Deuteronomy 28:58-68

The fifth view shows Israel deprived of all the benefits she had formerly enjoyed (cf. Deuteronomy 6:21-23; Deuteronomy 26:5-9). This section deals with disease and disasters in the land (Deuteronomy 28:58-63) and deportation from the land (Deuteronomy 28:64-68). Both parts picture a reversal of Exodus blessings.

In the later history of Israel the punishments God predicted here took place very literally when the people disobeyed His law. What Moses described in Deuteronomy 28:32-36 happened in the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities. Deuteronomy 28:52-57 found fulfillment then as well as in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and Israel in A.D. 70. Deuteronomy 28:64-68 have taken place during the Roman invasion of A.D. 70, in the Middle Ages, the Russian pogroms, Nazi Germany, and the present day.

God designed these blessings and curses to persuade His people to obey His covenant with them. Stronger proof of the blessing of obedience and the blasting of disobedience is hardly imaginable. God’s will was, and is, very clear and simple: obey His Word.

This section of Deuteronomy (chs. 27-28) is one of the most important ones in Scripture because it records the two options open to Israel as she entered the Promised Land. Obedience to the revealed Word of God would result in blessing, but disobedience would result in blasting. Scholars who do not believe in supernatural prophecy have said that it would have been impossible for Moses to have written these words. They say the subsequent history of Israel so accurately fulfilled these warnings that someone must have written them much later, perhaps after the Babylonian captivity. The books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings take pains to point out how God fulfilled what Moses said here in Israel’s later history. [Note: See George Harton, "Fulfillment of Deuteronomy 28-30 in History and in Eschatology" (Th.D. dissertation, Dallas Theological Seminary, 1981).] Martin Noth advanced the theory that one man or a group of men later in Israel’s history edited Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings to validate what the writer of Deuteronomy predicted. [Note: Martin Noth, The Deuteronomistic History.] Internal evidence as well as Jewish tradition, however, suggest that these books had separate writers, and their writers composed them earlier than Noth proposed.

"For understanding and explaining Israel’s history as recorded throughout the Old Testament, there are perhaps no more important chapters than Deuteronomy 28-30." [Note: J. Dwight Pentecost, Thy Kingdom Come, p. 105.]

The purpose of the whole ceremony Moses described here was to impress the Israelites with the importance and solemnity of entering into and perpetuating covenant relationship with Yahweh. This ceremony was to be a formal occasion that the Canaanites as well as the Israelites would perceive as a covenant renewal ritual.

"When the Greeks invaded Palestine in 332 B.C., the Samaritans sought and obtained permission from the Greeks to build a temple on Mt. Gerizim. This temple was later destroyed and replaced by a Roman temple, but the Samaritans have observed their sacred festivals, including the Passover, on Mt. Gerizim ever since." [Note: G. Herbert Livingston, The Pentateuch in Its Cultural Environment, p. 208. Cf. John 4:20.]