned by them and will enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them, and they will pay for their iniquity — because they rejected my ordinances and despised my statutes. 44Yet in spite of this, while they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or despise them so as to destroy them completely and break my covenant with them, for I am Yahweh their God. 45For their sake I will remember the covenant with their ancestors, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, to be their God. I am Yahweh.” 46These are the statutes, the ordinances, and the laws that Yahweh established between himself and the Israelites on Mount Sinai, through Moses.
