So that the generation to come of your children that shall rise up after you,.... Not the next generation, but in future times, in ages to come, at a great distance, even after the destruction of Judea by the Romans; to which Deu 29:23 seems to refer: and the stranger that shall come from a far land; on trade and business, or for the sake of travelling, his road either lying through it, or his curiosity leading him to see it: shall say, when they see the plagues of the land; cities and towns in ruins, fields lie uncultivated, and the whole land depopulated, and all become a barren wilderness, which was once a fruitful country, a land flowing with milk and honey: and the sicknesses which the Lord hath laid upon it; upon the inhabitants of it, as the pestilence and other diseases, which shall have swept the land of them; see Deu 28:22. This case supposes a general departure from the worship of God to the service of idols; otherwise single individuals are punished in their own persons, as in the Deu 29:21.