⁴⁷ The Lord has given you many good things. But you have not agreed to serve the Lord your God with joy. ⁴⁸ So you will serve your enemies that the Lord will send to attack you. You will be hungry and thirsty. You will be so poor that you do not even have clothes to wear. Your enemies will make you work so hard that they will destroy you.

⁴⁹ The Lord will bring a nation from far away in the world to attack you. You will not understand their language. They will come quickly to attack you, like an eagle that comes down from the sky. ⁵⁰ They will have angry faces. They will not be kind to anyone, even old people and young children. ⁵¹ They will eat your young animals and the crops from your fields, until they have destroyed you. They will not leave any food for you. You will have no grain, no wine, no olive oil, no young cows, no lambs. They will take everything from you until they destroy you.

⁵² They will attack all your towns, everywhere in the land that the Lord your God has given to you. They will knock down the strong walls that you thought would keep you safe. They will make their camps around your towns until they can take the towns for themselves. ⁵³ When that happens, you will have no food, because your enemy's soldiers are all around your town. You will be so hungry that you eat your own children. Those are the sons and daughters that the Lord your God has given to you. ⁵⁴ Even the best and kindest man among you will turn against his brother. He will turn against the wife that he loves and against his children who are still alive. ⁵⁵ He will be so hungry that he eats meat from his own child, because there is no other food. He will not share it with any of his own family. He will do that because your enemy is so strong. The soldiers will stop any food from coming into your towns. ⁵⁶ Even the best and kindest woman among you will turn against the husband that she loves. She will turn against her sons and daughters. She has been rich enough to have everything that she needs. ⁵⁷ But now she will be so hungry that she will eat her new baby and the afterbirth.^[a] She will eat them secretly because there is nothing else for her to eat. She will not share anything with her family because your enemy will be too strong. The soldiers will stop any food from coming into your towns.

Moses warns the people again

⁵⁸ Be careful to obey all the words of this law that I have written in this scroll. Always respect the Lord your God. Give him the honour that his great name deserves. ⁵⁹ If you refuse to do that, the Lord will punish you and your descendants more and more. You will have lots of pain and many kinds of terrible disease that will not get better. ⁶⁰ He will cause you to have all the same diseases that hurt the Egyptians and that made you very afraid. Those diseases will never leave you alone. ⁶¹ The Lord will also cause you to have many other terrible diseases. This scroll of God's Law does not say anything about those diseases, but they will destroy you completely.

⁶² At one time, you were as many people as the stars in the sky. But if you do not obey the Lord your God, only a few of you will remain alive. ⁶³ At one time, the Lord was happy to help you with good things. He gave you many children. But if you do not obey him, he will be happy to destroy you. He will remove you from the land that will soon become your new home.

⁶⁴ If that happens, the Lord will send you away to live among many other nations, all over the world. There you will worship other gods. They are gods that people have made from wood and from stone. Neither you nor your ancestors have ever known those gods before. ⁶⁵ When you live among those nations, you will not be happy. You will not find a home where you can live safely in peace. The Lord will cause you to have troubles in your mind. Your eyes will not see well. You will be sad and upset. ⁶⁶ You will be in danger of death all the time. You will be afraid in the day and at night. You will never know if you will live for one more day. ⁶⁷ Every morning you will say, ‘I want the night to come quickly!’ And every evening you will say, ‘I want the morning to come quickly!’ You will say that because of all the terrible things that you see. ⁶⁸ The Lord told you that you must never travel on the road back to Egypt. But he will send you back to Egypt in ships. In Egypt, you will try to sell yourselves to your enemies, as slaves. But no one will agree to buy you.