17. There may be among you a man or woman, or a clan or tribe, whose heart is now turning away from the Lord, our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; there may be among you a root bearing poison and wormwood;
18. if any such persons, after hearing the words of this curse, should congratulate themselves, saying in their hearts, “I am safe, even though I walk in stubbornness of heart,” thereby sweeping away moist and dry alike,
19. the Lord will never consent to pardon them. Instead, the Lord’s burning wrath will flare up against them; every curse written in this book will pounce on them, and the Lord will blot out their names from under the heavens.
20. The Lord will single them out from all the tribes of Israel for doom, in keeping with all the curses of the covenant written in this book of the law.
21. Future generations, your descendants who will rise up after you, as well as the foreigners who will come here from distant lands, when they see the calamities of this land and the ills the Lord has inflicted upon it—
22. all its soil burned out by sulphur and salt, unsown and unfruitful, without a blade of grass, like the catastrophe of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in his furious wrath—
23. they and all the nations will ask, “Why has the Lord dealt thus with this land? Why this great outburst of wrath?”
24. And they will say, “Because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, which he had made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt,
25. and they went and served other gods and bowed down to them, gods whom they did not know and whom he had not apportioned to them.
26. So the anger of the Lord flared up against this land and brought on it every curse written in this book.