The Blessings and the Curses

"If thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the LORD thy God… Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground… Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out." "The LORD shall make thee the head, and not the tail."

"But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken… Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field." Pestilence, consumption, fever, mildew. "And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron." Defeat before enemies; "thy carcase shall be meat unto all fowls of the air." A nation "from far, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth."

In the siege, "thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters." "And the LORD shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other… And among these nations shalt thou find no ease… In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning!" And finally: "the LORD shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships."

Esarhaddon's curses

Esarhaddon's Succession Treaty (672 BC) ends with long lists of curses on anyone who breaks the oath, many invoking specific gods. Scholars have pointed to close parallels with Deuteronomy 28. The most cited is the sequence of 28:26–35: carcasses as food for birds, skin disease, blindness, groping at noonday, a wife taken by another man. Esarhaddon's treaty has a similar run, with the curses in a similar order and tied to the gods Sin, Shamash and others. Another is the brass sky and iron earth (28:23): the treaty curses "may they make your ground like iron… may your sky become bronze."

What does it mean? Some scholars (following Moshe Weinfeld and Hans Ulrich Steymans) argue that a Judahite scribe adapted the Assyrian curses in the 7th century BC, transferring loyalty from the Assyrian king to Israel's God. Others (Laura Quick) emphasize a wider Aramaic and West Semitic curse tradition that both draw on; Jeremy Hutton and C. L. Crouch argue against reading Deuteronomy as a translation of the treaty; Nicholas Polk reexamines the parallels and finds many of them general. Hittite treaties of the 14th–13th centuries BC also end with blessings and curses, though in a different style.

Cannibalism in siege

Assyrian texts and curses also mention parents eating children in famine. 2 Kings 6:28–29 describes it during a siege of Samaria, and Lamentations 4:10 at the fall of Jerusalem. These were real horrors of ancient siege warfare.

Chapter numbers

The last verse of chapter 28 in Hebrew Bibles (28:69) is the first verse of chapter 29 in English Bibles (29:1): "These are the words of the covenant… in the land of Moab, beside the covenant which he made with them in Horeb." Hebrew treats it as the end of the curses; English as the start of the next speech.