Deuteronomy 28:35 describes a painful, incurable skin disease spreading from the feet to the head, which Moses presents as a consequence of turning away from the LORD’s covenant. The verse is a warning in the middle of a long list of curses, not a general statement about how God treats every person who suffers.
The LORD will strike you in the knees and in the legs with a sore boil, of which you can not be healed, from the sole of your foot to the crown of your head.
Deuteronomy 28:35 (WEB)
What Deuteronomy 28:35 Means
The verse speaks of a “sore boil” that strikes the knees and legs and then spreads “from the sole of your foot to the crown of your head.” Moses uses the image of a body covered in an illness that cannot be cured. The point is total and inescapable affliction, a judgment that reaches every part of a person.
The phrase “of which you can not be healed” makes the curse especially grim. In the ancient world, a persistent skin disease that could not be treated was among the most feared conditions, and it carried a sense of being cut off from normal life. Moses is describing a loss so complete that no remedy is available.
The verse does not promise that every illness is a punishment, and it does not describe what God does for people who are sick today. It belongs to a covenant framework in which Israel’s blessings and curses depended on whether the nation kept faith with the LORD. Reading it as a rule that explains every hardship in a believer’s life goes beyond what the text itself claims.
The Context of Deuteronomy 28:35
Deuteronomy is presented as a series of speeches Moses gave to Israel on the plains of Moab before they entered the promised land. Tradition holds that Moses is the speaker, and the audience is the new generation of Israelites who would live under the covenant in Canaan. Chapter 28 sets out the blessings for obedience and the curses for rebellion, and it is one of the most detailed warnings in the Torah.
The verses just before and after 28:35 describe a sequence of losses: sons and daughters taken by another nation, crops eaten by strangers, and the harvest destroyed by locusts. Verse 35 sits in the middle of this list as one more form of judgment, and reading it alongside those losses shows that the curse is about the collapse of ordinary life under the covenant’s terms. It is not a single isolated event in one person’s health.
Key Phrases in Deuteronomy 28:35
Deuteronomy 30:19
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life, that you may live, you and your descendants…
(WEB)
This verse comes near the end of Moses’ speeches and sums up the covenant choice set before Israel. Reading it alongside 28:35 shows that the curses were never meant to be the final word, but a sober invitation to choose life by returning to the LORD.
John 9:1-3
1 As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “Neither did this man sin, nor his parents; but, that the works of God might be revealed in him.
(WEB)
In this passage Jesus refuses to treat a man’s blindness as a simple sign of his sin. Reading it with Deuteronomy 28:35 helps you see that the Old Testament covenant warnings are not a template for explaining every sickness, and that God’s purposes in suffering can be larger than any single cause.
A Short Prayer From Deuteronomy 28:35
Lord, your word is serious, and I do not want to read the warnings of Deuteronomy lightly. Search my heart and show me any places where I have turned from your ways or grown careless in my faithfulness to you. Give me the courage to repent and the humility not to judge others in their pain. Where I am suffering, hold me close, and where I am watching others suffer, teach me to love them well. Thank you that your mercy is greater than the curses of the covenant. Amen.
