NOTES for Deu 28:1-34
The warnings about blessings and curses that overtake the people in the case of faithfulness or, on the contrary, betrayal of God may appear to be a somewhat strange and formal arithmetic, so characteristic of religious consciousness. The religious person is precisely the one who would like, whether in this world or in the future, for exactly such an arithmetic of good and evil deeds to work, some mechanism of recompense resembling a computer. This computer would sum up every human life, or even the life of whole peoples, and then issue the corresponding total of rewards or punishments. At the same time, of course, every religious person deep down hopes, or is even sure, that the final calculation will be in his favor.
It can appear that the Book of Deuteronomy also confirms the correctness of such a view: after all, here too the subject is rewards and blessings for obedience to God and curses, and therefore punishments, for disobedience. In reality, however, everything proves not so simple. If blessing and curse were merely rewards and punishments issued from above, everything would be roughly as religious consciousness imagines it. In practice, however, blessing and curse are connected respectively with God's giving strength to a person or to a whole people, and with His taking it away. Therefore the issue here, in any case, is the dynamics of a person's relationship with God, or its absence. In this case, of course, the subject is not an individual person but a whole people, but that does not change the essence of the matter.
If so, then we must speak not about rewards or punishments issued on the basis of a person's or a people's behavior matching certain criteria, even religious or moral ones, but about the consequence of the relationships that bind the people to God. Blessing and prosperity as its consequence are not a reward, but a state corresponding to the relationships that bind the people to God. In the same way, curse and the misfortunes that follow are not punishment, but the consequence of the absence of normal relationships with Him. God's strength is inseparable from God's love, and love presupposes precisely the dynamics of relationship, not a game played by established rules. From this comes the picture drawn by the author of the Book of Deuteronomy: a picture of a world abiding in God's love or remaining without it.