The Life of the Land Can Be Turned Inside Out

“Hearken diligently” is a doubled verb, hearing thou shalt hear. “On high” is elyon, the word that as a title means the Most High (32:8), so the promise lifts Israel with a word usually reserved for God. The verse picks up 26:19, “high above all nations”, and makes it conditional.

“Overtake” is nasag, the verb of pursuers catching up: Laban overtook Jacob (Genesis 31:25), and the Egyptians overtook Israel at the sea (Exodus 14:9). Here the pursuers are blessings, and Israel cannot outrun them.

City and field are the two settings of the cases in 22:23–27, and together they mean everywhere a person could be. The first blessing is a place, not a possession: wherever Israel stands, it stands blessed.

“Kine” is the old plural of cow. “Flocks of thy sheep” translates ashterot tsonekha, where the word for the young of the flock is the same as the name of Ashtoreth, the Canaanite goddess of fertility. The blessing of increase is credited to the LORD in the very vocabulary Canaan used for its goddess.

The basket is the tene of 26:2, the one carried to the sanctuary with firstfruits. “Store” is misheret, the kneading trough, the same vessel Israel carried out of Egypt bound up in their clothes (Exodus 12:34). The blessing reaches the bowl where the dough is made.

Coming in and going out is Hebrew for the whole of a working life. Moses uses it of himself at a hundred and twenty: “I can no more go out and come in” (31:2). Psalm 121:8 turns it into a closing benediction.

“Smitten before thy face” reverses the warning at Hormah, where Moses told the people “lest ye be smitten before your enemies” (1:42) and they were. “Rise up against thee” is a single word, qamim, the risers, those who stand up to attack.

God does not simply give the blessing; he commands it, as though sending a servant (compare Leviticus 25:21, “I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year”). “Storehouses” is asamim, a word found only here and in Proverbs 3:10, “So shall thy barns be filled with plenty”.

“As he hath sworn” points back to Sinai, where Israel was to be “an holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). The condition is written into the oath: God establishes the holy people, and the people keep the commandments and walk in his ways. Neither half stands alone in this verse.

Literally, “the name of the LORD is called over thee”, a formula of ownership. Solomon uses it of the temple (1 Kings 8:43), and Joab uses it of a conquered city, asking David to come and take Rabbah “lest I take the city, and it be called after my name” (2 Samuel 12:28).

“Plenteous in goods” is literally “make thee abound for good”. The three fruits of verse 4 return in a new order, body, cattle, ground, and are placed in “the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers”, so the abundance is tied to the old promise, not to the soil’s own merit.

“In his season” refers to the two rains of 11:14, the early rain of autumn that softens the ground for sowing and the latter rain of spring that fills the grain. The Book of Kings will show the treasury shut: no rain for three years in Ahab’s reign (1 Kings 17:1).

Isaiah 9:14–15 takes up this pair and turns it into a sharp gloss: “The ancient and honourable, he is the head; and the prophet that teacheth lies, he is the tail.” Here the head leads and the tail follows; the promise is that Israel will lead.

“To the right hand, or to the left” is Deuteronomy’s image for a straight road (5:32; 17:11, 20), and the Book of Joshua opens with it again (Joshua 1:7). The blessings end not on wealth but on the first commandment: no other gods.

Verse 15 mirrors verse 1 nearly clause for clause, then turns. The proportions are telling: the blessings take fourteen verses, the curses fifty four. The Book of Deuteronomy gives the warning nearly four times the space of the promise.

The six curses of verses 16–19 answer the six blessings of verses 3–6, but not in the same order. City and field come first again, as though the curse begins by walking over the same ground the blessing did.

In the blessings the basket came after the children and the crops; here it comes straight after the city and field. The kneading trough, the store of verse 5, is the first thing lost: the reversal starts at the bread.

This list is one item shorter than verse 4. The “fruit of thy cattle” has dropped out, though the kine and sheep remain. The order also shifts: in the curses, children and crops are named after basket and store.

The last of the mirror curses has nothing new in it; it is verse 6 with one word changed. From verse 20 on, the curses stop echoing the blessings and begin to add, which is where the chapter becomes its own.

Three nouns: cursing, vexation and rebuke. “Vexation” is mehumah, the panic God sends on enemies to rout them, promised against the Canaanites in 7:23. “Rebuke” is a word found only here. In the last clause the speaker becomes God himself: “whereby thou hast forsaken me”.

“Pestilence” is dever, the plague that fell on Egypt’s livestock in the fifth plague (Exodus 9:3, the “murrain”). “Cleave” is dabaq, the verb of loyalty in 4:4 and 10:20, “to him shalt thou cleave”. The people who would not cling to God have a disease cling to them.

Seven afflictions, the number of completeness. “Sword” may be read with a vowel change as “drought”, which suits the farming list and is how many modern versions take it. “Blasting” and “mildew” are grain diseases, scorch and rust, named together in Solomon’s prayer (1 Kings 8:37) and in Amos 4:9.

Leviticus 26:19 uses the same two metals the other way round: “I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass.” Either way the sky gives nothing and the ground takes nothing in. Metal neither rains nor grows.

The picture is of the hot east wind, the sirocco, which fills the air with fine dust and can blow for days. What falls from the sky is not water but the same dust that already covers the ground. “Until thou be destroyed” begins to recur like a drumbeat through these verses.

“Removed” is zaavah, a horror, something to shudder at. Jeremiah borrowed the phrase for Judah’s fate at least four times, “to be removed into all kingdoms of the earth” (Jeremiah 15:4; 24:9; 29:18; 34:17), which shows how closely the prophets read this chapter.

“Fray” is old English for frighten. The one person in the Old Testament who does fray the birds away is Rizpah, who sat on a rock from harvest to rain guarding the bodies of her hanged sons, and let neither bird nor beast touch them (2 Samuel 21:10). Jeremiah 7:33 quotes this verse almost exactly.

“The botch of Egypt” is shechin, the boils of the sixth plague (Exodus 9:9). “Emerods”, tumours or swellings, are what struck the Philistines when they kept the ark (1 Samuel 5:6), after which they sent back golden models of them. The plagues once aimed at Israel’s enemies are here aimed at Israel.

The same three words, madness, blindness and astonishment, are used in Zechariah 12:4 of the horses and riders that come against Jerusalem. In Deuteronomy they fall on Israel; in Zechariah they are turned back on Jerusalem’s attackers.

A blind man gropes whether it is day or night; this is a sighted man groping in full daylight. Isaiah 59:10 describes the same condition as confession: “We grope for the wall like the blind... we stumble at noonday as in the night.”

Behind the King James “lie with her” the written Hebrew has a coarser verb, and the scribes who fixed the reading tradition marked it to be read aloud as the ordinary word for lying with. The three frustrations are the three exemptions from battle in 20:5–7, in reverse order.

The law of 22:1–4 required an Israelite to bring back a neighbour’s straying ox and ass. Here the ox is killed and the ass seized before the owner’s face, and “shall not be restored”, using the same verb of return. The neighbourly duty has no one left to keep it.

“Fail with longing” is kalot, to waste away: eyes that wear themselves out watching the road. “No might in thine hand” is an idiom, literally “not to the power of thine hand”, which Laban used the other way when he told Jacob “It is in the power of my hand to do you hurt” (Genesis 31:29).

The two verbs, oppressed and crushed, are the pair Amos flings at the wealthy women of Samaria, the cows of Bashan, “which oppress the poor, which crush the needy” (Amos 4:1). The nation that oppressed its own poor is threatened with the same treatment at foreign hands.

“Mad” is meshugga, the word Achish uses when David feigns madness at Gath (1 Samuel 21:15), and the root of the Yiddish meshuggah. Here no disease causes it. The cause is watching: “the sight of thine eyes”.

The phrase “sore botch” and the range “from the sole of thy foot unto the top of thy head” are the words Job 2:7 uses when Satan strikes Job. A curse of the covenant falls, in that book, on a man who had done nothing to earn it.

“Thy king which thou shalt set over thee” echoes the king law, “thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee” (17:15), written before Israel had any king. Jehoiachin and Zedekiah were both carried to Babylon (2 Kings 24:15; 25:7), and Manasseh before them in chains (2 Chronicles 33:11).

Astonishment, proverb and byword are shammah, mashal and sheninah. God used the second and third words to Solomon at the temple’s dedication: “Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all people” (1 Kings 9:7). A byword is a name people use to make a point about ruin.

Haggai 1:6 describes this curse already in force among the returned exiles: “Ye have sown much, and bring in little.” The locust, arbeh, is the insect of the eighth plague (Exodus 10:4), which ate every green thing in Egypt.

“Dress” is avad, to work or serve, the verb of Genesis 2:15, where the man is put in the garden “to dress it and to keep it”. “Worms” is tolaat, the grub that bred in hoarded manna (Exodus 16:20). The vinedresser does the work of Eden and gets the worm.

“Coasts” in 1611 meant borders or territory, not seashore; olive trees fill the land to its edges. Oil was daily grooming; to go unanointed was the sign of mourning (2 Samuel 14:2). “Cast his fruit” means the olives drop before they ripen.

Literally “they shall not be to thee”: born to you, but not yours. The children appear in a run of crops, between the olive and the locust, as another harvest reaped by someone else. Lamentations 1:5 records it done: “her children are gone into captivity before the enemy.”

The insect here is not the arbeh of verse 38 but tselatsal, a rare, whirring word, perhaps a cricket or a swarm locust. “Consume” is yarash, to possess, the verb Israel uses for taking the land. The insect takes possession of the trees as Israel took possession of Canaan.

The stranger is the ger, the resident alien Israel was told to protect. The Hebrew doubles the direction words: “higher and higher” for him, “lower and lower” for Israel. The protected guest overtakes the host, so the law’s care for him becomes the measure of Israel’s fall.

Verses 12 and 13 are compressed and reversed in one line: the lender becomes the borrower, the head the tail. Proverbs 22:7 names what that means in practice: “the borrower is servant to the lender.”

“Pursue” and “overtake” together are the verbs Pharaoh boasted with at the sea: “I will pursue, I will overtake” (Exodus 15:9). Egypt’s threat against Israel becomes the curses’ threat. The verse sums up the section and gives its reason again, not hearkening.

“A sign and a wonder”, ot and mofet, are the words used for the plagues on Egypt (6:22; 4:34). Israel is threatened with becoming, in its own land, what Egypt became: a public demonstration of God’s judgment. “For ever” applies it to the descendants.

“For the abundance of all things” is merov kol. The next verse answers it with choser kol, “want of all things”. The reason for the curse is framed as a failure of joy, not only of obedience: plenty was given and received without gladness.

When the prophet Hananiah broke the wooden yoke Jeremiah wore, God answered: “Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but thou shalt make for them yokes of iron” (Jeremiah 28:13). The iron yoke of this verse is the one Jeremiah announced for Babylon’s subjects.

Habakkuk 1:8 describes the Chaldeans in this verse’s terms: “they shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat.” Jeremiah 5:15 echoes the language: “a nation whose language thou knowest not, neither understandest what they say.” The enemy cannot be pleaded with, because it cannot be spoken to.

“Fierce countenance” is az panim, hard of face. Daniel 8:23 uses the same phrase for a king who will stand up in the latter days. Lamentations 5:12 records the fulfilment in Jerusalem: “the faces of elders were not honoured.”

Corn, wine and oil are the triad the book promised to bless (7:13; 11:14): grain, new wine, fresh oil. The same three are here listed as what the enemy leaves none of. The list of kine and sheep repeats verse 4 word for word.

At Kadesh the spies had reported cities “great and walled up to heaven” (1:28), and fear of them kept Israel out of the land. The Book of Joshua will soon show Jericho’s wall falling (Joshua 6:20). Here the walls are Israel’s own, trusted and falling. “Besiege thee in all thy gates” is said twice.

“The fruit of thine own body” is the phrase of the first blessing in verse 4. “Siege and straitness”, matsor and matsoq, is a rhyming pair repeated in verses 55 and 57. In 2 Kings 6:28–29 two women of Samaria under siege agree to eat their sons, and one keeps the bargain.

“Tender” and “very delicate” describe a man used to comfort. “His eye shall be evil” is the idiom of stinginess from 15:9, the evil eye toward a poor brother before the year of release. The grudging eye once turned on a neighbour’s loan is turned on his own wife and children.

The verse explains the evil eye of verse 54: he shares nothing because nothing else is left. “In all thy gates” widens the siege to every town. Deuteronomy’s meals were always shared, with Levite and stranger at the table; this one is eaten alone.

Isaiah 47:1 addresses Babylon’s daughter in this verse’s words: “thou shalt no more be called tender and delicate.” The woman who would not set the sole of her foot on the ground reverses 11:24, where every place the sole of Israel’s foot trod was promised to them.

“Her young one” is shilyah, a word found only here, meaning the afterbirth; many modern versions translate it so. The verse lists the birth itself, then the children yet to be born. “Secretly” returns: in the siege, as in the curses of chapter 27, the worst acts are hidden ones.

For the first time the chapter calls itself writing: “the words of this law that are written in this book.” The King James sets THE LORD THY GOD in capitals here as the name itself, the “glorious and fearful” name the people are to fear.

“Wonderful” is hifla, to make extraordinary, the root of the wonders God did for Israel in Egypt (Exodus 15:11). “Of long continuance” translates neemanot, literally faithful or reliable, from the root of Amen: plagues as dependable as God’s promises.

In 7:15 Moses had promised the obedient that the LORD would put “none of the evil diseases of Egypt” on them, and in Exodus 15:26 God said “I will put none of these diseases upon thee... for I am the LORD that healeth thee.” Here the promise is reversed.

“The book of this law” is sefer hattorah, the phrase Hilkiah the priest uses when he finds the scroll in the temple in Josiah’s reign (2 Kings 22:8). When Josiah heard the curses read, he tore his clothes (22:11).

Moses had said in 10:22 that seventy went down into Egypt and “now the LORD thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude”, the promise to Abraham (Genesis 15:5). The same words are here reversed. “Few in number” is the phrase of 26:5, the father who went down “with a few”.

“Plucked” is nasach, to tear out by the roots. Proverbs 2:22 uses it: “the transgressors shall be rooted out of it.” The land Israel was planted in (Exodus 15:17, “plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance”) can pull its planting out again.

“From the one end of the earth even unto the other” is the span of 4:32, where Moses challenged Israel to ask across the whole world whether anything like Sinai had ever happened. The same horizons now measure the scattering. Gods of wood and stone are those of 4:28, “which neither see, nor hear”.

“Neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest” repeats the words used of Noah’s dove, which “found no rest for the sole of her foot” and came back to the ark (Genesis 8:9). The dove had an ark to return to. Here the trembling heart has none.

Literally, “thy life shall be hung up before thee”, dangling in front of you like something on a hook. The picture is of a life that is present but can be taken down at any moment.

“Would God” is mi yitten, literally “who will give”, the Hebrew idiom for an unanswerable wish. Job 7:4 is the same sleepless longing: “When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone?” Each part of the day is dreaded, so each wishes for the other.

The king law (17:16) forbade causing the people “to return to Egypt”, and Exodus 14:13 had promised of the Egyptians, “ye shall see them again no more for ever.” After Jerusalem fell in AD 70, Josephus records that many captives were sent to Egypt to labour (Jewish War 6.418). The ships are the new detail: the return is by sea.