One of the worst punishments for not following Yahweh and the Levite priests' advice: You'll eat your own children!  Family value meals!  (Deuteronomy 28:53-55)

Deuteronomy 28 is a descent into madness.  Here's a basic rundown.

It starts off innocent enough.  If you follow Yahweh and listen to the advice of the priests, you (meaning 'the Israelites') will:

1. Be blessed in the city and in the field
2. be blessed in body, crops, livestock, and family
3. have your basket and store blessed
4. be blessed when you "come in and when you go out" - not sure what that means
5. find that Yahweh will defeat your enemies before you face them (they'll come against you one way and flee seven)
6. find that your storehouses have been blessed
7. be considered a holy person unto Yahweh Himself
8. AGAIN be blessed in body, crops, livestock, and family.
9. Have abundant crops due to good weather, other people will borrow from and owe you (not the other way around)
10. Be the head and not the tail.

But ... if you don't follow Yahweh and you actually go after "other gods" (insinuating of course that the Israelites believed in other gods!), then:

1. You will be cursed in the city and in the field
2. Your basket and store will be cursed
3. Your body, crops, livestock, and family will be cursed
4. You will be cursed when  you "come in and go out." - still have no idea what that means!
5. You will be sent in cursing, vexation, and rebuke in everything you do until you are dead
6. You'll get very sick with pestilence
7. You'll be smited with consumption, fever, inflammation, "an extreme burning", by sword, "the blasting", MILDEW, and Yahweh will pursue you until you die!!!
8. Heaven above will be brass, while the earth below is iron. (On top of all the other stuff, you get crappy weather too!)
9. Instead of rain, your crops will get powder and dust.
10. Your corpse will be eaten by vultures and other scavengers
11.  You'll get the botch of Egypt, hemorrhoids, scabs and itches that can't be healed, madness, blindness, and "astonishment of heart" (if numbers 6 and 7 weren't bad enough!)
12. You'll grope around during day and night, won't be prosperous (no shit!)
13. When you marry, other men will sleep with your wife
14. Your ox will be slain before your eyes, your donkeys will be "violently taken away before your eyes", your sheep will be given to your enemies
15. Your sons and daughters will be given away to other people; you'll look everywhere for them, but will not find them
16. You will not be prosperous at all (how many times do the priests threaten this?), and you will be oppressed by others
17. You'll go mad just at the sight of the things going on around you
18.  Your knees will be smited and you'll get a huge sore botch from the bottom of your feet to the top of your head.
19. You'll be ruled by a strange nation and worship their gods, wood, and stone.
20. You'll become a joke to your neighbors
21. Locusts will consume your crops; worms shall eat your vineyards
22. You'll have fruitless olive trees
23. You'll have sons and daughters but won't enjoy them because they'll go into captivity.
24. The strangers among you will rise up and rule
25. You'll serve your enemies hungry, thirsty, and naked, under a yoke of iron, until your dead.
26. Yahweh will send a fierce nation from the end of the earth, and this nation will eat your cattle, take the fruit of your land, he'll besiege your city and easily overtake it, and you'll BE FORCED TO EAT YOUR OWN FLESH AND YOUR OWN CHILDREN'S FLESH
27. Pretty women around you will turn an evil eye toward husband and eat her children
28. Mass plagues will destroy your people
29. The Israelites will be scattered around the world and follow other gods
30. The Israelites will be sold back to Egypt as slaves.

Wow!  The Levite priests went out of their way on this one.  I admit, the first time I read the Bible this chapter didn't stick.  Now it's the craziest chapter I've read, and I've read some crazy ones so far! You'd think that since so people listen to the advice of these ancient Bronze Age people today, that this stuff would be prevalent in society. 

Image from Christa Wimmers

I imagine that any reasonable and rational Israelite, after reading the last chapters of Leviticus, would have said something like, "Whoa God, what is up with you?!?" And of course, he would've been met by silence, because it wasn't really God who wrote this stuff, but the priests and Israelite elites.

The last chapters of Leviticus, 25 through 27, paint God as if he's a sociopathic control freak, with a tinge of multiple personality disorder, and paranoid delusion. In Chapter 25, God's kind of a good guy. In Chapter 26, he morphs into a monster. And finally, in Chapter 27, He calms down - a little bit, but gives some rather awkward bits of information regarding the cash value of human life.

As I said, in Chapter 25, God's a half-decent guy. He gives a little bit of advice on real estate, how to treat your slaves, how to purchase your brother as a slave, and he even says some nice, though ironic, things. God almost sounds like Thomas Jefferson when he said, ""Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."

And like Thomas Jefferson, whom I admire, He was in the odd position of having to justify slavery.

Chapter 26 is where his personality sudden changes. He tells the Israelites, through the scribes who wrote this down, that if they follow his laws (stone nonbelievers, don't boil a kid in its mother's milk, don't eat crustaceans, etc.), then God will give them success. He promises to give them rain when rain is due, to be on their side when the Israelites go to war, to drive away "evil beasts", and to have bountiful harvests.

But.

But if the Israelites don't do this, if they have the audacity to go against Him and His covenant, God lists all the punishments He will put upon them. They be forced to under such hardship that they will have to eat their kids (Leviticus 26:29), at least the ones left over after their enemies and animals get to them first.

While this is going on, God will appoint over the Israelites terror, consumption, the burning ague that will consume their eyes and cause sorrow of heart.

Oh yea, my favorite threat is that 10 women will cook my bread. Hey, as long as they're hot chicks that would be awesome. But even if they were humongous 500 pounders and ugly - how is that a punishment? The men who wrote Leviticus must really hate it when women congregate in groups. Yea, they can be loud and they giggle alot, and say weird girly things - but it would seem to me that 10 women cooking my bread would be the least of my worries.

In Chapter 27, God discusses the value of a human life in terms of cash value. Any healthy male 20 to 60 years old is worth 50 shekels. Women are worth 30 shekels. Males aged 5 to 20 are worth 20 shekels, and females in the same age range are worth 10. Under 5, males are 5 shekels and females are 3. Over 60, males are 15 shekels, and women are 10. Absent are fetuses, which are worth nothing in Leviticus.

But there you have it, folks. Men are worth more than women. And in the words of a bumper sticker I often see, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."

Just kidding, I don't believe this stuff at all. In fact, re-reading the Bible is making me REALLY not believe any of this stuff even more than I didn't believe it before. Does that make sense? But I wonder if my religious friends believe, at the very least, that men are worth more shekels than women. Do you?

Woohoo! I'm done with Leviticus!