¹ tn Heb “the curse, the confusion, and the rebuke” (NASB and NIV similar); NRSV “disaster, panic, and frustration.”

¹ tn Heb “You shall not curse a deaf [person] and before a blind [person] you shall not put a stumbling block.”

¹ sn Ancient Near Eastern treaties often had “curses,” or threatened judgments, attached to them. (See Deut 28 for a biblical example of such curses.) The party or parties taking an oath of allegiance acknowledged that disobedience would activate these curses, which typically threatened loss of agricultural fertility as depicted in the following verses.

¹ sn A curse in OT times consists of a formal appeal to God to bring judgment down upon another. Curses were sometimes justified (such as the one spoken by the psalmist here in vv. 6-19), but when they were not, the one pronouncing the curse was in danger of bringing the anticipated judgment down upon himself.

³ tn The verb “cursed” is the Piel preterite from the verb קָלַל (qalal); this means “to be light” in the Qal stem, but here “to treat lightly, with contempt, curse.” See in general H. C. Brichto, The Problem of “Curse” in the Hebrew Bible (JBLMS); and A. C. Thiselton, “The Supposed Power of Words in the Biblical Writings,” JTS 25 (1974): 283-99.

³ tn Heb “the curse and the oath that is written.” The term “curse” refers here to the judgments threatened in the Mosaic law (see Deut 28) for rebellion. The expression “the curse and the oath” is probably a hendiadys (cf. Num 5:21; Neh 10:29) referring to the fact that the covenant with its threatened judgments was ratified by solemn oath and made legally binding upon the covenant community.

¹ sn A blessing and a curse. Every extant treaty text of the late Bronze Age attests to a section known as the “blessings and curses,” the former for covenant loyalty and the latter for covenant breach. Blessings were promised rewards for obedience; curses were threatened judgments for disobedience. In the Book of Deuteronomy these are fully developed in 27:1-28:68. Here Moses adumbrates the whole by way of anticipation.

² tn Grk “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all the things written in the book of the law, to do them.”

¹ tn Grk “May your silver together with you be sent into destruction.” This is a strong curse. The gifts of God are sovereignly bestowed and cannot be purchased.

¹ sn The judgment of plague and famine comes from the covenant curse (Lev 26:25-26). As in v. 10, the city of Jerusalem is figuratively addressed here.

³ sn The imagery of this verse, which depicts the Lord bringing a curse of infertility to the earth, metaphorically describes how the Lord will destroy his enemies.

³ tn Heb “but a blessing is for the head of the one who sells.” The parallelism with “curse” suggests that בְּרָכָה (b^erakhah) “blessing” means “praise.”

¹ tn The direct object suffix on the verb picks up on the emphatic absolute phrase: “they will curse him—the one who withholds grain.”

³ tn The editors of BHS suggest a reading “will be cursed” to make a better parallelism, but the reading of the MT is more striking as a metaphor.

² tn Heb “and it came like water into his inner being, and like oil into his bones.” This may refer to this individual’s appetite for cursing. For him cursing was as refreshing as drinking water or massaging oneself with oil. Another option is that the destructive effects of a curse are in view. In this case a destructive curse invades his very being, like water or oil. Some who interpret the verse this way prefer to repoint the verb from the preterite form וַתָּבֹא (vattavoʾ, “and it came”) to a jussive form וְתָבֹא (v^etavoʾ, “and may it come!”).

¹ tn Heb “Now you are cursed and a servant will not be cut off from you, woodcutters and water carriers for the house of my God.”

⁴ tn The Hebrew phrase אָרוּר לִפְנֵי יְהוָה (ʾarur lifne y^ehvah, “cursed [i.e., condemned] before the Lord”) also occurs in 1 Sam 26:19.

¹ tn The Levites speak again at this point; throughout this pericope the Levites pronounce the curse and the people respond with “Amen.”

¹ tn The two verbs are negated imperfects; they have the nuance of prohibition: You must not go and you must not curse.

³ tn Heb “makes light of his father and his mother.” Almost all English versions render this as some variation of “curses his father or mother.”