Leviticus 26:5 Kommentar

This chapter is a solemn conclusion of the main body of the levitical law. The precepts that follow in this and the following book either relate to some particular matters or are repetitions and explications of the foregoing institutions. Now this chapter contains a general enforcement of all those laws by promises of reward in case of obedience on the one hand, and threatenings of punishment for disobedience on the other hand, the former to work upon hope, the latter on fear, those two handles of the soul, by which it is taken hold of and managed. Here is, I. A repetition of two or three of the principal of the commandments (Lev 26:1, Lev 26:2). II. An inviting promise of all good things, if they would but keep God's commandments (Lev 26:3-13). III. A terrible threatening of ruining judgments which would be brought upon them if they were refractory and disobedient (v. 14-39). IV. A gracious promise of the return of mercy to those of them that would repent and reform (Lev 26:40, etc.). Deu. 28 is parallel to this.

INTRODUCTION TO LEVITICUS 26 In this chapter, after a repetition of some laws against idolatry, and concerning keeping sabbaths, and reverencing the sanctuary of God, Lev 26:1; in order to encourage the Israelites to keep the various statutes and commandments in this book, and in the preceding, many promises are made of plenty, and peace, and safety from enemies, and of the presence of God with them, Lev 26:3; and on the contrary, to such as should despise and break his commandments, the most grievous things are threatened, as diseases of body, destruction by their enemies, barrenness and unfruitfulness of land, the sore judgments of wild beasts, famine, sword, and pestilence, Lev 26:14; and yet after all, when they should confess their sins, and were humbled for them, the Lord promises to remember the covenant he made with their ancestors, and would deal kindly with them, and not cast them away, and utterly destroy them, Lev 26:40.

And I will give peace in the land,.... Among yourselves, as Aben Ezra; that as safety from enemies is promised before, here it is assured they should be free from insurrections and from riots, broils, contentions, and civil wars among themselves: and ye shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid; that is, lie down upon their beds, and sleep quietly and comfortably, and not be in any fear of thieves and robbers breaking in upon them, Psa 3:5, and I will rid evil beasts out of the land: out of the land of Israel, as the Targum of Jonathan, not out of the world, such as lions, bears, wolves, &c. which were sometimes troublesome and mischievous in the land: neither shall the sword go through your land; either the sword of the enemy, which if it entered should not be suffered to proceed, much less to pervade the land and destroy the inhabitants of it: so the Targum of Jonathan,"they that draw the sword shall not pass through your land,''or the sword of the Lord, that is, the pestilence, Ch1 21:12; as Ainsworth suggests; though the Jews (k) commonly understand it of the sword of peace, as they call it, though that is of one that is not an enemy, but passes through one country to destroy another; which yet is distressing to the country he passes through, as in the case of Pharaoh Necho, whom Josiah went out to meet, Ch2 35:20; though, by what follows, it seems rather to be the first of these. (k) T. Bab. Taanith, fol. 22. 1. 2.

I do not consider this as a material blessing, as though the man who observes God’s law will obtain that common bread in abundance. Why not? Do not wicked sinners also eat bread, not only in abundance but even in luxury? Therefore let us look rather to him who says, “I am the living bread that has come down from heaven.” And “he who eats this bread shall live forever.” As we notice that he who said this is the word with which our soul is fed, we realize of what bread it was said by God in blessing that: “You will have food to eat in abundance.” Solomon proclaims something similar concerning the just man, when he says in the book of Proverbs, “When the just man eats, his hunger is appeased, but the souls of the wicked suffer want.” If this is understood only according to the letter, it seems utterly false, for the souls of the wicked eat more greedily and strive for satiety, while the just sometimes even suffer hunger. Finally, Paul was a just man, and he said, “To this very hour we hunger and thirst, and we are naked and buffeted”;8 and again he says, “In hunger and thirst, in fastings often.” How then does Solomon say that the just man eats and satisfies his soul? What we understood before concerning the rain we ought to consider at this point also with regard to the bread. That heavenly bread, that is, the Word of God who said, “I am the living bread,” none but the just eat, to whom it is said, “Taste, and see how good the Lord is.” With what kind of a conscience then do sinners who are defiled by many sins dare to eat?

The wicked man is never secure but is always disturbed and wavering. He is tossed about by every wind of doctrine to deceitful error, by the craft of men. However, the just man who observes God’s law dwells in security on his land, because he governs his body in fear of God and brings it into subjection. His understanding is firm when he says to God, “Strengthen me according to your words, O Lord.” Strengthened, secure and well rooted, he dwells on the earth, founded in faith. His house is not built upon sand but is established on solid ground.

Idolatry forbidden, Lev 26:1. The Sabbath to be sanctified, Lev 26:2-3. Promises to obedience, of fruitful fields, plentiful harvests, and vintage, Lev 26:4-5. Of peace and security, Lev 26:6. Discomfiture of their enemies, Lev 26:7-9. Of abundance, Lev 26:10. Of the divine presence, Lev 26:11-13. Threatenings against the disobedient, Lev 26:14-15. Of terror and dismay, Lev 26:16. Their enemies shall prevail against them, Lev 26:17-18. Of barrenness, Lev 26:19-20. Of desolation by wild beasts, Lev 26:21-22. And if not humbled and reformed, worse evils shall be inflicted upon them, Lev 26:23-24. Their enemies shall prevail, and they shall be wasted by the pestilence, Lev 26:25-26. If they should still continue refractory, they shall be yet more sorely punished, Lev 26:27-28. The famine shall so increase that they shall be obliged to eat their own children, Lev 26:29. Their carcasses shall be cast upon the carcasses of their idols, Lev 26:30. Their cities shall be wasted, and the sanctuary desolated, Lev 26:31; the land destroyed, Lev 26:32; themselves scattered among their enemies, and pursued with utter confusion and distress, Lev 26:33-39. If under these judgments they confess their sin and return to God, He will remember them in mercy, Lev 26:40-43; visit them even in the land of their enemies, Lev 26:44; and remember His covenant with their fathers, Lev 26:45. The conclusion, stating these to be the judgments and laws which the Lord made between himself and the children of Israel in Mount Sinai, Lev 26:46.

Your threshing shall reach unto the vintage - According to Pliny, Hist. Nat., l. xviii., c. 18, the Egyptians reaped their barley six months, and their oats seven months, after seed time; for they sowed all their grain about the end of summer, when the overflowings of the Nile had ceased. It was nearly the same in Judaea: they sowed their corn and barley towards the end of autumn, and about the month of October; and they began their barley-harvest after the passover, about the middle of March; and in one month or six weeks after, about pentecost, they began that of their wheat. After their wheat-harvest their vintage commenced. Moses here leads the Hebrews to hope, if they continued faithful to God, that between their harvest and vintage, and between their vintage and seed-time, there should be no interval, so great should the abundance be; and these promises would appear to them the more impressive, as they had just now come out of a country where the inhabitants were obliged to remain for nearly three months shut up within their cities, because the Nile had then inundated the whole country. See Calmet. "This is a nervous and beautiful promise of such entire plenty of corn and wine, that before they could have reaped and threshed out their corn the vintage should be ready, and before they could have pressed out their wine it would be time to sow again. The Prophet Amos, Amo 9:13 expresses the same blessing in the same manner: The ploughman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him who soweth seed." - Dodd.

OF IDOLATRY. (Lev 26:1-2) Ye shall make you no idols--Idolatry had been previously forbidden (Exo 20:4-5), but the law was repeated here with reference to some particular forms of it that were very prevalent among the neighboring nations. a standing image--that is, "upright pillar." image of stone--that is, an obelisk, inscribed with hieroglyphical and superstitious characters; the former denoting the common and smaller pillars of the Syrians or Canaanites; the latter, pointing to the large and elaborate obelisks which the Egyptians worshipped as guardian divinities, or used as stones of adoration to stimulate religious worship. The Israelites were enjoined to beware of them.

your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time, &c.--The barley harvest in Judea was about the middle of April; the wheat harvest about six weeks after, or in the beginning of June. After the harvest came the vintage, and fruit gathering towards the latter end of July. Moses led the Hebrews to believe that, provided they were faithful to God, there would be no idle time between the harvest and vintage, so great would be the increase. (See Amo 9:13). This promise would be very animating to a people who had come from a country where, for three months, they were pent up without being able to walk abroad because the fields were under water.

Promises and Threats - Leviticus 26 Just as the book of the covenant, the kernel containing the fundamental principles of the covenant fellowship, which the Lord established with the children of Israel whom He had adopted as His nation, and the rule of life for the covenant nation (Ex 20:22-23:19), concluded with promises and threats (Exo 23:20-33); so the giving of the law at Sinai, as the unfolding of the inner, spiritual side of the whole of the covenant constitution, closes in this chapter with an elaborate unfolding of the blessing which would be secured by a faithful observance of the laws, and the curse which would follow the transgression of them. But whilst the former promises and threats (Ex 23) related to the conquest of the promised land of Canaan, the promises in this chapter refer to the blessings which were to be bestowed upon Israel when the land was in their possession (Lev 26:3-13), and the threats to the judgments with which the Lord would visit His disobedient people in their inheritance, and in fact drive them out and scatter them among the heathen (vv. 14-39). When this had been done, then, as is still further proclaimed with a prophetic look into the distant future, would they feel remorse, acknowledge their sin to the Lord, and be once more received into favour by Him, the eternally faithful covenant God (Lev 26:40-45). (Note: When modern critics, who are carried away by naturalism, maintain that Moses was not the author of these exhortations and warnings, because of their prophetic contents, and assign them to the times of the kings, the end of the eighth, or beginning of the seventh century (see Ewald, Gesch. i. 156), they have not considered, in their antipathy to any supernatural revelations from God in the Old Testament, that even apart from any higher illumination, the fundamental idea of these promises and threats must have presented itself to the mind of the lawgiver Moses. It required but a very little knowledge of the nature of the human heart, and a clear insight into the spiritual and ethical character of the law, to enable him to foresee that the earthly-minded, unholy nation would not fulfil the solemn demand of the law that their whole life should be sanctified to the Lord God, that they would transgress in many ways, and rebel against God and His holy laws, and therefore that in any case times of fidelity and the corresponding blessing would alternate with times of unfaithfulness and the corresponding curse, but that, for all that, at the end the grace of God would obtain the victory over the severely punished and deeply humbled nation, and bring the work of salvation to a glorious close. It is true, the concrete character of this chapter cannot be fully explained in this way, but it furnishes the clue to the psychological interpretation of the conception of this prophetic discourse, and shows us the subjective points of contact for the divine revelation which Moses has announced to us here. For, as Auberlen observes, "there is a marvellous and grand display of the greatness of God in the fact, that He holds out before the people, whom He has just delivered from the hands of the heathen and gathered round Himself, the prospect of being scattered again among the heathen, and that, even before the land is taken by the Israelites, He predicts its return to desolation. These words could only be spoken by One who has the future really before His mind, who sees through the whole depth of sin, and who can destroy His own work, and yet attain His end. But so much the more adorable and marvellous is the grace, which nevertheless begins its work among such sinners, and is certain of victory notwithstanding all retarding and opposing difficulties." The peculiar character of this revelation, which must deeply have affected Moses, will explain the peculiarities observable in the style, viz., the heaping up of unusual words and modes of expression, several of which never occur again in the Old Testament, whilst others are only used by the prophets who followed the Pentateuch in their style.) The blessings and curse of the law were impressed upon the hearts of the people in a still more comprehensive manner at the close of the whole law (Deut 28-30), and on the threshold of the promised land.