"But if you ignore 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:

You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the field.

Your basket and your mixing bowl will be cursed.

Your children will be cursed, as well as the produce of your soil, the calves of your herds, and the lambs of your flocks.

You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.

"The Lord will send on you a curse, confusing you and opposing you in everything you undertake until you are destroyed and quickly perish because of the evil of your deeds, in that you have forsaken me.

He will afflict you with weakness, fever, inflammation, infection, sword, blight, and mildew; these will attack you until you perish.

The sky above your heads will be bronze and the earth beneath you iron.

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.

"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 to all the kingdoms of the earth.

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.

The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, eczema, and scabies, all of which cannot be healed.

The Lord will also subject you to madness, blindness, and confusion of mind.

You will feel your way along at noon like the blind person does in darkness and you will not succeed in anything you do; you will be constantly oppressed and continually robbed, with no one to save you.

You will be engaged to a woman and another man will rape her. You will build a house but not live in it. You will plant a vineyard but not even begin to use it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Lord will force you and your king 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.

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.

You will plant vineyards and cultivate them, but you will not drink wine or gather in grapes, because worms will eat them.

You will bear sons and daughters but not keep them, because they will be taken into captivity.

Whirring locusts will take over every tree and all the produce of your soil.

The foreigners who reside among you will become higher and higher over you and you will become lower and lower.

They will lend to you but you will not lend to them; they will become the head and you will become the tail!

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 you.

These curses will be a perpetual sign and wonder with reference to you and your descendants.

"Because you have not served the Lord your God joyfully and wholeheartedly with the abundance of everything you have,

instead in hunger, thirst, nakedness, and poverty you will serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you. They will place an iron yoke on your neck until they have destroyed you.

They 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, or lambs of your flocks until they have destroyed you.

They will besiege all of your villages 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.

You will then eat your own offspring, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you, because of the severity of the siege by which your enemies will constrict you.

The man among you who is by nature tender and sensitive will turn against his brother, his beloved wife, and his remaining children.

Likewise, the most 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, will turn against her beloved husband, her sons and daughters,

and will secretly eat her afterbirth and her newborn children (since she has nothing else), because of the severity of the siege by which your enemy will constrict you in your villages.

"If you refuse to obey 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,

then the Lord will increase your punishments and those of your descendants -- great and long-lasting afflictions and severe, enduring illnesses.

He will infect you with all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will persistently afflict you.

Moreover, the Lord will bring upon you every kind of sickness and plague not mentioned in this scroll of commandments, until you have perished.

This is what will happen: Just as the Lord delighted to do good for you and make you numerous, he will take delight in destroying and decimating you. You will be uprooted from the land you are about to possess.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Moses proclaimed to all Israel as follows: "You have seen all that the Lord did in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, all his servants, and his land.

Your eyes have seen the great judgments, those signs and mighty wonders.

You have eaten no bread and drunk no wine or beer -- all so that you might know that I am the Lord your God!

When you came to this place King Sihon of Heshbon and King Og of Bashan came out to make war and we defeated them.

Then we took their land and gave it as an inheritance to Reuben, Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh.

"Therefore, keep the terms of this covenant and obey them so that you may be successful in everything you do.

your infants, your wives, and the foreigners living in your encampment, those who chop wood and those who carry water --

so that you may enter by oath into the covenant the Lord your God is making with you today.

Today he will affirm that you are his people and that he is your God, just as he promised you and as he swore by oath to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

"(For you know how we lived in the land of Egypt and how we crossed through the nations as we traveled.

You have seen their detestable things and idols of wood, stone, silver, and gold.)

Beware that the heart of no man, woman, clan, or tribe among you turns away from the Lord our God today to pursue and serve the gods of those nations; beware that there is among you no root producing poisonous and bitter fruit.

When such a person hears the words of this oath he secretly blesses himself and says, "I will have peace though I continue to walk with a stubborn spirit." This will destroy the watered ground with the parched.

The Lord will be unwilling to forgive him, and his intense anger will rage against that man; all the curses written in this scroll will fall upon him and the Lord will obliterate his name from memory.

The generation to come -- your descendants who will rise up after you, as well as the foreigner who will come from distant places -- will see the afflictions of that land and the illnesses that the Lord has brought on it.

The whole land will be covered with brimstone, salt, and burning debris; it will not be planted nor will it sprout or produce grass. It will resemble the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord destroyed in his intense anger.

They went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods they did not know and that he did not permit them to worship.

So the Lord has uprooted them from their land in anger, wrath, and great rage and has deported them to another land, as is clear today."

Secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those that are revealed belong to us and our descendants forever, so that we might obey all the words of this law.

"When you have experienced all these things, both the blessings and the curses I have set before you, you will reflect upon them in all the nations where the Lord your God has banished you.

Then if you and your descendants turn to the Lord your God and obey him with your whole mind and being just as I am commanding you today,

the Lord your God will reverse your captivity and have pity on you. He will turn and gather you from all the peoples among whom he has scattered you.

Even if your exiles are in the most distant land, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back.

Then he will bring you to the land your ancestors possessed and you also will possess it; he will do better for you and multiply you more than he did your ancestors.

The Lord your God will also cleanse your heart and the hearts of your descendants so that you may love him with all your mind and being and so that you may live.

Then the Lord your God will put all these curses on your enemies, on those who hate you and persecute you.

You will return and obey the Lord, keeping all his commandments I am giving you today.

The Lord your God will make the labor of your hands abundantly successful and multiply your children, the offspring of your cattle, and the produce of your soil. For the Lord your God will once more rejoice over you to make you prosperous just as he rejoiced over your ancestors,

if you obey the Lord your God and keep his commandments and statutes that are written in this scroll of the law. But you must turn to him with your whole mind and being.

It is not in heaven, as though one must say, "Who will go up to heaven to get it for us and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?"

And it is not across the sea, as though one must say, "Who will cross over to the other side of the sea and get it for us and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?"

For the thing is very near you -- it is in your mouth and in your mind so that you can do it.

"Look! I have set before you today life and prosperity on the one hand, and death and disaster on the other.

What I am commanding you today is to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, and to obey his commandments, his statutes, and his ordinances. Then you will live and become numerous and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are about to possess.

However, if you turn aside and do not obey, but are lured away to worship and serve other gods,

Today I invoke heaven and earth as a witness against you that I have set life and death, blessing and curse, before you. Therefore choose life so that you and your descendants may live!

I also call on you to love the Lord your God, to obey him and be loyal to him, for he gives you life and enables you to live continually in the land the Lord promised to give to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

Then Moses went and spoke these words to all Israel.

He said to them, "Today I am a hundred and twenty years old. I am no longer able to get about, and the Lord has said to me, 'You will not cross the Jordan.'

As for the Lord your God, he is about to cross over before you; he will destroy these nations before you and dispossess them. As for Joshua, he is about to cross before you just as the Lord has said.

The Lord will do to them just what he did to Sihon and Og, the Amorite kings, and to their land, which he destroyed.

The Lord will deliver them over to you and you will do to them according to the whole commandment I have given you.

Be strong and courageous! Do not fear or tremble before them, for the Lord your God is the one who is going with you. He will not fail you or abandon you!"

Then Moses called out to Joshua in the presence of all Israel, "Be strong and courageous, for you will accompany these people to the land that the Lord promised to give their ancestors, and you will enable them to inherit it.

Then Moses wrote down this law and gave it to the Levitical priests, who carry the ark of the Lord's covenant, and to all Israel's elders.

He commanded them: "At the end of seven years, at the appointed time of the cancellation of debts, at the Feast of Temporary Shelters,

Gather the people -- men, women, and children, as well as the resident foreigners in your villages -- so they may hear and thus learn about and fear the Lord your God and carefully obey all the words of this law.

Then their children, who have not known this law, will also hear about and learn to fear the Lord your God for as long as you live in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess."

Then the Lord said to Moses, "The day of your death is near. Summon Joshua and present yourselves in the tent of meeting so that I can commission him." So Moses and Joshua presented themselves in the tent of meeting.

Then the Lord said to Moses, "You are about to die, and then these people will begin to prostitute themselves with the foreign gods of the land into which they are going. They will reject me and break my covenant that I have made with them.

At that time my anger will erupt against them and I will abandon them and hide my face from them until they are devoured. Many disasters and distresses will overcome them so that they will say at that time, 'Have not these disasters overcome us because our God is not among us?'

Now write down for yourselves the following song and teach it to the Israelites. Put it into their very mouths so that this song may serve as my witness against the Israelites!

For after I have brought them to the land I promised to their ancestors -- one flowing with milk and honey -- and they eat their fill and become fat, then they will turn to other gods and worship them; they will reject me and break my covenant.

Then when many disasters and distresses overcome them this song will testify against them, for their descendants will not forget it. I know the intentions they have in mind today, even before I bring them to the land I have promised."