1 "'You shall make for yourselves no idols, neither shall you raise up an engraved image or a pillar, neither shall you place any figured stone in your land, to bow down to it: for I am Yahweh your God. 2 "'You shall keep my Sabbaths, and have reverence for my sanctuary. I am Yahweh. 3 "'If you walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; 4 then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. 5 Your threshing shall reach to the vintage, and the vintage shall reach to the sowing time; and you shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. 6 "'I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and no one will make you afraid; and I will remove evil animals out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land. 7 You shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. 8 Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall chase ten thousand; and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword. 9 "'I will have respect for you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and will establish my covenant with you. 10 You shall eat old store long kept, and you shall move out the old because of the new. 11 I will set my tent among you: and my soul won't abhor you. 12 I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you will be my people. 13 I am Yahweh your God, who brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their slaves; and I have broken the bars of your yoke, and made you go upright. 14 "'But if you will not listen to me, and will not do all these commandments; 15 and if you shall reject my statutes, and if your soul abhors my ordinances, so that you will not do all my commandments, but break my covenant; 16 I also will do this to you: I will appoint terror over you, even consumption and fever, that shall consume the eyes, and make the soul to pine away; and you will sow your seed in vain, for your enemies will eat it. 17 I will set my face against you, and you will be struck before your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you; and you will flee when no one pursues you. 18 "'If you in spite of these things will not listen to me, then I will chastise you seven times more for your sins. 19 I will break the pride of your power, and I will make your sky like iron, and your soil like brass; 20 and your strength will be spent in vain; for your land won't yield its increase, neither will the trees of the land yield their fruit. 21 "'If you walk contrary to me, and won't listen to me, then I will bring seven times more plagues on you according to your sins. 22 I will send the wild animals among you, which will rob you of your children, destroy your livestock, and make you few in number; and your roads will become desolate. 23 "'If by these things you won't be reformed to me, but will walk contrary to me; 24 then I will also walk contrary to you; and I will strike you, even I, seven times for your sins. 25 I will bring a sword upon you, that will execute the vengeance of the covenant; and you will be gathered together within your cities: and I will send the pestilence among you; and you will be delivered into the hand of the enemy. 26 When I break your staff of bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver your bread again by weight: and you shall eat, and not be satisfied. 27 "'If you in spite of this won't listen to me, but walk contrary to me; 28 then I will walk contrary to you in wrath; and I also will chastise you seven times for your sins. 29 You will eat the flesh of your sons, and you will eat the flesh of your daughters. 30 I will destroy your high places, and cut down your incense altars, and cast your dead bodies upon the bodies of your idols; and my soul will abhor you. 31 I will lay your cities waste, and will bring your sanctuaries to desolation, and I will not take delight in the sweet fragrance of your offerings. 32 I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies that dwell therein will be astonished at it. 33 I will scatter you among the nations, and I will draw out the sword after you: and your land will be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste. 34 Then the land will enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate and you are in your enemies' land. Even then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. 35 As long as it lies desolate it shall have rest, even the rest which it didn't have in your sabbaths, when you lived on it. 36 "'As for those of you who are left, I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies: and the sound of a driven leaf will put them to flight; and they shall flee, as one flees from the sword; and they will fall when no one pursues. 37 They will stumble over one another, as it were before the sword, when no one pursues: and you will have no power to stand before your enemies. 38 You will perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies will eat you up. 39 Those of you who are left will pine away in their iniquity in your enemies' lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall they pine away with them. 40 "'If they confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, in their trespass which they trespassed against me, and also that, because they walked contrary to me, 41 I also walked contrary to them, and brought them into the land of their enemies: if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled, and they then accept the punishment of their iniquity; 42 then I will remember my covenant with Jacob; and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham; and I will remember the land. 43 The land also will be left by them, and will enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them: and they will accept the punishment of their iniquity; because, even because they rejected my ordinances, and their soul abhorred my statutes. 44 Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break my covenant with them; for I am Yahweh their God; 45 but I will for their sake remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God. I am Yahweh.'" 46 These are the statutes, ordinances and laws, which Yahweh made between him and the children of Israel in Mount Sinai by Moses.
Idolatry forbidden, Leviticus 26:1. The Sabbath to be sanctified, Leviticus 26:2-3. Promises to obedience, of fruitful fields, plentiful harvests, and vintage, Leviticus 26:4-5. Of peace and security, Leviticus 26:6. Discomfiture of their enemies, Leviticus 26:7-9. Of abundance, Leviticus 26:10. Of the divine presence, Leviticus 26:11-13. Threatenings against the disobedient, Leviticus 26:14-15. Of terror and dismay, Leviticus 26:16. Their enemies shall prevail against them, Leviticus 26:17-18. Of barrenness, Leviticus 26:19-20. Of desolation by wild beasts, Leviticus 26:21-22. And if not humbled and reformed, worse evils shall be inflicted upon them, Leviticus 26:23-24. Their enemies shall prevail, and they shall be wasted by the pestilence, Leviticus 26:25-26. If they should still continue refractory, they shall be yet more sorely punished, Leviticus 26:27-28. The famine shall so increase that they shall be obliged to eat their own children, Leviticus 26:29. Their carcasses shall be cast upon the carcasses of their idols, Leviticus 26:30. Their cities shall be wasted, and the sanctuary desolated, Leviticus 26:31; the land destroyed, Leviticus 26:32; themselves scattered among their enemies, and pursued with utter confusion and distress, Leviticus 26:33-39. If under these judgments they confess their sin and return to God, He will remember them in mercy, Leviticus 26:40-43; visit them even in the land of their enemies, Leviticus 26:44; and remember His covenant with their fathers, Leviticus 26:45. The conclusion, stating these to be the judgments and laws which the Lord made between himself and the children of Israel in Mount Sinai, Leviticus 26:46.
INTRODUCTION TO LEVITICUS 26
In this chapter, after a repetition of some laws against idolatry, and concerning keeping sabbaths, and reverencing the sanctuary of God, Leviticus 26:1; in order to encourage the Israelites to keep the various statutes and commandments in this book, and in the preceding, many promises are made of plenty, and peace, and safety from enemies, and of the presence of God with them, Leviticus 26:3; and on the contrary, to such as should despise and break his commandments, the most grievous things are threatened, as diseases of body, destruction by their enemies, barrenness and unfruitfulness of land, the sore judgments of wild beasts, famine, sword, and pestilence, Leviticus 26:14; and yet after all, when they should confess their sins, and were humbled for them, the Lord promises to remember the covenant he made with their ancestors, and would deal kindly with them, and not cast them away, and utterly destroy them, Leviticus 26:40.
(Leviticus 26:1-13) Promises upon keeping the precepts.
(v. 14-39) Threatenings against disobedience.
(Leviticus 26:40-46) God promises to remember those that repent.
Promises and Threats - Leviticus 26
Just as the book of the covenant, the kernel containing the fundamental principles of the covenant fellowship, which the Lord established with the children of Israel whom He had adopted as His nation, and the rule of life for the covenant nation (Ex 20:22-23:19), concluded with promises and threats (Exodus 23:20-33); so the giving of the law at Sinai, as the unfolding of the inner, spiritual side of the whole of the covenant constitution, closes in this chapter with an elaborate unfolding of the blessing which would be secured by a faithful observance of the laws, and the curse which would follow the transgression of them. But whilst the former promises and threats (Ex 23) related to the conquest of the promised land of Canaan, the promises in this chapter refer to the blessings which were to be bestowed upon Israel when the land was in their possession (Leviticus 26:3-13), and the threats to the judgments with which the Lord would visit His disobedient people in their inheritance, and in fact drive them out and scatter them among the heathen (vv. 14-39). When this had been done, then, as is still further proclaimed with a prophetic look into the distant future, would they feel remorse, acknowledge their sin to the Lord, and be once more received into favour by Him, the eternally faithful covenant God (Leviticus 26:40-45).
(Note: When modern critics, who are carried away by naturalism, maintain that Moses was not the author of these exhortations and warnings, because of their prophetic contents, and assign them to the times of the kings, the end of the eighth, or beginning of the seventh century (see Ewald, Gesch. i. 156), they have not considered, in their antipathy to any supernatural revelations from God in the Old Testament, that even apart from any higher illumination, the fundamental idea of these promises and threats must have presented itself to the mind of the lawgiver Moses. It required but a very little knowledge of the nature of the human heart, and a clear insight into the spiritual and ethical character of the law, to enable him to foresee that the earthly-minded, unholy nation would not fulfil the solemn demand of the law that their whole life should be sanctified to the Lord God, that they would transgress in many ways, and rebel against God and His holy laws, and therefore that in any case times of fidelity and the corresponding blessing would alternate with times of unfaithfulness and the corresponding curse, but that, for all that, at the end the grace of God would obtain the victory over the severely punished and deeply humbled nation, and bring the work of salvation to a glorious close. It is true, the concrete character of this chapter cannot be fully explained in this way, but it furnishes the clue to the psychological interpretation of the conception of this prophetic discourse, and shows us the subjective points of contact for the divine revelation which Moses has announced to us here. For, as Auberlen observes, "there is a marvellous and grand display of the greatness of God in the fact, that He holds out before the people, whom He has just delivered from the hands of the heathen and gathered round Himself, the prospect of being scattered again among the heathen, and that, even before the land is taken by the Israelites, He predicts its return to desolation. These words could only be spoken by One who has the future really before His mind, who sees through the whole depth of sin, and who can destroy His own work, and yet attain His end. But so much the more adorable and marvellous is the grace, which nevertheless begins its work among such sinners, and is certain of victory notwithstanding all retarding and opposing difficulties." The peculiar character of this revelation, which must deeply have affected Moses, will explain the peculiarities observable in the style, viz., the heaping up of unusual words and modes of expression, several of which never occur again in the Old Testament, whilst others are only used by the prophets who followed the Pentateuch in their style.)
The blessings and curse of the law were impressed upon the hearts of the people in a still more comprehensive manner at the close of the whole law (Deut 28-30), and on the threshold of the promised land.
*More commentary available by clicking individual verses.