Leviticus 26:14

The Consequences of Disobedience

26:14 “‘If, however, ¹  you do not obey me and keep ²  all these commandments –

Leviticus 26:33-46

26:33 I will scatter you among the nations and unsheathe the sword ³  after you, so your land will become desolate and your cities will become a waste.

26:34 “‘Then the land will make up for ⁴  its Sabbaths all the days it lies desolate while you are in the land of your enemies; then the land will rest and make up its Sabbaths. 26:35 All the days of the desolation it will have the rest it did not have ⁵  on your Sabbaths when you lived on it.

26:36 “‘As for ⁶  the ones who remain among you, I will bring despair into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a blowing leaf will pursue them, and they will flee as one who flees the sword and fall down even though there is no pursuer. 26:37 They will stumble over each other as those who flee before a sword, though ⁷  there is no pursuer, and there will be no one to take a stand ⁸  for you before your enemies. 26:38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will consume you.

Restoration through Confession and Repentance

26:39 “‘As for the ones who remain among you, they will rot away because of ⁹  their iniquity in the lands of your enemies, and they will also rot away because of their ancestors’ ¹⁰  iniquities which are with them. 26:40 However, when ¹¹  they confess their iniquity and their ancestors’ iniquity which they committed by trespassing against me, ¹²  by which they also walked ¹³  in hostility against me ¹⁴  26:41 (and I myself will walk in hostility against them and bring them into the land of their enemies), and ¹⁵  then their uncircumcised hearts become humbled and they make up for ¹⁶  their iniquity, 26:42 I will remember my covenant with Jacob and also my covenant with Isaac and also my covenant with Abraham, ¹⁷  and I will remember the land. 26:43 The land will be abandoned by them ¹⁸  in order that it may make up for ¹⁹  its Sabbaths while it is made desolate ²⁰  without them, ²¹  and they will make up for their iniquity because ²²  they have rejected my regulations and have abhorred ²³  my statutes. 26:44 In spite of this, however, when they are in the land of their enemies I will not reject them and abhor them to make a complete end of them, to break my covenant with them, for I am the Lord their God. 26:45 I will remember for them the covenant with their ancestors ²⁴  whom I brought out from the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations to be their God. I am the Lord.’”

Summary Colophon

26:46 These are the statutes, regulations, and instructions which the Lord established ²⁵  between himself and the Israelites at Mount Sinai through ²⁶  Moses.

Deuteronomy 28:15

Curses as Reversal of Blessings

28:15 “But if you ignore ²⁷  the Lord your God and are not careful to keep all his commandments and statutes I am giving you today, then all these curses will come upon you in full force: ²⁸ 

Deuteronomy 28:36-68

28:36 The Lord will force you and your king ²⁹  whom you will appoint over you to go away to a people whom you and your ancestors have not known, and you will serve other gods of wood and stone there. 28:37 You will become an occasion of horror, a proverb, and an object of ridicule to all the peoples to whom the Lord will drive you.

The Curse of Reversed Status

28:38 “You will take much seed to the field but gather little harvest, because locusts will consume it. 28:39 You will plant vineyards and cultivate them, but you will not drink wine or gather in grapes, because worms will eat them. 28:40 You will have olive trees throughout your territory but you will not anoint yourself with olive oil, because the olives will drop off the trees while still unripe. ³⁰  28:41 You will bear sons and daughters but not keep them, because they will be taken into captivity. 28:42 Whirring locusts ³¹  will take over every tree and all the produce of your soil. 28:43 The foreigners ³²  who reside among you will become higher and higher over you and you will become lower and lower. 28:44 They will lend to you but you will not lend to them; they will become the head and you will become the tail!

28:45 All these curses will fall on you, pursuing and overtaking you until you are destroyed, because you would not obey the Lord your God by keeping his commandments and statutes that he has given ³³  you. 28:46 These curses ³⁴  will be a perpetual sign and wonder with reference to you and your descendants. ³⁵ 

The Curse of Military Siege

28:47 “Because you have not served the Lord your God joyfully and wholeheartedly with the abundance of everything you have, 28:48 instead in hunger, thirst, nakedness, and poverty ³⁶  you will serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you. They ³⁷  will place an iron yoke on your neck until they have destroyed you. 28:49 The Lord will raise up a distant nation against you, one from the other side of the earth ³⁸  as the eagle flies, ³⁹  a nation whose language you will not understand, 28:50 a nation of stern appearance that will have no regard for the elderly or pity for the young. 28:51 They ⁴⁰  will devour the offspring of your livestock and the produce of your soil until you are destroyed. They will not leave you with any grain, new wine, olive oil, calves of your herds, ⁴¹  or lambs of your flocks ⁴²  until they have destroyed you. 28:52 They will besiege all of your villages ⁴³  until all of your high and fortified walls collapse – those in which you put your confidence throughout the land. They will besiege all your villages throughout the land the Lord your God has given you. 28:53 You will then eat your own offspring, ⁴⁴  the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you, because of the severity of the siege ⁴⁵  by which your enemies will constrict you. 28:54 The man among you who is by nature tender and sensitive will turn against his brother, his beloved wife, and his remaining children. 28:55 He will withhold from all of them his children’s flesh that he is eating (since there is nothing else left), because of the severity of the siege by which your enemy will constrict ⁴⁶  you in your villages. 28:56 Likewise, the most ⁴⁷  tender and delicate of your women, who would never think of putting even the sole of her foot on the ground because of her daintiness, ⁴⁸  will turn against her beloved husband, her sons and daughters, 28:57 and will secretly eat her afterbirth ⁴⁹  and her newborn children ⁵⁰  (since she has nothing else), ⁵¹  because of the severity of the siege by which your enemy will constrict you in your villages.

The Curse of Covenant Termination

28:58 “If you refuse to obey ⁵²  all the words of this law, the things written in this scroll, and refuse to fear this glorious and awesome name, the Lord your God, 28:59 then the Lord will increase your punishments and those of your descendants – great and long-lasting afflictions and severe, enduring illnesses. 28:60 He will infect you with all the diseases of Egypt ⁵³  that you dreaded, and they will persistently afflict you. ⁵⁴  28:61 Moreover, the Lord will bring upon you every kind of sickness and plague not mentioned in this scroll of commandments, ⁵⁵  until you have perished. 28:62 There will be very few of you left, though at one time you were as numerous as the stars in the sky, ⁵⁶  because you will have disobeyed ⁵⁷  the Lord your God. 28:63 This is what will happen: Just as the Lord delighted to do good for you and make you numerous, he ⁵⁸  will take delight in destroying and decimating you. You will be uprooted from the land you are about to possess. 28:64 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. 28:65 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. 28:66 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. ⁵⁹  28:67 In the morning you will say, ‘If only it were evening!’ And in the evening you will say, ‘I wish it were morning!’ because of the things you will fear and the things you will see. 28:68 Then the Lord will make you return to Egypt by ship, over a route I said to you that you would never see again. There you will sell yourselves to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.”

Deuteronomy 28:1

The Covenant Blessings

28:1 “If you indeed ⁶⁰  obey the Lord your God and are careful to observe all his commandments I am giving ⁶¹  you today, the Lord your God will elevate you above all the nations of the earth.

Deuteronomy 12:25

12:25 You must not eat it so that it may go well with you and your children after you; you will be doing what is right in the Lord’s sight. ⁶² 

Deuteronomy 12:1

The Central Sanctuary

12:1 These are the statutes and ordinances you must be careful to obey as long as you live in the land the Lord, the God of your ancestors, ⁶³  has given you to possess. ⁶⁴ 

Deuteronomy 28:9

28:9 The Lord will designate you as his holy people just as he promised you, if you keep his commandments ⁶⁵  and obey him. ⁶⁶ 

[26:14]  ¹ tn Heb “And if.”

[26:14]  ² tn Heb “and do not do.”

[26:33]  ³ tn Heb “and I will empty sword” (see HALOT 1228 s.v. ריק 3).

[26:34]  ⁴ tn There are two Hebrew roots רָצָה (ratsah), one meaning “to be pleased with; to take pleasure” (HALOT 1280-81 s.v. רצה; cf. “enjoy” in NASB, NIV, NRSV, and J. E. Hartley, Leviticus [WBC], 452), and the other meaning “to restore” (HALOT 1281-82 s.v. II רצה; cf. NAB “retrieve” and B. A. Levine, Leviticus [JPSTC], 189).

[26:35]  ⁵ tn Heb “it shall rest which it did not rest.”

[26:36]  ⁶ tn Heb “And.”

[26:37]  ⁷ tn Heb “and.” The Hebrew conjunction ו (vav, “and”) is used in a concessive sense here.

[26:37]  ⁸ tn The term rendered “to stand up” is a noun, not an infinitive. It occurs only here and appears to designate someone who would take a powerful stand for them against their enemies.

[26:39]  ⁹ tn Heb “in” (so KJV, ASV; also later in this verse).

[26:39]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “fathers’” (also in the following verse).

[26:40]  ¹¹ tn Heb “And.” Many English versions take this to be a conditional clause (“if…”) though there is no conditional particle (see, e.g., NASB, NIV, NRSV; but see the very different rendering in B. A. Levine, Leviticus [JPSTC], 190). The temporal translation offered here (“when”) takes into account the particle אָז (’az, “then”), which occurs twice in v. 41. The obvious contextual contrast between vv. 39 and 40 is expressed by “however” in the translation.

[26:40]  ¹² tn Heb “in their trespassing which they trespassed in me.” See the note on Lev 5:15, although the term is used in a more technical sense there in relation to the “guilt offering.”

[26:40]  ¹³ tn Heb “and also which they walked.”

[26:40]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “with me.”

[26:41]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “or then,” although the LXX has “then” and the Syriac “and then.”

[26:41]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “and then they make up for.” On the verb “make up for” see the note on v. 34 above.

[26:42]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “my covenant with Abraham I will remember.” The phrase “I will remember” has not been repeated in the translation for stylistic reasons.

[26:43]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “from them.” The preposition “from” refers here to the agent of the action (J. E. Hartley, Leviticus [WBC], 455).

[26:43]  ¹⁹ tn The jussive form of the verb with the simple vav (ו) here calls for a translation that expresses purpose.

[26:43]  ²⁰ tn The verb is the Hophal infinitive construct with the third feminine singular suffix (GKC 182 §67.y; cf. v. 34).

[26:43]  ²¹ tn Heb “from them.”

[26:43]  ²² tn Heb “because and in because,” a double expression, which is used only here and in Ezek 13:10 (without the vav) for emphasis (GKC 492 §158.b).

[26:43]  ²³ tn Heb “and their soul has abhorred.”

[26:45]  ²⁴ tn Heb “covenant of former ones.”

[26:46]  ²⁵ tn Heb “gave” (so NLT); KJV, ASV, NCV “made.”

[26:46]  ²⁶ tn Heb “by the hand of” (so KJV).

[28:15]  ²⁷ tn Heb “do not hear the voice of.”

[28:15]  ²⁸ tn Heb “and overtake you” (so NIV, NRSV); NAB, NLT “and overwhelm you.”

[28:36]  ²⁹ tc The LXX reads the plural “kings.”

[28:40]  ³⁰ tn Heb “your olives will drop off” (נָשַׁל, nashal), referring to the olives dropping off before they ripen.

[28:42]  ³¹ tn The Hebrew term denotes some sort of buzzing or whirring insect; some have understood this to be a type of locust (KJV, NIV, CEV), but other insects have also been suggested: “buzzing insects” (NAB); “the cricket” (NASB); “the cicada” (NRSV).

[28:43]  ³² tn Heb “the foreigner.” This is a collective singular and has therefore been translated as plural; this includes the pronouns in the following verse, which are also singular in the Hebrew text.

[28:45]  ³³ tn Heb “commanded”; NAB, NIV, TEV “he gave you.”

[28:46]  ³⁴ tn Heb “they”; the referent (the curses mentioned previously) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[28:46]  ³⁵ tn Heb “seed” (so KJV, ASV).

[28:48]  ³⁶ tn Heb “lack of everything.”

[28:48]  ³⁷ tn Heb “he” (also later in this verse). The pronoun is a collective singular referring to the enemies (cf. CEV, NLT). Many translations understand the singular pronoun to refer to the Lord (cf. NAB, NASB, NIV, NCV, NRSV, TEV).

[28:49]  ³⁸ tn Heb “from the end of the earth.”

[28:49]  ³⁹ tn Some translations understand this to mean “like an eagle swoops down” (e.g., NAB, NASB, NIV, NRSV, NLT), comparing the swift attack of an eagle to the attack of the Israelites’ enemies.

[28:51]  ⁴⁰ tn Heb “it” (so NRSV), a collective singular referring to the invading nation (several times in this verse and v. 52).

[28:51]  ⁴¹ tn Heb “increase of herds.”

[28:51]  ⁴² tn Heb “growth of flocks.”

[28:52]  ⁴³ tn Heb “gates,” also in vv. 55, 57.

[28:53]  ⁴⁴ tn Heb “the fruit of your womb” (so NAB, NRSV); NASB “the offspring of your own body.”

[28:53]  ⁴⁵ tn Heb “siege and stress.”

[28:55]  ⁴⁶ tn Heb “besiege,” redundant with the noun “siege.”

[28:56]  ⁴⁷ tc The LXX adds σφόδρα (sfodra, “very”) to bring the description into line with v. 54.

[28:56]  ⁴⁸ tn Heb “delicateness and tenderness.”

[28:57]  ⁴⁹ tn Heb includes “that which comes out from between her feet.”

[28:57]  ⁵⁰ tn Heb “her sons that she will bear.”

[28:57]  ⁵¹ tn Heb includes “in her need for everything.”

[28:58]  ⁵² tn Heb “If you are not careful to do.”

[28:60]  ⁵³ sn These are the plagues the Lord inflicted on the Egyptians prior to the exodus which, though they did not fall upon the Israelites, must have caused great terror (cf. Exod 15:26).

[28:60]  ⁵⁴ tn Heb “will cling to you” (so NIV); NLT “will claim you.”

[28:61]  ⁵⁵ tn The Hebrew term תּוֹרָה (torah) can refer either (1) to the whole Pentateuch or, more likely, (2) to the book of Deuteronomy or even (3) only to this curse section of the covenant text. “Scroll” better reflects the actual document, since “book” conveys the notion of a bound book with pages to the modern English reader. Cf. KJV, NASB, NRSV “the book of this law”; NIV, NLT “this Book of the Law”; TEV “this book of God’s laws and teachings.”

[28:62]  ⁵⁶ tn Or “heavens.” The Hebrew term שָׁמַיִם (shamayim) may be translated “heaven(s)” or “sky” depending on the context.

[28:62]  ⁵⁷ tn Heb “have not listened to the voice of.”

[28:63]  ⁵⁸ tn Heb “the Lord.” See note on “he” in 28:8.

[28:66]  ⁵⁹ tn Heb “you will not be confident in your life.” The phrase “from one day to the next” is implied by the following verse.

[28:1]  ⁶⁰ tn The Hebrew text uses the infinitive absolute for emphasis, which the translation indicates with “indeed.”

[28:1]  ⁶¹ tn Heb “commanding”; NAB “which I enjoin on you today” (likewise in v. 15).

[12:25]  ⁶² tc Heb “in the eyes of the Lord.” The LXX adds “your God” to create the common formula, “the Lord your God.” The MT is preferred precisely because it does not include the stereotyped formula; thus it more likely preserves the original text.

[12:1]  ⁶³ tn Heb “fathers.”

[12:1]  ⁶⁴ tn Heb “you must be careful to obey in the land the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess all the days which you live in the land.” This adverbial statement modifies “to obey,” not “to possess,” so the order in the translation has been rearranged to make this clear.

[28:9]  ⁶⁵ tn Heb “the commandments of the Lord your God.” See note on “he” in the previous verse.

[28:9]  ⁶⁶ tn Heb “and walk in his ways” (so NAB, NASB, NIV, NRSV, NLT).