1. You shall make you no idols. These words signal a shift in the discourse to summarizing generalization, for the language of this verse and the next, as Jacob Milgrom observes, invokes three of the first five injunctions of the Decalogue, reverting, one may say, to first principles. These verses, then, may be construed as an overture to the grand epilogue to the laws of Leviticus that swings into full momentum with verse 3, the point at which Jewish tradition marks the beginning of the textual unit for communal reading. What follows is a rhetorically powerful evocation (the style switching from legalistic to rhetorical) of the blessings that will ensue if Israel keeps the covenant and the ghastly curses if it violates the covenant. Both in its placement in the book after the code of laws and in its own formal organization and language, the enire passage closely parallels Deuteronomy 28.

figured stone. The etymology of the word rendered as “figured,” maskit, has long been debated, though it might derive from a verb that means “to look.” Milgrom plausibly suggests that the stone in question is a paving stone (hence “bow over it”), perhaps with a mosaic design, set in the floor of a sanctuary.

5. your threshing will overtake the vintage. This image of a kind of fast-forward of the agricultural cycle as a hyperbolic representation of fertility is used in Amos 9:13.

your bread. Once again, this is a synecdoche for food in general.

6. I shall make evil beasts cease from the land. As both biblical narrative and poetry repeatedly attest, in the early period of Israelite settlement predatory beasts—in particular, lions and bears—were a threat to the population (the young David became a skilled fighter by learning how to contend with them). In the hyperbolic language of the passage, predators, like invading enemies, will entirely vanish. As in the Prophets, hyperbole points the way to later messianic constructions of an end-time in history.

9. I shall turn toward you. The rabbis supply “in favor,” an idea clearly implied by the idiom as it stands.

make you fruitful and multiply you. The phrasing explicitly invokes God’s injunction to humankind in the Priestly version of the creation (Genesis 1:28).

10. you will eat old grain long stored. This appears to be an allusion to the preceding chapter (25:20–22) in which God promises to provide Israel sufficient grain in the sixth year of the sabbatical cycle to tide people over the seventh and eighth year until they can harvest new crops, planted in the eighth year, during the ninth. This detail, perhaps oddly specific in context, is evidently put forth as a particular instance of God’s special providential care for Israel. The punctilious observance of the sabbatical year, as the section of curses makes clear, is a paramount concern of this writer.

11. tabernacle. Milgrom argues that mishkan (from the root sh-k-n, “to dwell”) means “presence” here, though elsewhere it is always a cultic structure, and the fact that Israel in the wilderness already has a tabernacle by no means prevents God from promising that He will establish a sanctuary within the land which the people is about to enter.

loathe. The present translation concurs with Milgrom that the multivalent nefesh here means “throat” and hence the phrase lo tigʿal nafshi ʾetkhem means literally “my throat will not expel you,” i.e., I will not retch in disgust over you, loathe you. Although it might at first seem surprising that so strongly negative a locution would be used in a blessing, albeit prefaced by a “not,” it is chosen in order to stand in counterpoint to Israel’s loathing God in verses 15 and 43 and God’s loathing Israel in return for its miscreance.

13. I broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk upright. In Hebrew, as in other languages, “yoke” is a general symbol for subjugation (an English word which itself means “being under the yoke”). But here the dead metaphor is resuscitated: the two bars of the yoke connecting to the crosspiece are broken, and enslaved Israel, forced to go about (in the metaphor) pulling heavy burdens on all four like a beast, can now stand up straight.

15. voiding My covenant. The antithesis to God’s fulfilling the covenant (verse 9).

16. making the throat ache. Since a particular body part seems required to match the wasted eyes, it is highly likely that the sense here of nefesh is once again “throat.”

17. I will set My face against you. This is the antithesis of “I shall turn toward you” in verse 9. Throughout this section of curses, the translation uses “will” in the first person and “shall” in the second because the modal force of the language seems more emphatic in the curses than in the blessings.

19. your heavens like iron and your earth like bronze. This grim simile is a common feature in Assyrian treaty curses and is equally exploited in Deuteronomy 28:23, although in that instance bronze goes with the heavens and iron with the earth.

21. come in encounter against Me. The exact origin of this phrase, unique to this passage, telkhu ʿimi beqeri, is in dispute, though it obviously means something like “confront,” “dispute,” “rebel against.” The most plausible etymology of the noun qeri is from the verbal stem q-r-h, suggesting “encounter,” “happening upon,” or even “mishap,” and so this translation uses the phrase “in encounter” (which of course can also mean “duel”), preserving what may be a slight idiomatic oddness in the Hebrew.

22. your roads will be desolate. If one pauses to reflect, this is a haunting image (and one to which several of the Prophets revert): the once teeming highways of the land will be bleak and empty after the devastation of the populace.

23. And if through these you do not take chastisement. The section of curses is structured as a sequence of downward spiraling disasters. After each set of punishing blows, God, as it were, pauses to see if Israel will correct its ways. When this does not happen, He intensifies the catastrophes, which will culminate in exile.

25. the avenging sword of the covenant’s vengeance. A covenant is both a promise and a threat. From those who violate their covenantal obligations, vengeance is exacted.

28. against you in wrathful encounter. Ominously, God now adds the component of wrath, ḥamah, to the reiterated noun qeri, suggesting that divine hostility is now ready to trump Israelite hostility in a climactic set of disasters.

29. you shall eat the flesh of your sons. On this grisly detail, see the comment on Deuteronomy 28:53. The verse is arranged as a neat chiasm—eat (a), flesh of your sons (b), flesh of your daughters (b'), eat (a')—as a rhetorical means of hammering home the horrific images.

30. your corpses . . . the corpses of your fetishes. Although logically fetishes cannot have corpses, not ever having been alive, the same word is pointedly repeated, suggesting a bitter equation between the inert, heaped-up bodies of the fetish worshippers and the inert, lifeless fetishes, which have been “corpses” all along, and now deprived of worshippers, are all the more conspicuously sheer dead matter.

31. sanctuaries. The plural surely suggests that in this text a single central sanctuary is not presupposed.

I will not smell your fragrant odors. The reference is to the fragrance of the sacrifice burned on the altar and thought, at least in the pre-Israelite period, to be a pleasing aroma in the nostrils of the gods. By the time of the writing of this text, it may have become a dead metaphor simply meaning, I will not look with favor on your sacrifices.

34. Then shall the land expiate its sabbath years. These words, and those of the next two verses, reflect both a logic of restitution and mordant satiric irony. The people has violated its obligation to keep the sabbatical year. Now, as the depopulated land lies fallow year after year, all those violated sabbaths will be made up for, numerically. But this is also a bitterly mocking image of the land, violently divested of its Israelite inhabitants, compelled by grim history to keep on its own a whole series of sabbatical years, in which nothing is sown or reaped.

37. there shall be no standing up for you in the face of your enemies. This is a vivid antithesis to “made you walk upright” in verse 13. The two Hebrew words in question derive from the same root—“upright,” qomemiyut, and “standing up,” tequmah.

39. guilt. The Hebrew ʿawon means “iniquity” (or “crime”) and by causal extension, both “guilt” and “punishment.”

41. their uncircumcised heart. This is a recurrent metaphor for obtuseness or callousness. See the comment on Deuteronomy 10:16.

44. My covenant. The envelope structure formed by the reiteration of this key term at the beginning and the end of the entire section is meant as a reassurance. God will respond in terrible wrath to Israel’s dereliction, but the commitment to the covenant He expressed at the beginning will in the end lead Him to rescue Israel from exile as He once rescued them from Egyptian slavery.

45. the covenant of the first ones. This somewhat opaque phrase refers to the founding generation that stood at Sinai, but its very vagueness allows a certain elision between these “first ones” and the patriarchs, with whom God initially sealed the covenant that has just been mentioned.

46. between Himself and the Israelites. This locution of betweenness, in the summation at the end of all the preceding laws and statutes, followed by this chapter’s catalogue of blessings and curses, is an indication of the two-sided contractual nature of God’s covenant with Israel that is repeatedly invoked in the blessings and the curses.