Leviticus26chapter 26

Leviticus 26:1-2

The chapter opens by repeating two commands before it names a single blessing, no idols and keep my sabbaths. Both come back in the curses, images cut down at verse 30 and the land taking its sabbaths at verse 34. The section that decides whether Israel keeps the land begins with the two commandments Israel went on to break.

Leviticus 26:3-5

The blessings all stand on the condition set in verse 3, and the section then runs unbroken to verse 13. The first item promised is rain in due season, which is the one thing in a farming year no man can arrange for himself. Threshing runs into vintage and vintage into sowing, so the picture is a harvest too large to finish before the next one begins.

Leviticus 26:6-8

Peace here is measured by sleep. A man lies down and nobody makes him afraid, the wild beasts are cleared out, and no army crosses the ground. The arithmetic of verse 8 then breaks on purpose, five chasing a hundred and a hundred chasing ten thousand, so the larger company fights at five times the rate of the smaller one.

Leviticus 26:9-10

Fruitful and multiply are the words spoken over creation at Genesis 1:28 and over Noah at Genesis 9:1, and here they land on a nation. Establish my covenant is the language of Genesis 17:7, so the promise attached to obedience is the promise already made to Abraham. Verse 10 measures the blessing by a storage problem, old grain still in hand when the new crop arrives and needing to be carried out to make room.

Leviticus 26:11-12

The tent stops being a place Israel visits and becomes a place God lives. Walking among them recalls the LORD God walking in the garden at Genesis 3:8, and the three clauses of verse 12 give the whole covenant in one sentence. Paul takes these words up at 2 Corinthians 6:16 and applies them to the church as the temple of the living God.

Leviticus 26:13

The blessings close where the nation started, at the exodus. The bands of the yoke are the crossbars that hold a yoke down on the neck of an ox, and breaking them is what lets the animal lift its head. Made you go upright is the last phrase of the section, so the posture of a free man is where the whole list of blessings lands.

Leviticus 26:14-17

The curses run more than twice the length of the blessings, twenty-six verses against eleven. Verse 15 traces the failure inward before anything happens outside, from despising statutes, to a soul that abhors judgments, to a broken covenant. The first round strikes the body, the harvest and the nerve together, and it ends at verse 17 with men fleeing when no one pursues, which verse 36 takes up again.

Leviticus 26:18-20

Here the shape of the passage appears. The sentence is raised four times by the same phrase, seven times, at verses 18, 21, 24 and 28, and each round follows a fresh refusal to hear. Heaven as iron over earth as brass is a sky that gives no rain above ground that gives no crop, which reverses verse 4 clause for clause.

Leviticus 26:21-22

Walk contrary is the chapter's own phrase for the breach, and it runs both directions. It is used of Israel at verses 21, 23, 27 and 40, and of God at verses 24, 28 and 41, so the answer is described in the same words as the offence. The beasts that were driven out at verse 6 come back, and the high ways lie desolate because nobody will travel them.

Leviticus 26:23-24

Reformed is the word that gives the passage its aim. The judgments are set out as correction with a purpose, and the escalation happens because the correction is refused. Andrew Bonar reads the rounds as discipline meant to bring the nation back, and Calvin makes the same point from the fact that each stage is announced in advance.

Leviticus 26:25-26

The sword avenges the quarrel of the covenant, so the war is legal action taken on a broken agreement. The cities that gather people behind walls for safety become the place the pestilence finds them. Ten women baking in one oven is scarcity described from the kitchen, fuel enough for a single fire and bread handed back by weight.

Leviticus 26:27-28

The verb changes at verse 28. Punish stands at verses 18 and 24, chastise stands here, and the doubled I, even I puts the speaker in front of the act. Fury is the strongest word in the chapter and it arrives only at the fourth refusal.

Leviticus 26:29

This is the floor of the passage, and Scripture records it happening. Two women agree to it during the siege of Samaria at 2 Kings 6:28-29, and Lamentations 4:10 says the hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children in the fall of Jerusalem. Deuteronomy 28:53-57 gives the same warning at greater length, and Josephus describes it again inside Jerusalem during the siege of AD 70.

Leviticus 26:30-31

The carcases of the worshippers are cast on the carcases of their idols, so the dead god and the dead man lie in one heap. Verse 31 closes the worship from the other end, cities waste, sanctuaries desolate, and the sweet savour that runs sixteen times through this book no longer smelled. My soul shall abhor you at the end of verse 30 answers my soul shall not abhor you at verse 11.

Leviticus 26:32-33

Scattering is the last of the curses and it undoes the gift of the land itself. The enemies who take the ground are described as astonished at what they find, which is a detail a reader expects in a lament rather than in a threat. Deuteronomy 29:24-28 works the same picture into a scene where the nations stand over the ruin and ask why the LORD did this.

Leviticus 26:34-35

The sabbath years commanded in Leviticus 25 are the reason the exile is given a length. The land takes the rest it was owed while the people are away, and 2 Chronicles 36:21 reads the seventy years of Babylon as exactly that, the land keeping sabbath until threescore and ten years were fulfilled. Jeremiah 25:11-12 supplies the number and Chronicles supplies the reason.

Leviticus 26:36-39

The last of it is done to the mind. A shaken leaf chases them, they fall over each other with no sword behind them, and the fear promised back at verse 17 has become the whole of their condition. Pine away falls twice in verse 39, once for their own iniquity and once for the iniquities of their fathers, so the survivors carry two accounts at the same time.

Leviticus 26:40-41

The turn comes on a confession with no sacrifice attached to it, which is worth noticing in a book made of sacrifices. Uncircumcised hearts be humbled asks that the sign cut in the flesh be true of the inward man, language Deuteronomy 30:6 and Jeremiah 4:4 take up and Paul carries to Romans 2:29. Daniel prays this passage back to God at Daniel 9:4-19, confessing the iniquity of the fathers in the last year of the exile.

Leviticus 26:42

Remember falls three times in this one verse, at the end of the longest curse passage in the Torah. The patriarchs are named backwards, Jacob first and Abraham last, and checked across the whole King James text this is the only place the covenant formula runs in that order. The sequence counts back from the generation sitting in exile to the man the promise was first made to, and then the verse adds the land.

Leviticus 26:43-45

Verse 43 restates the desolation straight after the promise of verse 42, so the record of what caused the exile stands unsoftened beside the mercy. Verse 44 then sets the limit on the whole passage, that in the land of their enemies God will not cast them away nor break his covenant with them. Paul asks whether God has cast away his people at Romans 11:1-2 and answers on the same ground, that God foreknew them.

Leviticus 26:46

This sentence closes the book. It signs the laws off as given in mount Sinai by the hand of Moses, and the same Sinai formula stands at Leviticus 25:1 and again at 27:34. Chapter 27 follows an ending that has already been written, which is why it reads as an appendix on vows and valuations rather than a continuation of the holiness code.