For Teaching

Leviticus 26: What the Passage Says

152 claims across 46 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Leviticus 26 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD tells Israel not to make idols, to keep his sabbaths, and to honor his sanctuary. He then lays out what will follow if they walk in his statutes: rain, harvests, peace, safety, and his presence among them. He also lays out what will follow if they refuse to listen: sickness, defeat, drought, wild animals, siege, famine, ruined cities, and exile among the nations, with the punishments increasing in stages as they continue to walk contrary to him. The chapter ends with a promise that if the exiles confess their sin and their hearts are humbled, he will remember his covenant with Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham, and that even in their enemies' land he will not destroy them completely or break his covenant.

Claim by Claim

26:1
- The people are commanded not to make idols for themselves.
- They are commanded not to set up a carved image or a standing pillar for themselves.
- They are commanded not to place a carved or figured stone in their land to bow down on or toward it.
- The reason given is that the LORD is their God.
26:2
- The people are commanded to keep the LORD's sabbaths.
- The people are commanded to revere the LORD's sanctuary.
- The speaker states that he is the LORD.
26:3
- The condition is set: if the people walk in the LORD's statutes.
- The condition is set: if they keep his commandments.
- The condition is set: if they do them.
26:4
- Then the LORD will give the rains in their season.
- The land will yield its produce.
- The trees of the field will yield their fruit.
26:5
- The threshing will last until the grape harvest.
- The grape harvest will last until the sowing time.
- The people will eat their bread to the full.
- The people will dwell securely in their land.
26:6
- The LORD will give peace in the land.
- The people will lie down with no one making them afraid.
- The LORD will remove dangerous wild animals from the land.
- No sword will pass through their land.
26:7
- The people will pursue their enemies.
- Their enemies will fall before them by the sword.
26:8
- Five of them will pursue a hundred.
- A hundred of them will pursue ten thousand.
- Their enemies will fall before them by the sword.
26:9
- The LORD will turn toward them with favor.
- The LORD will make them fruitful.
- The LORD will multiply them.
- The LORD will establish his covenant with them.
26:10
- The people will eat old stored grain.
- They will clear out the old to make room for the new.
26:11
- The LORD will place his dwelling among them.
- The LORD's soul will not abhor them.
26:12
- The LORD will walk among them.
- The LORD will be their God.
- They will be his people.
26:13
- The speaker is the LORD their God.
- The LORD brought them out of the land of Egypt.
- The purpose was that they should no longer be slaves to the Egyptians.
- The LORD broke the bars of their yoke.
- The LORD made them walk upright.
26:14
- The condition is set: if the people will not listen to the LORD.
- The condition is set: if they will not do all these commandments.
26:15
- The condition is set: if they reject the LORD's statutes.
- The condition is set: if their soul abhors his ordinances.
- The result of this is that they will not do all his commandments.
- The result of this is that they break his covenant.
26:16
- The LORD says he will do this to them.
- The LORD will appoint terror over them.
- The LORD will appoint wasting disease over them.
- The LORD will appoint fever over them.
- These will consume the eyes.
- These will drain away life.
- They will sow their seed in vain.
- Their enemies will eat what they sow.
26:17
- The LORD will set his face against them.
- They will be struck down before their enemies.
- Those who hate them will rule over them.
- They will flee when no one is pursuing them.
26:18
- The condition is set: if even after this they will not listen to the LORD.
- Then the LORD will continue to punish them seven times more for their sins.
26:19
- The LORD will break the pride of their strength.
- The LORD will make their sky like iron.
- The LORD will make their land like bronze.
26:20
- Their strength will be spent in vain.
- Their land will not yield its produce.
- The trees of the land will not yield their fruit.
26:21
- The condition is set: if they walk contrary to the LORD.
- The condition is set: if they are unwilling to listen to him.
- Then the LORD will bring seven times more blows upon them according to their sins.
26:22
- The LORD will send wild animals among them.
- The wild animals will bereave them of their children.
- The wild animals will cut off their livestock.
- The wild animals will reduce their numbers.
- Their roads will become desolate.
26:23
- The condition is set: if by these things they are not corrected toward the LORD.
- The condition is set: if they walk contrary to him.
26:24
- Then the LORD also will walk contrary to them.
- The LORD himself will strike them seven times for their sins.
26:25
- The LORD will bring a sword upon them that avenges the covenant.
- They will gather into their cities.
- The LORD will send pestilence among them.
- They will be given into the hand of the enemy.
26:26
- The LORD will break their staff of bread.
- Ten women will bake their bread in one oven.
- The women will give back their bread by weight.
- They will eat and not be satisfied.
26:27
- The condition is set: if in spite of this they will not listen to the LORD.
- The condition is set: if they walk contrary to him.
26:28
- Then the LORD will walk contrary to them in fury.
- The LORD himself will chastise them seven times for their sins.
26:29
- They will eat the flesh of their sons.
- They will eat the flesh of their daughters.
26:30
- The LORD will destroy their high places.
- The LORD will cut down their incense altars.
- The LORD will cast their corpses on the corpses of their idols.
- The LORD's soul will abhor them.
26:31
- The LORD will make their cities a ruin.
- The LORD will lay their sanctuaries desolate.
- The LORD will not smell their pleasing odors.
26:32
- The LORD himself will make the land desolate.
- Their enemies who dwell in it will be appalled at it.
26:33
- The LORD will scatter them among the nations.
- The LORD will unsheathe a sword after them.
- Their land will become a desolation.
- Their cities will become a ruin.
26:34
- Then the land will enjoy its sabbaths all the days it lies desolate.
- During that time the people will be in the land of their enemies.
- Then the land will rest.
- The land will enjoy its sabbaths.
26:35
- All the days it lies desolate the land will rest.
- The land did not rest during their sabbaths when they lived on it.
26:36
- The LORD will bring faintness into the hearts of those of them who remain, in the lands of their enemies.
- The sound of a driven leaf will chase them.
- They will flee as one flees from a sword.
- They will fall when no one is pursuing.
26:37
- They will stumble over one another as if before a sword, though no one is pursuing.
- They will have no power to stand before their enemies.
26:38
- They will perish among the nations.
- The land of their enemies will devour them.
26:39
- Those of them who remain will waste away in their iniquity in the lands of their enemies.
- They will also waste away in the iniquities of their fathers along with them.
26:40
- The condition is set: if they confess their iniquity.
- The condition is set: if they confess the iniquity of their fathers.
- The confession concerns the treachery they committed against the LORD.
- The confession concerns their having walked contrary to the LORD.
26:41
- The LORD also walked contrary to them.
- The LORD brought them into the land of their enemies.
- The condition is set: if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled.
- The condition is set: if then they accept the punishment of their iniquity.
26:42
- Then the LORD will remember his covenant with Jacob.
- The LORD will also remember his covenant with Isaac.
- The LORD will also remember his covenant with Abraham.
- The LORD will remember the land.
26:43
- The land will be abandoned by them.
- The land will enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them.
- They will accept the punishment of their iniquity.
- The reason is that they rejected the LORD's ordinances.
- The reason is that their soul abhorred his statutes.
26:44
- Even so, when they are in the land of their enemies, the LORD will not reject them.
- The LORD will not abhor them so as to destroy them utterly.
- The LORD will not break his covenant with them.
- The reason given is that he is the LORD their God.
26:45
- The LORD will remember for their sake the covenant of the ancestors.
- The LORD brought those ancestors out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations.
- The purpose was that he might be their God.
- The speaker states that he is the LORD.
26:46
- These are the statutes, ordinances, and laws.
- The LORD set them between himself and the children of Israel.
- They were given on Mount Sinai.
- They were given by the hand of Moses.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

26:1: "Sacred stone pillar" translates Hebrew *massebah*, an upright standing stone set up at a place of worship to mark a god's presence; the "carved stone" is a figured or inscribed stone laid on the ground for the same purpose. These were ordinary furniture of local religion in the region, not exotic objects. Also: where the text prints LORD in capitals it stands in for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew letters usually written YHWH, which readers traditionally did not say aloud.
26:2: "My sabbaths" is plural because more than the weekly rest day is meant: the seventh day, the rest days attached to the festivals, and the seventh-year rest of the farmland set out in chapter 25, which is what verse 34 comes back to. The sanctuary is the tent-shrine at the center of the camp.
26:3: Treaties between a great king and a smaller people in the ancient Near East normally ended with a list of rewards for keeping the terms and punishments for breaking them. This chapter follows that shape exactly: verses 3 to 13 are the rewards, and verses 14 to 39 are the punishments, which run about three times longer.
26:4: In this climate rain falls in two seasons only: the early rains of autumn that soften baked ground for plowing, and the later rains of spring that fill out the grain. "Rain at the right time of year" means both arriving on schedule. Farming here depended on rainfall, with no great river to irrigate from.
26:5: Threshing beats the grain loose from the harvested stalks and is normally finished in early summer; the grape harvest comes in late summer; sowing follows in autumn. Each job would ordinarily be over well before the next began. Harvests that run into one another describe crops too large to process before the next one arrives.
26:6: "No sword will pass through your land" is not only about invasion: this territory was the land corridor between the empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and armies marched through it on their way to fight each other. To be spared passing armies was a real and specific thing to ask for.
26:8: The ratios deliberately do not scale evenly. Five against a hundred is one to twenty, but a hundred against ten thousand is one to a hundred, so the odds get more absurd as the numbers grow. Exaggerated battle figures of this kind were a normal feature of ancient war language.
26:9: A covenant is a binding agreement between two parties, sworn and formally sealed, the word covers a treaty between kings, an alliance, or a marriage. Here the two parties are God and Israel, and the terms are the laws set out in the preceding chapters.
26:10: Grain was stored in sealed jars and pits and had to be eaten before it spoiled. Having to shovel out last year's supply to make room for this year's is a way of saying the harvests are arriving faster than the storage can hold them.
26:11: The word translated "dwelling" is the one used for the tabernacle, the portable tent-shrine carried with the camp. To place his dwelling among them is to pitch his tent in the middle of theirs.
26:12: Walking among the people pictures God moving around inside the camp as a resident rather than visiting from a distance. The same verb describes God walking in the garden in Genesis 3.
26:13: A yoke is the wooden frame laid across the necks of draft animals, held in place by bars or pegs. Someone working under a load walks bent over; break the bars and he can straighten up. That is the picture behind "made you walk standing up straight", the posture of a free person rather than a slave.
26:15: "Judgments" here has nothing to do with condemnation. It means legal rulings, the case by case decisions that make up a law code, while "statutes" are the standing rules. The verse traces a sequence: first rejecting the rules, then feeling disgust at them, then not doing them, then breaking the agreement outright.
26:16: The Hebrew names of the two illnesses are uncertain; the words suggest a wasting sickness and a burning fever, and translators can only approximate. The phrase behind "drain the life out of you" speaks of the *nephesh* (throat, appetite, life) failing.
26:17: Setting the face against someone is a Hebrew idiom for turning deliberate, personal hostility on them. It is the exact reverse of verse 9, where the same face is turned toward them in favor.
26:18: Seven is the number of completeness in Hebrew usage, so "seven times over" means punishment in full measure rather than a literal multiplication by seven. The phrase returns at verses 21, 24 and 28, marking the stages by which the chapter escalates: each round begins with "and if after all this you still will not listen."
26:19: Metal gives nothing and takes nothing. A sky of iron lets no rain through; ground of bronze cannot be broken by a plow or take a seed. The two images together mean total agricultural failure from above and below.
26:21: "Keep going against me" renders a Hebrew phrase found only in this chapter, where it occurs seven times. Its sense is disputed: it may mean walking in hostility, walking at cross purposes, or walking "as if by chance": that is, treating God as an accident rather than as the other party to an agreement.
26:22: Empty roads are a standard ancient image for a country that has stopped working: travel and trade cease because no one dares go out, and the highways grass over.
26:25: Treaties between a great king and a lesser one ended with a list of rewards for keeping the terms and curses for breaking them, and the wronged party was entitled to take vengeance for the breach. This chapter is built on that pattern, and the sword here is the covenant's enforcement clause rather than random violence. A besieged population crowded inside city walls was exactly the condition in which epidemics spread.
26:26: "The staff of bread" is the supporting stick that bread gives a person; breaking it means cutting off the food supply. Ten women sharing one oven means there is so little dough that a single oven serves ten households, normally each would bake her own. Bread handed back "by weight" is bread rationed, weighed out rather than taken freely.
26:29: Sieges in the ancient Near East could last months or years, and accounts from Israel and from its neighbors record starving cities reduced to this. The line is the recognized extreme of siege warfare, and it appears in the curse lists of other ancient treaties as well.
26:30: A "high place" was an open-air worship site, often on a hill or raised platform, usually equipped with an altar, a standing stone and other furniture; such shrines were the normal local form of worship throughout the region. The word behind "idols" (*gillulim*) is a contemptuous Hebrew term, close in sound and sense to "dung-pellets"; the verse plays on the fact that corpses and images both end as the same kind of lifeless lump.
26:31: A burnt offering sent smoke upward, and the fixed phrase for God accepting it was that he smelled the "soothing smell." Refusing to smell it means refusing the offering: the sacrifices continue to be made but are not received.
26:32: "Astonished" in 1611 English meant stunned or appalled, much closer to horrified than to impressed. The detail is pointed: even the enemies who took the land are shaken by what is left of it.
26:33: Scattering among the nations is exile, deporting a conquered population away from its own land, which was standard imperial policy in the centuries after this text describes. Where the King James has "heathen," the Hebrew word simply means "the nations," everyone who is not Israel; it carries no suggestion of savagery.
26:34: Chapter 25 requires the farmland to be left unworked every seventh year, a sabbath for the land itself. The logic here is arithmetic: the rest the land was owed and did not get while it was being farmed will be taken instead while it lies empty of people.
26:36: "Faintness" translates a word meaning softness or melting, the collapse of nerve rather than physical weakness. The rest of the verse describes people so wrecked by fear that a leaf moving in the wind registers as footsteps behind them.
26:38: "The land of your enemies shall eat you up" is not about being eaten. It is a standard Hebrew image for a country absorbing the people living in it, until after a generation or two they no longer exist as a distinct people at all.
26:39: The Hebrew word behind "sin" here covers the wrong done, the guilt it incurs, and the punishment that follows, all in one term; English needs separate words for these, so a translator has to choose. The verb translated "waste away" is used of bones or flesh rotting.
26:40: Guilt is treated through this chapter as something a community carries across generations, which is why the confession names the fathers' sin alongside their own. That assumption runs through much of the Old Testament, and it is argued with directly later, in Ezekiel 18, which insists each person answers for what they themselves did.
26:41: Circumcision was the physical mark of the covenant made with Abraham, so to call a heart "uncircumcised" is to say it is unmarked, closed, resistant to what it should be open to; the same image is used elsewhere of ears that will not hear and lips that will not speak plainly. "Accept the punishment" translates a verb that can mean either submitting to a penalty or paying it off; the original leaves both open.
26:42: The three names run backwards through the generations (Jacob, his father Isaac, his grandfather Abraham) arriving at the original promise, which included this land. In Hebrew usage "remember" means to act on something, not merely to call it to mind.
26:45: "The covenant with their ancestors" here means the agreement made with the generation brought out of Egypt. "While the nations watched" points out that the exodus had foreign witnesses; in the ancient world a god's standing among outsiders was bound up with what became of the people attached to him.
26:46: "These are the rules, the decisions, and the laws..." is a closing formula used to mark the end of a block of law; similar lines close other sections of Leviticus. It reads as the end of the book, and the chapter that follows, on vows and valuations, has the character of an appendix.

Read Leviticus 26