53. You will eat the offspring of your own womb—the flesh of your own sons and daughters, whom the Lord your God gave you—because of the desperate and dire circumstances that your enemy has brought on you.
54. Even the most gentle and refined man among you will scowl at his brother or his own dear wife, or the last of his surviving children.
55. He won’t want to give them any of his children’s flesh that he will be eating because he has no other food due to the desperate and dire circumstances that your enemy has brought on you in all your cities.
56. Even the most gentle and refined woman among you, who is so refined and gentle she wouldn’t stomp her foot on the ground, will scowl at her own dear husband, her son, or her daughter—
57. not wanting to give them any of the afterbirth she pushed out or the babies she bore, because she will be eating them secretly while starving due to the desperate and dire circumstances that your enemy will bring on you in your cities.
58. If you don’t carefully keep all the words of this Instruction that are written in this scroll, by fearing the awesome and glorious name of the Lord your God—
59. the Lord will overwhelm you and your descendants with severe and chronic afflictions, and with terrible and untreatable sicknesses.
60. He’ll put on you all the Egyptian diseases about which you were so afraid; they will stick to you!
61. What’s more, the Lord will bring on you all the other diseases and plagues that aren’t written in this Instruction scroll until you are completely wiped out.
62. Once as countless as the stars in the night sky, only a few of you will be left alive—all because you didn’t obey the Lord your God’s voice.
63. And just as before, the Lord enjoyed doing good things for you and increasing your numbers, now the Lord will enjoy annihilating and destroying you. You will be torn off the very fertile land you are entering to possess.
64. The Lord will scatter you among every nation, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will serve other gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known—gods of wood and stone.
65. Among those nations you will have no rest and no place to call your own. There the Lord will give you an agitated mind, failing eyes, and a depressed spirit.
66. Your life will seem to dangle before your very eyes. You will be afraid night and day. You won’t be able to count on surviving for long.