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.
55. He won’t want to give them any of his children’s flesh that he will be eating because he has no other food due to the desperate and dire circumstances that your enemy has brought on you in all your cities.
56. Even the most gentle and refined woman among you, who is so refined and gentle she wouldn’t stomp her foot on the ground, will scowl at her own dear husband, her son, or her daughter—
57. not wanting to give them any of the afterbirth she pushed out or the babies she bore, because she will be eating them secretly while starving due to the desperate and dire circumstances that your enemy will bring on you in your cities.
58. If you don’t carefully keep all the words of this Instruction that are written in this scroll, by fearing the awesome and glorious name of the Lord your God—
59. the Lord will overwhelm you and your descendants with severe and chronic afflictions, and with terrible and untreatable sicknesses.
60. He’ll put on you all the Egyptian diseases about which you were so afraid; they will stick to you!
61. What’s more, the Lord will bring on you all the other diseases and plagues that aren’t written in this Instruction scroll until you are completely wiped out.
62. Once as countless as the stars in the night sky, only a few of you will be left alive—all because you didn’t obey the Lord your God’s voice.
63. And just as before, the Lord enjoyed doing good things for you and increasing your numbers, now the Lord will enjoy annihilating and destroying you. You will be torn off the very fertile land you are entering to possess.