The Ceremony at Ebal and Gerizim

Deuteronomy 27 instructs Israel to perform a covenant ceremony once they cross the Jordan. Large stones are to be set up, coated with plaster, and inscribed with "all the words of this law" (Deuteronomy 27:3). An altar of uncut stones is to be built on Mount Ebal, and burnt offerings and peace offerings made. Then the tribes are to divide: six on Mount Gerizim to pronounce blessings, six on Mount Ebal to pronounce curses.

The Levites are then to recite twelve curses, each concluding with the congregation's "Amen." The curses address hidden sins — carved images made in secret, dishonoring parents, moving a neighbor's boundary stone, misleading the blind, perverting justice for the vulnerable, and incest (Deuteronomy 27:15–26). Peter Craigie, in his Deuteronomy commentary (NICOT, 1976), notes the significance of the "Amen" response: it is a communal acknowledgment of responsibility. The people are not passive recipients of the curse list. They affirm it. They agree that these sins, even when done in secret, fall under God's judgment.

The twelfth curse is the most comprehensive:

"'Cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them.' And all the people shall say, 'Amen.'" — Deuteronomy 27:26 (ESV)

Paul quotes this verse in Galatians 3:10, arguing that it establishes the impossibility of earning justification through law-keeping: whoever depends on the law for righteousness is under a curse, because the law demands total and continuous obedience that no fallen human being can maintain. The curse of Deuteronomy 27:26 was always, for Paul, pointing beyond itself to the need for a redeemer who would bear that curse in our place.

The Blessings

Deuteronomy 28 opens with fourteen verses of blessing — the most compressed and comprehensive vision of human flourishing in the Old Testament. If Israel listens to the voice of the LORD and obeys, blessing will pursue them in city and field, in offspring and harvest, in the produce of their animals and the fruit of their ground, in coming in and going out. Enemies who rise against them will be defeated before them:

"The LORD will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before you. They shall come out against you one way and flee before you seven ways." — Deuteronomy 28:7 (ESV)

Patrick Miller, in his Deuteronomy commentary (Interpretation, 1990), argues that Deuteronomy's vision of blessing is irreducibly material and corporate. The New Testament spiritualizes these promises in certain ways — the blessing of Abraham comes to the Gentiles through Christ (Galatians 3:14) — but Deuteronomy's own vision is of a community in which obedience produces visible, tangible flourishing that the surrounding nations can see and wonder at. Blessing is not merely internal peace; it is ordered communal life under God's good rule.

We keep coming back to how short this section is — fourteen verses of blessing — against what comes next.

The Curses and Their Depth

The curses occupy the remaining fifty-four verses of chapter 28 — nearly four times the space given to blessings. They begin proportionally — what was blessed is now cursed, in city and field, in basket and kneading bowl — but they expand rapidly into descriptions of disease, drought, defeat, madness, blindness, and siege. The culminating section anticipates an exile so severe that Israel will be returned to Egypt in ships, and no one will want to buy them (Deuteronomy 28:68).

It is worth sitting with the specificity of these curses rather than moving past them quickly. The text describes your body wasting with tumors and scabs (verse 27). It describes you being struck with madness and blindness, groping at noon as the blind grope in darkness (verse 29). It describes your betrothed wife being taken by another man, your house built and not lived in, your vineyard planted and not harvested (verse 30). It describes the very things the blessings promised — home, harvest, marriage, children — being destroyed in reverse, one by one. The enemy you feared will set up their own king over you (verse 36). You will plant much and harvest little because the locust will consume it (verse 38). Your sons and daughters will be given to another people and your eyes will fail with longing for them all day long (verse 32).

J.G. McConville, in his Deuteronomy commentary (Apollos OT Commentary, 2002), observes that the curses are not designed to frighten Israel into bare compliance. They are designed to make Israel understand what life without the LORD's blessing actually looks like. They are the detailed shape of a world from which God has withdrawn. And in one of the chapter's most piercing verses, Moses identifies the root failure not as dramatic apostasy but as joyless obedience:

"Because you did not serve the LORD your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, because of the abundance of all things, therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the LORD will send against you." — Deuteronomy 28:47–48 (ESV)

What strikes us about that verse is how precise the diagnosis is. The failure described is not atheism. It is not an organized rebellion against God. It is serving God without joy — going through the motions while the heart has drifted, treating the covenant as obligation rather than love. Moses is saying that you can be technically observant and spiritually empty, and that God treats that emptiness as a form of abandonment. The forgetfulness he warned about in chapter 6 — forgetting that God brought you out, forgetting what He did, forgetting who you are — this is what forgetfulness produces at the far end: a people in chains, wondering what went wrong.

The curses of chapter 28 are not abstract threats. Israel will live them. The prophets will reference them. The exile will fulfill them. These are not hypothetical consequences. They are the shape of history when God's people stop serving Him with gladness.

Last updated: March 3, 2026.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.