Deuteronomy 28

Whoever wrote this adopted the style from ancient treaties between countries and kingdoms in what is now the Middle East. Parts of this track nicely with a treaty that Assyrian king Esarhaddon made with kingdoms he strongarmed for tax revenue. It dates to 672 BC, hundreds of years after Moses. Much like some contracts today, this contract between God and the Israelite ancestors of today’s Jewish people, there are promises that need fulfilled and penalties no one wants to activate. Here, the list of 53 verses (14-68) of penalties far outweighs the 14 verses of perks (1-14). Some are scenes that ministers might say, “That won’t preach.” It means they don’t want to talk about it in a sermon, or anywhere. Perhaps the best of the worst examples is of a mother during a siege eating her newborn baby, and (ugh) the afterbirth (verse 57).

Many Bibles translate this Hebrew word, qados, as “holy.” The word can mean: innocent, free of sin or impurity. But Israel was never that, as far as the Bible reports. They were, however, sometimes devoted to God. That’s another meaning for the Hebrew word used here. It can mean set apart from others, sacred, and devoted. Israel probably wasn’t “holy” or “sacred” because the people were innocent. They were sacred and different from other nations because they were committed to obeying God.

No rain from the iron sky. No plants in a bronze-plated land.

Some scholars say the list of punishments here not only parallel what they find in other ancient treaties, the punishment in those other treaties are reportedly enforced by their gods. The moon god Sin can inflict or heal serious skin diseases. The sun god Shamash can do the same with blindness. Ishtar, associated with the planet Venus, featured sex rituals and was referenced in treaties that spoke of rape.

Many scholars speculate that this portion of the law was added a thousand years after Moses, and after Babylonian invaders from what is now Iraq invaded what was left of Israel after the Assyrians got through with it. Babylonians took down Israelite city walls and leveled Jerusalem in 586 BC. Survivors were deported, to keep them from reforming their nation. That worked for nearly a century, until a new empire—Persians of what is now Iran—rose to power and freed Jews and other political prisoners to go back to their homelands. Descriptions of what happened during the invasion are presented as prophecy, but track well with the history, which makes skeptics or critical thinkers wonder if someone wrote it during the time when Jews were exiled abroad. That’s when many historians say the Jewish Bible started taking form. Jews didn’t have their Jerusalem Temple anymore. All they had that was sacred and tangible were copies of their sacred stories, laws, and teachings. So, Jewish scholars got busy compiling them onto scrolls. Yet some ancient Jewish scrolls are older than that. Some go back to the 700s BC, when Assyrians erased the northern part of the Jewish nation of Israel and exiled the survivors.

Deuteronomy 28:58-68 is a way of saying that if the people of Israel reject God, he’s going to treat them as though they deserve to be shipped back to where they came from: Egyptian slavery. The difference is that slavery is too good for them; no one wants to buy them (28:68). They’re good for nothing but dying.

“Law Book” probably refers to the laws Moses delivered in his speeches, many scholars say. He reportedly wrote what is now Deuteronomy chapters 1-30 and gave them to the priests for safe keeping (31:9). This may be the long-lost book of Jewish laws that motivated King Josiah (ruled about 640-609 BC) to launch a revival and to destroy idols and shrines in the southern Jewish nation of Judah (2 Kings 22:8). The revival was apparently too little, too late. Babylonian invaders from what is now Iraq leveled Jerusalem and erased the Jewish nation from the political map.