44. They will lend to you, but you will have nothing to lend to them. They will be the head of things; you will be the tail.
45. That’s how all these curses will come over you, pursuing you, reaching you until you are completely wiped out, because you didn’t obey the Lord your God’s voice by keeping his commandments and his regulations that he gave you.
46. These things will be a sign and a wonder on you and your descendants forever.
47. Because you didn’t serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly above all else,
48. you will serve your enemies—the ones the Lord will send against you—during famine, drought, nakedness, and total depravation. God will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has wiped you out.
49. The Lord will bring a distant nation—one from the far ends of the earth—against you as fast as the eagle flies: a nation that speaks a language you can’t understand,
50. a stern nation that doesn’t go easy on the very old or show pity to the very young.
51. That nation will devour your livestock’s offspring and your soil’s produce until you yourselves are destroyed because you will have no grain, wine, or oil left—nor any young from your cattle or offspring from your flocks—that is, until that nation annihilates you.
52. That nation will attack you in all your cities until your high, reinforced walls that you thought were so safe fall down across your entire countryside. That nation will attack you in all your cities throughout the land the Lord your God has given you.
53. You will eat the offspring of your own womb—the flesh of your own sons and daughters, whom the Lord your God gave you—because of the desperate and dire circumstances that your enemy has brought on you.
54. Even the most gentle and refined man among you will scowl at his brother or his own dear wife, or the last of his surviving children.