Deuteronomy 28 contains one of the hardest sentences in the Old Testament:
“And it shall come to pass, that as the LORD rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the LORD will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought” (Deuteronomy 28:63).
Read alone, it sounds like a God who relishes destruction. Read in its place, it is part of a covenant warning designed to be so frightening that it would never need to be carried out. It sits inside a speech running from Deuteronomy 27 through 30 that ends with scattered people gathered home. And in Ezekiel 18, God tells people living through these very curses that their death gives him no pleasure. The chapter does not show a God who enjoys punishing people.
Most readers stumble here for a simple reason. The chapter is usually read alone, and it is usually read as a report on God’s feelings. Both habits mislead. The way through is to put a few pieces in order: what kind of speech this is, how the four chapters fit together, what the troubling verse can and cannot mean and where the story goes after the curses.
A Warning Built to Be Loud
The chapter opens with fourteen verses of blessing: fruitful fields, healthy children, rain in its season, security against enemies. Then verse 15 turns the conditional around. If Israel will not listen to the voice of the Lord, curses follow, and they run to the end of the chapter: disease, drought, defeat in battle, exile and famine during siege so extreme that parents eat their own children. The curses take up far more space than the blessings, and a reader who starts in the middle will reasonably wonder why the author dwells on suffering.
The answer starts with the kind of speech this is. A covenant is a binding relationship with stated terms. In Deuteronomy, Moses renews the covenant between God and Israel before the people cross into the land. The terms are the laws of chapters 12–26. Chapters 27 and 28 attach consequences to keeping or breaking them.
Dr. Esau McCaulley, who teaches New Testament at Wheaton College and wrote a significant portion of his doctoral dissertation on Deuteronomy 28–30, explains what that kind of language was built to do. God is setting two paths in front of Israel, obedience with blessing or disobedience with curse. McCaulley describes the purpose of the curse language this way: “The way this rhetoric worked was you made it seem so bad if you disobeyed that nobody would disobey.”
That changes what the length of the list means. A deterrent reveals the speaker’s goal, and the goal is prevention. The more someone wants to keep a disaster from happening, the more vividly they describe it. A curse list this long measures how badly the speaker wants Israel to choose the other road.
McCaulley offers an ordinary comparison. Parents sometimes threaten a child with losing everything they love and sitting in the corner forever. As he puts it, “The parent isn’t actually gonna put you in the corner forever.” The parent is trying to make the child feel how serious the moment is.
The comparison helps with one thing and breaks down on another, and the break matters. It helps because it shows that severe language can come from love and aim at prevention. It breaks because the parent’s threat is exaggeration that will never happen. Deuteronomy’s curses did happen. Israel lost the land: the northern kingdom fell to Assyria, and Judah went into exile in Babylon. So the deterrent reading leaves the warnings real. Their first purpose was to keep the disaster from coming, and their severity matched genuine stakes. Keep that half of the analogy and set the other half aside.
Four Chapters, One Argument
This is the step most readers miss. Deuteronomy 28 is the middle of a longer argument, and the argument has a direction. McCaulley says it directly: “You can read Deuteronomy 27 to 30 like a narrative.”
Chapter 27 sets up a public ceremony. Once Israel enters the land, half the tribes are to stand on Mount Gerizim to bless and half on Mount Ebal for the curse. The Levites read out curses on specific hidden sins, and after each one the people answer Amen. The people themselves agree to the terms.
Chapter 28 lays out blessings and curses in full.
Chapter 29 renews the covenant and adds a sobering admission. The speech already knows Israel’s heart is not equal to the terms:
“Yet the LORD hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day” (Deuteronomy 29:4).
Chapter 30 looks past the curses to a time when the scattered people remember and return to God:
“That then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath scattered thee” (Deuteronomy 30:3).
The chapter promises that God will circumcise their hearts so they can love him, and it closes with a plea:
“I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
McCaulley summarizes God’s message across the whole unit in four short sentences: “These are your options. I know you’re not gonna listen, therefore, I’m gonna punish you, but I’m gonna bring you back because I delight in you.”
Notice where delight shows up in that summary. It attaches to bringing Israel back. That is why McCaulley warns against reading only the middle: “You can’t stop midway in the story and say, God’s real thing is, I enjoy punishing people.”
The Verse That Says God Will Rejoice
Verse 63 is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. The verse says what it says. In the KJV, the same word describes God rejoicing over Israel to do them good and rejoicing over them to destroy them. The New Living Translation pushes the wording further, rendering it as God finding great pleasure in destroying them. A reader is right to feel the sting.
The translation difference is worth handling honestly. The sources behind this article do not examine the Hebrew verb, and this article will not pretend to settle its range. What the two renderings do show is agreement on the structure of the verse: in both, one attitude of God covers both blessing and judgment, and the parallel is the point. They differ in how strongly they state that attitude. Neither rendering, taken alone, tells you whether the verse describes an appetite for suffering or a full commitment to enforcing the covenant. That question has to be answered from the surrounding text.
Three observations from that text help, and none of them makes the verse disappear.
First, the verse belongs to the deterrent section. Its job is to remove any comforting thought that God would be reluctant to enforce the covenant. Israel could not count on God looking away. God would be as committed to the consequences as he had been to the gifts. That is a claim about how seriously God takes his covenant. To turn it into a disclosure of what God most wants, a reader has to lift it out of a speech whose stated goal is life.
Second, rejoicing in justice differs from enjoying pain. Dr. Jo Vitale, an Old Testament scholar, takes up this exact word, pleasure, and admits she wrestled with it herself as a teenager. What changed her mind was watching a close friend suffer a grave wrong while the person responsible was never held to account. Her own love for her friend made her long for justice. Vitale argues that this is how people already think when a court finally gets it right: “We don’t celebrate the crime, we don’t celebrate the wrongdoing. We don’t celebrate the fact this has to happen. I don’t think God does either.”
Her point is that love and judgment are allies. “If you love somebody, you can’t just sweep it under the carpet, say No big deal.” A God who felt nothing about oppression, betrayal and the abuse of the weak would be indifferent, and indifference is a strange thing to call love. Vitale’s phrase for the alternative is that “justice is an expression of true love.” There can be a rightness in justice being done without any taste for the suffering it brings.
Third, the Bible answers the question of God’s desire directly, and it addresses that answer to people who were inside the curses.
What God Says to People Living Through the Curses
Ezekiel prophesied among the exiles in Babylon. These people had lived through siege, defeat and removal from the land, the very outcomes Deuteronomy 28 described. In Ezekiel 18 they complain that they are being punished for their parents’ sins. God answers by insisting that each person can turn and live.
Then he speaks about his own desire:
“Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?” (Ezekiel 18:23).
And at the end of the chapter:
“For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye” (Ezekiel 18:32).
Vitale points to this chapter as the plainest statement of the matter, and says of God’s answer, “That’s his heart.” The order of these texts teaches something. Deuteronomy speaks before the disaster, in the voice of warning. Ezekiel speaks during it, in the voice of appeal. The warning was loud so that Israel would never need the appeal. When they did need it, God’s first words were about turning and living.
McCaulley adds a historical pattern that fits this reading. In the record of Israel’s kings and prophets, he says, “You don’t see Israel making one mistake and God saying, that’s it.” Generation after generation, God sends prophets pleading with the people before the consequences arrive. McCaulley puts it bluntly: “God is not sitting in heaven waiting for humanity to mess up so that he can then smash them and be glorified in the smashing.” Even the prophets’ harshest words had a purpose: “Calling Israel back is a manifestation of love.”
The warnings were also evenhanded. McCaulley notes that Leviticus 18 told Israel the land would expel them for the same practices that led to the expulsion of the nations before them, so that “what happens to the Canaanites also happens to Israel, and he predicts it when they come to the land.”
Who Carries the Curse
Deuteronomy 30 promises a return and a changed heart. McCaulley reads the rest of Scripture as the account of how that promise is finally kept. He describes Israel caught in a repeating pattern of grace, failure, curse, exile and restoration, and he names where it stops: “Jesus is the one whose death ends this cycle of opportunity for blessing.”
He grounds that in Paul, who quotes Deuteronomy’s curse language directly. Galatians 3:10 cites the curse on everyone who does not continue in all that the law requires, drawn from Deuteronomy 27:26. Then Paul writes:
“Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Galatians 3:13).
That last line comes from Deuteronomy 21:23.
Paul keeps the curse fully in force. What he adds is the identity of the one who bore it: God himself, in the person of his Son. A God who enjoyed punishing would have no reason to take the curse onto himself. Read in order, Deuteronomy 28 states the stakes, Deuteronomy 30 states God’s intention beyond them, Ezekiel 18 states his desire to people living the worst of it, and Galatians 3 shows how far that desire went. The chapter that seemed to expose a cruel God turns out to be the loudest warning of a God who did not want to lose his people, and who would not let the curse be the last word.
Quick Answers
Does Deuteronomy 28 promise health and wealth to people who obey God today? No. The blessings and curses were covenant terms given to Israel as a nation entering the land. Reading them as a personal guarantee of prosperity, or a personal threat of disaster, mistakes the kind of text this is.
Should I read my own suffering as one of these curses? Nothing in the passage supports that. Ezekiel 18 rejects the idea that people are simply carrying inherited punishment, and Paul teaches that Christ bore the curse of the law. Hard seasons call for lament, honest prayer and the help of others, not a search through Deuteronomy for a verdict.
Does Jesus’s teaching fit this reading? Vitale points to John 3, where God sends his Son to save the world rather than condemn it. McCaulley points to Jesus’s parable of the tenants, where the owner sends servant after servant before finally sending his son.
How can I read other hard passages like this one? Vitale’s first question is where a passage fits in the larger story: what comes before it and what comes after. McCaulley urges reading any single text in light of the whole of Scripture and of God’s character revealed in Jesus. Deuteronomy 28 is a clear case of why both habits matter.