Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
The Curses Begin
Deuteronomy 28:15-35
15 But it shall come to pass, if you will not listen to Yahweh your God’s voice, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command you today, that all these curses will come on you and overtake you. · WEB
The same four categories are reversed word for word, and the worst of the curses is that a man watches other people use what he made.
The reversal is exact, and its exactness is the argument. The four categories of blessing are repeated with one word changed — city and field, basket and kneading trough, offspring and livestock, coming in and going out Deuteronomy 28:16–19.
One detail keeps it from being a mechanical copy: the middle two exchange places. The blessing named the offspring before the basket; the curse names the basket before the offspring. Somebody composing this was listening to it rather than transcribing it.
Then the curses proper, and they are cumulative rather than catastrophic. Pestilence. Fever and inflammation. Blight and mildew on the crops Deuteronomy 28:21–22.
The sky becomes bronze and the ground iron Deuteronomy 28:23 — a shut heaven and a soil that cannot be broken, which is the exact undoing of the promise of rain in its season. And the rain that does come is powder and dust Deuteronomy 28:24.
The military reversal is stated in the words of the blessing turned around. There, enemies fled seven ways; here, you will go out one way against them, and will flee seven ways before them Deuteronomy 28:25.
The most terrible section is not the disease. It is verses 30 to 33, and every clause has the same shape.
You will betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her. You will build a house, and you won't dwell in it. You will plant a vineyard, and not use its fruit Deuteronomy 28:30. The ox slaughtered in front of him and eaten by someone else. The donkey taken and not returned. Sons and daughters given to another people, with your eyes will look and fail with longing for them all day long Deuteronomy 28:32.
These are precisely the three exemptions from military service — the new house, the new vineyard, the new marriage Deuteronomy 20:5–7. The law had sent men home so they would not lose those things to another man. The curse is that they lose them anyway, and to nobody's sword.
What is being described is not destruction but futility. The work is done and the harvest comes in and none of it is his, and he is present to watch. The chapter names the effect: the sights that you see with your eyes will drive you mad Deuteronomy 28:34.
It should be said that this section is the longest curse passage in Scripture and that its length is deliberate. Fourteen verses of blessing, and fifty-four of curse. The disproportion is a rhetorical decision by a speaker who knew which way his audience would go.
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