Deuteronomy 28:65

Hebrew Bible

64 The Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of wood and stone. 65 Among those nations you will have no rest, nor will there be a place of peaceful rest for the soles of your feet, for there the Lord will give you an anxious heart, failing eyesight, and a spirit of despair. 66 Your life will hang in doubt before you; you will be terrified by night and day and will have no certainty of surviving from one day to the next.

1 Enoch 103:13

Pseudepigrapha

12 They have had dominion over us that hated us †and smote us; And to those that hated us† we have bowed our necks But they pitied us not. 13 We desired to get away from them that we might escape and be at rest, But found no place whereunto we should flee and be safe from them. 14 And are complained to the rulers in our tribulation, And cried out against those who devoured us, But they did not attend to our cries And would not hearken to our voice.

 Notes and References

"... After Enoch has told the sinners what their true lot is (being led to Sheol, to darkness, a snare and a flaming fire; 103:7-8), perhaps the clearest profile of the righteous is given. Enoch tells the sinners to not despair over their lot in life, and does so by quoting a righteous person lamenting his distress. Nickelsburg says that “perhaps no other passage in our literature describes the circumstance that give rise to apocalyptic theology with such poignancy and eloquence.” By drawing on vocabulary and phrases from Deuteronomy 28, the irony of suffering the curses of covenant despite not breaking it are obvious. Perhaps nothing exhibits this irony than the exclamation: “We had hoped to become the head and become the tail” (1 Enoch 103:11; compare Deuteronomy 28:13, 44). The righteous are thus oppressed by the wealthy, and when they try to complain to the rulers of the land, they took the sinners’ side instead (103:14-15). Nickelsburg notes, however, that the righteous are never called “poor” and “lowly” only once. It is the social injustice of the situation that is emphasized, more than the social statuses of the groups involved ..."

Berntsson, Peter The First and the Last: Eschatological Reversal in 1 Enoch and the Gospel of Luke (p. 23) Uppsala University, 2016

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