UST LEV Chapter 26

◄ LEV 26 ► ║ ©

26 Do not make idols because they are useless. Do not set up carved figures or sacred stones to worship as if they were God. Do not put on your property a stone that someone has carved so you can bow down to it. Worship only me, Yahweh your God. 2 Honor my sacred festivals by celebrating them. Honor the place where you worship me. Remember: I am Yahweh.

3 If you carefully obey all my instructions, 4 I will send rain for you at the proper times in order that crops will grow on your land and there will be plenty of fruit on your trees. 5 You will continue harvesting and threshing grain until it is time to harvest grapes, and you will continue harvesting grapes until it is time to start planting things for the following year. You will have all the food that you want to eat, and you will live safely in your land.

6 Furthermore, I will make you live peacefully in your country. When you go to sleep, you will not be afraid. I will get rid of the dangerous animals from your country. As for raids or wars, there will be none in your country. 7 In fact, you will chase away your enemies and kill them with your weapons. 8 Five of you will chase away a hundred of them, a hundred of you will chase away ten thousand of them, and you will kill them with your weapons.

9 What’s more, I will bless you and cause you to have many children. And I will do what I said that I would do in the covenant that I made with you. 10 While you are still eating food from last year’s harvest, you will have to move some of it to make space to store the food from the current harvest. 11 I will live with you, and I will never despise you. 12 I will always be among you and continue to be your God, and you will continue to be my people. 13 I am Yahweh your God, the one who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be the Egyptians’ slaves. When you were there, it was as though you were animals that were pulling plows for the people of Egypt, but I broke the bars of the yokes that they had put around your necks. I freed you so you could walk with your heads up.

14 But suppose you pay no attention to me; suppose you refuse to obey what I have told you to do. 15 Suppose that you reject my decrees and despise my laws and do not obey me, but that instead you reject the covenant that I made with you. 16 In that case, these are the things that I will personally do to you: I will suddenly send disasters that will ruin you. You will have diseases that cannot be cured and fevers that will cause you to become blind; these will slowly kill you. It will be useless for you to plant your fields, because your enemies will eat the crops that grow. 17 I will reject you, so your enemies will conquer you. People who hate you will rule over you, and you will be so frightened that you will run away even if they are not chasing you.

18 But after all these things happen to you, if you still refuse to obey me, I will continue to punish you again and again for sinning against me. 19 I will punish you so much that you will no longer be stubborn or proud. I will not let any rain fall in your land. It will be as though the sky were made of iron and the ground were as hard as bronze. 20 You will uselessly work very hard to plant seeds, because crops will not grow in the hard soil in your fields, and fruit will not grow on your trees.

21 If you stubbornly and hostilely continue disobeying me, I will send plague after plague on you to punish you for sinning against me like that. 22 I will send wild animals to attack you, and they will kill your little children and destroy your cattle. There will be very few of you who will remain alive, with the result that there will be very few people traveling about on the roads in your country.

23 When you experience those things that I do to punish you, if you still do not pay attention to me, and if you continue to act against me, 24 I myself will act against you, and I will punish you again and again for sinning against me. 25 I will send armies to you to punish you for not doing the things that I commanded you to do in the covenant that I made with you. If you try to escape from your enemies by hiding behind your city walls, I will send plagues to you, and I will allow your enemies to capture you. 26 When I destroy your supplies of food, there will be very little flour with which to make bread. As a result, ten women will be able to bake all their bread in only one oven. When the bread is baked, each woman will divide it among the members of her family, but there will be very little for each one, and when they have eaten all of it, they will still be hungry.

27 After all those things happen, if you still do not obey me, if you still act against me, 28 I will be very angry with you, and I will act against you. I myself will punish you again and again for sinning. 29 You will be so hungry that you will kill your sons and daughters and eat their flesh. 30 I will destroy the places on high hills where you have worshiped idols. I will smash the altars where you burn incense to worship your gods. I will cause people to pile your dead bodies on the lifeless figures of your idols. I will detest you. 31 I will ruin your cities and empty the buildings that you built for worshipping your idols. If you burn offerings on an altar, I will refuse to enjoy their scents. 32 I will completely ruin your country. When your enemies capture it, they will be shocked at what happened. 33 I will enable your enemies to kill you with their swords. I will cause them to scatter the rest of you among other people groups. I will make sure that they ruin your country and destroy your cities. 34 After that happens, as long as you are living in your enemies’ countries, no one will be in the land and it will finally be able to rest. During this time, the land will enjoy the sabbath rests it should have had. 35 During all the time that no one is in your land, it will rest—the rest that you never gave it during the sabbath rest years when you lived there.

36 As for you people who will remain alive in the countries to which your enemies will have taken you, I will make you very afraid, so when you hear the wind blowing leaves, you will run away. You will run like someone is trying to kill you, and you will fall down even though no one is chasing you. 37 You will run as if a man with a sword were chasing you, and you will fall down, even though no one is coming behind you. You will stumble over each other trying to flee. You will not be able to stand and fight your enemies. 38 Many of you will die in your enemies’ countries. 39 And those of you who remain alive will slowly die and rot in your enemies’ countries because you and your ancestors all sinned so much.

40 But if your descendants confess that they and their ancestors sinned against me, acted unfaithfully toward me, and were hostile to me— 41 because of that I became hostile to them and forced them to go to their enemies’ countries—if your descendants humble themselves, stop being very stubborn and admit that they are guilty, 42 I will keep my promises about the land of Canaan that I made in the covenant that I made with your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 43 But before that happens, I will force my people to leave their land, with the result that the land will be able to rest while no one is in it, and while I am punishing the people for rejecting my laws and hating my decrees. 44 But I will still not reject them or hate them and destroy them completely in their enemies’ countries. I will not cancel the covenant that I made with them because I am still Yahweh their God. 45 I will keep the promises from the covenant that I made with your ancestors when I brought them out of Egypt, something that the people of all nations heard about. I did this so that I, Yahweh, would be your God.”

46 Those are the commandments, the decrees, and the laws that Yahweh established on Mount Sinai between himself and the Israelite people by giving them to Moses to tell to them.

◄ LEV 26 ► ║ ©

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