What Does Deuteronomy 28:59 Mean?
Then the LORD will make your blows marvelous, and those upon your seed, great and steady blows, and harmful and steady sicknesses.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Then the LORD will make thy plagues wonderful, and the plagues of thy seed, even great plagues, and of long continuance, and sore sicknesses, and of long continuance.THE KEY
The verse calls the afflictions firm in their duration: their severity is matched by their power to endure.
THE MEANING
This verse gives affliction no soft edges: it names blows, great sicknesses, and a duration made firm. Its threat reaches the reader’s seed as well, presenting suffering as both bodily and generational.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the assumption that terrible suffering is always brief: the verse explicitly joins severity to duration.
THE ROOT
נֶאֱמָנוֹת
ne’emānōt
GROWS FROM
אמן
To be firm, steady, or established.
“steady” in this verse is ne’emānōt. The word translated “long continuance” carries the sense of being firm or made to hold. The same root family gives language for trust and for Amen, an affirmation of what stands; here, that firmness describes the staying power of the affliction.
ALSO GROWS
emunah: Firmness, steadiness, trust.
אֱמוּנָה
Its sense of grounded reliance reveals how firmness can underlie trust; here the same root marks how firmly the affliction persists.
amen: Firmly; truly; so be it.
אָמֵן
Amen affirms something as established, echoing the verse’s description of suffering as fixed in duration.
מַכּוֹת
makkot
GROWS FROM
נכה
To strike or smite; a blow.
“Plagues” can sound like a general category of disease, while the Hebrew keeps the force of being struck. The verse describes great blows and then gives them a duration that holds.
ALSO GROWS
nakah: To strike or smite.
נָכָה
This is the verb behind the verse’s image of affliction as blows.
makkah: A blow, wound, or plague.
מַכָּה
The plural in the verse keeps the emphasis on multiple blows rather than a single passing pain.
הִפְלָא
hiphlāʾ
GROWS FROM
פלא
To be extraordinary or beyond ordinary measure; to be marvelous.
“marvelous” in this verse is hiphlāʾ. The root describes what exceeds the ordinary, and it can name dread as well as marvel. Here the afflictions are extraordinary in scale; the word does not make them pleasant.
ALSO GROWS
pele: A wonder or extraordinary thing.
פֶּלֶא
It shows that the root marks what exceeds ordinary measure, not only what delights.
nifla’ot: Wonders or marvelous acts.
נִפְלָאוֹת
This branch appears in descriptions of extraordinary acts, linking the verse’s “wonderful” to a wider language of power beyond the ordinary.
THE PATTERN
The language of wonder marks what exceeds ordinary measure; the result may be affliction or deliverance.
And I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all my wonders, which I will do in its midst, and after that he will let you go.You are the God who makes wonders; you make known your strength among the peoples.THE THREAD
And I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all my wonders, which I will do in its midst, and after that he will let you go.Exodus 3:20 uses the same roots for “smite” (נכה) and “wonders” (פלא), then says Pharaoh lets the people go. The shared roots show that forceful striking and extraordinary action can mark a movement out of constriction, without making this verse’s violence gentler.
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