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26 [1] **You shall not make for you false gods, and you shall not establish for you an idol or a pillar, **whether in the likeness of other gods or in service of God. **And an ornamented stone you shall not place in your land, to prostrate yourself upon it, **as idol worshippers would often bow on a mosaic floor as an act of worship. 19 **For I am the Lord your God. **
[2] This section concludes with a mention of principles that are relevant to most of the issues discussed in the book of Leviticus:
**You shall observe My Sabbaths, **the Sabbath and the festivals, **and you shall revere My Sanctuary. **The obligation to revere the Temple includes the scrupulous observance of the sacrificial rituals and the preservation of the Temple’s ritual purity (see 16:16, 19:30). **I am the Lord. **
[3] God promises:
**If you follow My statutes **that I have made known to you, **and observe My commandments, **which further establish what paths one may not follow, 1 **and perform them, **
[4] **I will provide your rains in their season. **For workers of the land, not only is the overall yearly amount of rainfall important, but their precise distribution during the agricultural year is of no less significance. **And **when rain falls at the desired times, then **the land shall yield its produce, and the tree of the field shall yield its fruit. **If rain does not come at the right time, the fertility of the land is reduced, and even if the plants and trees grow, the course of their development will be adversely affected.
[5] When the harvest is successful,
**your threshing, **which starts at the beginning of the summer months, when the barley ripens, followed by the wheat harvest, **shall reach until grape harvest. **The grapes start to ripen during the months of Tammuz to Av, July to August. In a year of blessing, each one of these stages shall lengthen, so that they follow in an uninterrupted sequence. **And **therefore the **grape harvest shall reach until sowing, **the season for sowing the fields at the beginning of the next agricultural year, after the summer. The unbroken succession of these agricultural seasons is indicative of the earth’s fertility. **You shall eat your food to repletion, and **although a rich, productive land generally tempts enemies to come and seek to conquer it, **you shall live in your land in security. **
[6] In addition to the granting of rain and the resultant blessing of fertility,
**I shall grant peace in the land, and you shall lie without threat **of an enemy attack; **and I will banish wild beasts from the land. **When the land is tilled and the villages are inhabited, wild animals keep away from the settled areas. Furthermore, not only will you be spared a direct attack, but **a sword shall not pass in your land. **Foreign forces will not dare even to pass through your territory. 2
[7] Not only shall armies not pass through your land, but
**you shall pursue your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. **
[8] Furthermore,
**five of you shall pursue one hundred, and one hundred of you shall pursue ten thousand; and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword. **
[9] Not only will you not encounter difficulties, but
**I will turn to you **with a special blessing **and make you fruitful, and multiply you; and I will fulfill My covenant with you, **with all the promises the covenant includes.
[10] **You shall eat old produce. **This is a double blessing: First, there will be a surplus of food beyond present consumption which will be placed in storage; and second, the produce will improve with age. 3 **And **as the land will continue to be fertile, **you shall remove the old from before the new. **You will have to take out the excess old produce in order to make room for the new.
[11] On a broader scale,
**I will place My dwelling in your midst, and My self shall not reject you; **I shall willingly rest My presence among you.
[12] **I shall walk in your midst, **openly and with satisfaction. 4 ****I shall be your God, and you shall be My people. **The mutual relationship between the nation and its God will be apparent. You will feel that you are My people, 5 not only when you submit to My will, but also when you take shelter in My shade.
[13] **I am the Lord your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt, from being slaves to them; I broke the beams of your yoke, and caused you to walk upright. **By breaking the beams of the yoke, which force the wearer’s head downward, I enabled you to lift up your heads and walk erect. 6
[14] Here the chapter starts the list of curses:
**And if you do not heed Me, and do not perform all these commandments, **
[15] **but if you **also **despise My statutes, and if your soul rejects My ordinances, failing to perform all My commandments, in your violating My covenant, **
[16] **so **too will **I **act like you, as I **will do this to you: I will appoint over you panic, **existential anxiety that is not caused by any particular event. I will also bring upon you diseases: **consumption and fever, causing the eyes to seek and the soul to despair **with continuous suffering. There are sicknesses that are far more severe than the ones listed here, but those for the most part are circumscribed in that they start and end at defined points. Consumption and malaria, which is a classic example of the fever mentioned here, generally cause chronic pain for an extended period of time. **And **in a different realm of activity, **you shall sow your seed in vain, and your enemies shall eat it. **
[17] **I shall direct My attention against you, **in contrast to the blessing of verse 9: “I will turn to you.” 7 In the Bible, the act of turning toward is invariably a positive move, a sign of affection, whereas the directing of attention, which is likewise a mark of providence, means that God will attend in a negative form. 8 **And you shall be smitten **in combat **before your enemies; those who hate you shall subjugate you; and you shall flee with no one pursuing you. **This is the reverse of the description in verse 8. Panic, fear, and the loss of composure cause one to flee even when there is nobody chasing.
[18] **And if after these you do not heed Me, **in your willful refusal to interpret your troubles as a punishment for your evil deeds, if you continue to live your lives in the same manner, without rectifying your behavior, **I will amplify chastising you, **I will continue to punish you **sevenfold for your sins. **Some commentaries, both here and with regard to similar expressions below, spell out precisely seven types of punishments, to which this alludes. Generally speaking, however, seven is a symbolic number, often used in an inexact manner, to denote a substantial amount. 9
[19] **I will break the pride of your power, **I will destroy the Temple. 10 This expression can also be interpreted as referring to the shattering of Israel’s sense of power and strength. Such a feeling might be due to various causes, including years of famine and hunger, as indicated by the continuation: **And I will render your sky like iron, **which does not drip, **and your earth like bronze, **from which nothing grows.
[20] **Your strength shall be **entirely **expended in vain. **During a drought, much time and effort is invested to work the land and draw water in various ways for irrigation, but all this shall be for naught: **And your land shall not yield its produce and the tree of the land shall not yield its fruit. **
[21] **And if you walk recalcitrantly with Me, **in rebellion, **and you do not **wish to **heed Me, **as you learn nothing from the punishments, then **I will amplify My blow upon you sevenfold in accordance with your sins. **
[22] **I will send the beast of the field against you. **In sharp contrast to the blessing: “I will banish wild beasts from the land” (verse 6), here wild beasts invade settled areas. **It will bereave you of your children, **the easiest prey, **and destroy your cattle, and diminish you; and your roads shall become desolate. **Due to their reduced number and out of fear, people will shut themselves up in their communities, and the roads will be deserted and laid waste.
[23] **And if with these **too **you are not chastised to Me, **by accepting My reproof, **and you walk recalcitrantly with Me; **
[24] **so I also will walk with you recalcitrantly, **in the same harsh and forceful manner, **and I too will smite you sevenfold for your sins. **
[25] **I will bring upon you a sword **of war, **avenging the vengeance of the **broken **covenant; you shall be gathered into your cities, **to hide from the enemy. Also, **I will send forth pestilence among you. **When you are crowded within your cities, a plague will be all the more deadly. **And **eventually **you shall be delivered into the hand of an enemy, **as your cities will be unprotected.
[26] **When I break for you the staff, **your support **of bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven. **This is an exaggerated depiction of a lack of bread. Home ovens were like relatively small jugs, designed for baking the bread required by a single family. **And they shall return your bread by weight. **Since food will be so sparse, people will be unable to act in a broad-minded, generous manner, and swap portions freely; rather, they will weigh how much they put into the oven and how much they took out, to determine exactly what belongs to them and what belongs to their neighbor. **And **then **you shall eat, but you shall not be satisfied, **both due to the fact that there is not enough food and also because the feeling of scarcity itself will cause the meal to be unsatisfying.
[27] **And if with **even **this, **actual hunger, when the hardships and disasters increase, **you do not heed Me, and you walk recalcitrantly with Me; **
[28] **I will walk with you in recalcitrant fury. **After causing a food shortage and harming your welfare, I will bring further horrors upon you: **I, too, will chastise you sevenfold for your sins. **
[29] **You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters you shall eat. **Due to the increasing hunger, you will eat the flesh of man, and not just any person; rather, you will cannibalize your very own children.
[30] **I will destroy your high places, **the tall structures on which altars are built, **and destroy your sun idols, **images and monuments for the worship of the sun, **and I shall cast your carcasses on the carcasses of your idols. **You will die, and your
[31] **I will render your cities ruins, I will make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not smell your pleasing aroma. **On the one hand, the idols upon which you relied shall be broken; on the other hand, I, God, will not answer you.
[32] **I will make the land desolate, and **the result will be that **your enemies who live in it shall be desolate upon it. **Even those who try to settle the land after you are gone will be unable to make it blossom.
[33] The land will be desolate, and its settled areas, if there are any left at all, will be sparse and feeble. As for
**you, I will scatter **you **among the nations, and I will draw [ *harikoti *] the sword after you, **and it will consume you incessantly. *Harikoti *literally means, “I will empty.” This is a graphic expression of a sheath left empty due to the frequent use of its sword. **Your land shall be desolate, and your cities shall be ruins. **
[34] **Then the land shall be repaid for its sabbaths, all the days of its desolation, and you are in the land of your enemies; then the land shall rest and will repay its sabbaths. **Since you refused to observe the *halakhot *of the Sabbatical Year and let the land rest, as commanded in the previous section, the land shall find its own way to rest, when you have been exiled from it. It is as though the land itself will complete the missing years in which you did not keep the prohibitions of its rest. This is an ironic description of a measure-for-measure punishment. 12
[35] **All the days of its desolation it, **the land, **shall rest **from yielding produce; **that which it did not rest during your sabbaths, when you lived upon it. **This will be a cruel rest for the land. No labor will be performed in your cities on the Sabbath, as your cities will be deserted; the land will not be worked in the seventh year, because you will no longer live there.
[36] **Of the survivors among you, I will bring cowardice, **weakness and spinelessness, **in their hearts in the lands of their enemies; the sound of a driven leaf, **or a falling or rustling leaf, **shall pursue them. **Due to their constant state of fear, as well as their sense of vulnerability and the knowledge that they are surrounded by enemies on all sides, they will experience every slight noise as a sign that they are being chased. Consequently, **they shall flee, as one flees the sword, and they shall fall **while running **with no pursuer. **Their own panicked flight shall lead to their downfall, even though nobody is actually chasing after them.
[37] **They shall stumble over one another **during their flight, **as before a sword, **like those who flee from war and hurt each other in their rush to escape, **with no pursuer. You shall have no recourse before your enemies. **You will be unable to rise up and face enemy attackers.
[38] Moreover,
**you shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall consume you. **There is no assurance that you will remain as you are, both on the personal and the national levels. The land of the gentiles shall destroy you and swallow you up. This is one of the harshest curses of all. 13
[39] **The survivors among you **after all these retributions **shall molder in, **due to, **their iniquity, in the lands of your enemies, and also in the iniquities of their fathers, with them they shall molder. **
[40] Ultimately,
**they shall confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers, in their trespass, **betrayal, **that they committed against Me, and also that they walked recalcitrantly with Me. **At some point they will acknowledge their betrayal and the rebellious nature of their acts. The time will come when they will recognize their impudence and their obtuse response to God’s callings. The aim of the retributions, which appeared gradually, was not merely to punish them, but also to call upon them to change their perspectives, repent, and return to God.
[41] This verse summarizes the above stages.
**I too will walk recalcitrantly with them, and I will bring them into the land of their enemies, **the punishment of exile, which breaks all the frameworks of their lives; **or perhaps then, **when they have been exiled from their land, **their sealed **and dense **hearts will be humbled. **As described earlier, people will take no notice of the implications of the events that have befallen them, even when each tragedy is followed by a worse event. When the seal that blocks the heart is removed, they will become more sensitive to the meaning of these occurrences. **And they **will **then be repaid for their iniquity. **Their sins will be atoned for in exile, not only because punishment in general serves to atone for sins, but also because the shock of exile will cause them to return to God.
[42] **I will remember My covenant **that I enacted **with Jacob, and also My covenant with Isaac, and also My covenant with Abraham I will remember; and the land **that I chose to give to you, which due to your sins became a remote, miserable province, **I will remember. **
[43] Although I shall not forget it,
**the land shall be forsaken of them, **during their exile, **and shall be repaid for her sabbaths **that they failed to observe, **in **the fact of **its desolation from them; and they shall repay their iniquity **through their punishment, as described above, **because they despised My ordinances, and their soul rejected **and abhorred **My statutes. **They did not merely neglect and abandon God’s commandments, but they actively recoiled from them in revulsion and treated them with contempt.
[44] Here comes a very important point:
**Despite this, **after all the transgressions and punishments, and notwithstanding the people’s indifference to the lessons of the past, even **when they are in the land of their enemies, **poor, downtrodden, lowly in spirit, and weak in body, **I will not have despised them and will not have rejected them **in order **to destroy them **entirely, and thereby **to violate My covenant with them, as I am the Lord their God. **Even when they transgress the commandments and rebel in every possible manner, My covenant will remain in force.
[45] **I shall remember for them, **those who will live after many generations, **the covenant of their ancestors, that I took them out of the land of Egypt, **not in the manner of individuals taking flight, but **before the eyes of the nations, **in public display, on a grand scale, **to be their God. **In conclusion, God states: **I am the Lord, **who is responsible for all these events.
[46] In summary,
**these are the statutes and ordinances and laws which the Lord gave between Him and the children of Israel at Mount Sinai, **before their many journeys in the wilderness, **at the hand of Moses. **At Mount Sinai, Israel received numerous commandments, instructions, and *halakhot *. In a certain sense, this chapter recapitulated all the central matters given at Sinai.
Version: The Steinsaltz Tanakh - English
Source: https://korenpub.com/collections/the-steinsaltz-tanakh/products/steinsaltz-tanakh
License: Copyright: Steinsaltz Center