Deuteronomy28chapter 28

Fourteen verses of blessing are followed by fifty-four of curse, and the imbalance is the shape of the chapter. The vassal treaties of the second millennium show the same proportion, a correspondence Meredith Kline set out in Treaty of the Great King and Kenneth Kitchen in On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Verse 15 repeats verse 1 clause for clause with the negative put in.

Deuteronomy 28:16-19

These four verses are verses 3 to 6 with cursed set where blessed stood. Two things move in the copying, the basket and store coming before the fruit rather than after, and the fruit of thy cattle dropping out of verse 18. Held in two columns, the curse reads as the blessing withdrawn item by item.

Henry reads the cursed basket and kneading bowl as food still on hand that gives no comfort. He cites Titus 1:15, where nothing is pure to the defiled, so the curse lies on the use of a thing as much as on its supply. The bread remains and turns bitter.

Henry sets the cursed produce of your land beside Genesis 4:11, where Cain was cursed from the ground that had received his brother's blood. The man's sin passes into the soil he works and the herds he keeps. The ground answers for its owner.

Henry pairs the two halves with Proverbs 3:33, where the curse of the LORD rests on the house of the wicked. Going out gives no escape either, and he says the man cannot leave the curse behind him. Home and road are both closed.

Deuteronomy 28:20-22

Verse 20 gives the reason before the list runs, “the wickedness you have committed in forsaking Him”, where the Hebrew has God speak in the first person inside a speech of Moses. The person shifts back at verse 21 without any mark. Verse 22 names seven afflictions in one line, of the body and blight and mildew on the grain, so one sentence reaches the man and his field.

The Hebrew verb yadbek means to make stick, and Adam Clarke renders it as the LORD cementing the pestilence to the man. The Septuagint says He will glue death to him. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take the plague as some fatal epidemic that clings until the land is emptied.

Adam Clarke gives the Hebrew names: shachepheth, a wasting from want of food; kaddachath, a kindled fever; and charchur, burning upon burning. Where the King James reads the sword, Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read dryness, the drought of the Berean text. Leviticus 26:16 had threatened the same fever.

Deuteronomy 28:23-24

Leviticus 26:19 had the sky as iron and the land as bronze, and here the two metals trade places. Both images mean a sky that gives nothing and a ground that yields nothing, and the swap points to two chapters drawing on a shared stock of covenant language. Clarke links the rain turned to “dust and powder” with the dust the desert wind carries into that country.

Wesley gives two readings: the rain falls so uselessly that it might as well be dust, or dust raised by the wind falls in place of rain. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take the second and describe sandstorms that bury cultivated ground. Either way the sky sends ruin.

Deuteronomy 28:25-26

Verse 7 is reversed exactly here, one way out and seven ways in flight, with Israel in the place the enemy held. The unburied corpse of verse 26 was a horror on its own terms in that world. Jeremiah 7:33 and 34:20 use the same picture of Judah before the exile.

Henry fixes on the last clause, where no one drives the birds and beasts away. He reads it as the Israelite losing even the common humanity of strangers, so hateful would the curse make him to all mankind. The dead lie unguarded.

Deuteronomy 28:27-29

The botch of Egypt is the boil of Exodus 9:9, and Deuteronomy 7:15 had promised that God would put none of the evil diseases of Egypt upon them. The curse is that promise run backwards, and verse 60 says so outright. Madness, blindness and astonishment of heart move the affliction inward, and verse 29 has a man groping at noonday with the sun full up.

Adam Clarke gives the Hebrew behind madness, blindness and confusion of mind as shiggaon, distraction, ivvaron, blindness of eye and mind, and timmahon, stunned amazement. Henry reads them as a judgment on a nation's counsel. He points to 2 Chronicles 28:20, where the Assyrian king whom Ahaz paid for help came and oppressed him instead.

Wesley reads groping at noon like a blind man as gross error in matters as plain as daylight. He takes the ways that will not prosper as a man's own plans turning to his ruin. Noon gives no help.

Deuteronomy 28:30-31

Deuteronomy 20:5-7 excused three men from the army: one with a house not yet dedicated, one with a vineyard not yet enjoyed, and one pledged to a wife not yet married. Verse 30 takes away all three. The law that guarded a man's unfinished life is the frame of this curse, and verse 31 carries it to his ox, donkey and flock taken while he watches.

Henry reads the loss of ox, donkey and flock beside Deuteronomy 6:10-11, where Israel received houses and vineyards it had neither built nor planted. Now strangers eat what Israel raised. He also compares the losses to Job's, whose oxen and donkeys were carried off in one day at Job 1:14-15.

Deuteronomy 28:32-34

The children are taken and the parent is left watching, “your eyes grow weary looking for them day after day”. Verse 33 hands the harvest to “A people you do not know”, the foreigner rising at verse 43 and the far nation of verse 49. Verse 34 makes madness the effect of what the eyes have seen, and verse 67 closes the chapter on that same sight.

Wesley draws two dangers from a people you do not know. Nobody feared them in advance, and nobody could plead with them for mercy in a language they shared. That unknown tongue returns at verse 49.

Wesley and Henry both read the madness as despair, a man stripped of all comfort and hope by the sights he sees. Henry adds that a man who lives by what his eyes see is in danger of losing reason itself when every sight is frightful. Faith is the missing guard.

Deuteronomy 28:35-37

Boils “from the soles of your feet to the top of your head” is the wording Job 2:7 uses of Job himself. Verse 36 brings the king into the curse, his one appearance here, with the king law of 17:14-20 behind it, and 2 Kings 24:15 and 25:7 record two kings of Judah carried off. The horror and scorn of verse 37 return at 1 Kings 9:7-8.

Henry and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the service of gods of wood and stone in a nation unknown to the fathers as the sin turned into the sentence. Henry cites Daniel 3:6, the furnace of Babylon. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown cite Jeremiah 44:17-19, where exiles in Egypt burned incense to the Queen of Heaven.

Henry reads the horror, scorn and ridicule as the reversal of 26:19, where the LORD set Israel above the nations in praise, fame and honor. The name that drew praise becomes a byword. His comment echoes Proverbs 14:34, that sin is a disgrace to any people.

Deuteronomy 28:38-42

Five verses of labor come to nothing: seed and locust, vineyard and worm, olive and dropped fruit, children and captivity, and the locust again. This curse leaves the work standing and takes away the yield, a different stroke from plague and sword. Haggai 1:6 uses the same form of words of a later generation, which sowed much and harvested little.

John Gill identifies the worm that eats the grapes as a pest of vines, called ipes by the Greeks and convolvulus in the Latin of Pliny. Henry notes that the nations around used rites to guard their vineyards. For Israel the one guard was obedience to the LORD.

Deuteronomy 8:8 had called Canaan a land of olive oil, and this verse leaves the trees standing with no oil to use. John Gill observes that the word yourself stands outside the Hebrew, so the loss includes the anointing of guests at a feast, as at Psalm 23:5. The table goes dry.

John Gill gives the Hebrew of this line more literally, that the sons and daughters you father will not be yours, following the Latin of Pagninus and Montanus. He names three times they went into captivity: the ten tribes under Shalmaneser, Judah under Nebuchadnezzar, and the Jews under the Romans. The children belong to their captors.

John Gill notes that this locust strips the trees as well as the grain, as the swarm did in Egypt at Exodus 10:15. He traces its Hebrew name either to the shade a swarm casts at noon or to the noise of its wings, citing Joel 2:5. The plague of Egypt comes home.

Deuteronomy 28:43-44

The stranger is the man this book keeps under protection, at 10:18-19, 14:29 and 24:19-21, and here he rises above the household that sheltered him. Verse 44 undoes verses 12 and 13 clause by clause, lending becomes borrowing and the head becomes the tail. The reversal itself is the curse at this point, with no fresh affliction named.

Wesley says the stranger had once served Israel and gathered crumbs from its table. Henry finds his rise in two places: the colonists the king of Assyria settled in Samaria at 2 Kings 17:24, and Hosea 7:9, where foreigners devour Ephraim's strength. The lender now borrows.

Deuteronomy 28:45-46

The curses “pursue you and overtake you”, the verb used of the blessings at verse 2, so both halves of the chapter close on a chase. Verse 46 calls them “a sign and a wonder”, the pair Deuteronomy 6:22 and 26:8 use of what God did to Egypt. The words that told of the deliverance now describe the delivered nation, and the curse reaches the descendants forever.

Wesley and Henry read the sign and wonder in the later dispersion of Israel, a people scattered in every nation that stayed distinct and mixed with none. Both call it amazing. Henry likens the people to Cain at Genesis 4:15, a wanderer marked so as to be known.

Deuteronomy 28:47-48

The chapter states its ground here, and the ground is the manner of the service: Israel had everything and served without “joy and gladness of heart”. Henry reads the sin as the abuse of plenty, and Calvin takes the joy required as proof that obedience was willing. Verse 48 answers service with service, an iron yoke where the abundance had been, a figure Jeremiah 28:13-14 takes up again.

Henry sets the verse beside 2 Chronicles 12:8, where the LORD gave Judah to Shishak so that they would learn the difference between serving Him and serving the kingdoms of other lands. Famine, thirst and nakedness are the wages of the new master. Service is learned by comparison.

Deuteronomy 28:49-52

The nation from afar swoops “like an eagle” and speaks a language Israel will not understand, and Jeremiah 5:15 and Habakkuk 1:6-8 use both figures of Babylon. The text names no nation, and readers have applied it to Assyria, Babylon and Rome by the siege they had in view. Verse 52 brings down the walls Israel trusted and names all its cities twice, so no city stands outside the sentence.

The King James speaks of a fierce countenance here, and Henry reads the fierce face as the mark of a ruthless nature that pities neither the old nor the young. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown apply the line to the Romans. Age and youth give no protection.

The invader eats the grain, new wine, oil, calves and lambs that verses 4 and 11 had promised. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown cite Josephus for districts left strewn with wreckage, and Henry notes that the army fed full while the people starved. The land feeds its enemy.

Adam Clarke applies the siege of all your cities first to Nebuchadnezzar at 2 Kings 25:1-2 and then to Titus. He links the siege lines to the warning of Jesus in Luke 21 that Jerusalem would be surrounded by armies. The high and fortified walls fell both times.

Deuteronomy 28:53-55

The siege turns a family on itself, and the text says it plainly: “the flesh of the sons and daughters”. It happens at Samaria in 2 Kings 6:28-29 and after the fall of Jerusalem in Lamentations 4:10, and Josephus reports it under Titus in the Wars of the Jews. Verses 54 and 55 add that the man who does it is the most refined in the camp.

Begrudge renders an idiom of the evil eye, which Wesley glosses as unkind, envious and covetous. Henry notes that the gentle and refined man was bound by nature to feed his brother, his wife and his children. Hunger undoes his refinement and his duty.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown describe the famine's effect: the nearest relatives were shunned lest they find the food and ask a share. The man eats alone. The refrain of the siege and distress your enemy will inflict closes verses 53, 55 and 57.

Deuteronomy 28:56-57

The woman is described before her act is named, so refined that she would not set the sole of her foot on the ground. She will begrudge her husband, her son and her daughter, three degrees of nearness like the man's at verse 54. Verse 57 adds that she will eat “secretly”, the one detail the man's case did not carry.

The afterbirth follows the margin of the King James, and John Gill notes that the Targum of Jonathan and Aben Ezra read it the same way. Wesley takes the children she bears as her older children. Henry records from Josephus a noble woman in the Roman siege who ate her child in secret.

Deuteronomy 28:58-61

Verse 58 states the condition again, that Israel may fear “this glorious and awesome name”. The Hebrew word behind “extraordinary” in verse 59 is the one used of God's wondrous works, so these sicknesses are put among the wonders. Verse 60 brings back the diseases of Egypt, answering Exodus 15:26, and verse 61 takes in every sickness “not recorded in this Book of the Law”.

Henry calls some of God's plagues wonderful for bearing the marks of divine power so plainly that an onlooker says, with Psalm 58:11, surely there is a God who judges the earth. Lasting and chronic set these apart. They outlast a single generation.

Henry names the Egyptian diseases as leprosy, boils and foul ulcers. He reads them as sicknesses that would follow the people wherever they went after the siege. Cling repeats the verb of verse 21.

Henry calls the verse an et cetera. He adds that those under every sickness and plague of the curse find the half of its weight was never told them. John Gill cites the Jewish chronicle Shebet Judah as owning that the verse was fulfilled on the people.

Deuteronomy 28:62-63

Being left few after being “as numerous as the stars in the sky” reverses the promise of Genesis 15:5 and 22:17, and Deuteronomy 10:22. Verse 63 says that as it pleased the LORD to prosper them, “so also it will please Him to annihilate you”. Calvin and Gill read this as speech after the manner of men, stating how certain the act is, and Ezekiel 33:11 is read beside it.

Wesley reads the LORD being pleased to destroy as delight in the exercise of justice on the incorrigible. Henry calls it the goodness and severity of God, Romans 11:22. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown apply uprooted from the land to Hadrian's decree barring Jews from Judea.

Deuteronomy 28:64-66

Later readers have set this verse beside history more often than any other in the chapter. The text joins the scattering to the service of “gods of wood and stone”, repeating verse 36, and then turns to the inner life: “a trembling heart, failing eyes, and a despairing soul”. No resting place for the sole of the foot recalls the dove at Genesis 8:9.

Henry divides the verse into two losses, no rest for the body and no rest for the mind. The foot keeps moving in hope of gain or in fear of persecution, and the heart trembles within. Wesley likens the exile to Cain.

Wesley gives two sources of the fear: enemies with the power and the will to kill, and a guilty conscience that fears where no fear is. Athanasius read the Greek of this line as a prophecy of the cross. His text read your Life hanging before your eyes.

Deuteronomy 28:67-68

Morning and evening each become the wrong hour, because of the dread of heart and the sights of verse 34. The last curse is a return to Egypt in ships, by “a route that I said you should never see again”. Commentators differ over whether Exodus 14:13 or the king law at 17:16 is meant, and the chapter ends with slaves no one will buy.

Adam Clarke explains that hithmaccartem can mean offering oneself for sale, as starving vagrants did, which the Berean renders sell yourselves. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown cite Josephus for Jews returned to Egypt in ships under Titus and sold as male and female slaves. Wesley names a glutted slave market among his reasons.