Leviticus 26

¹ You must make no idols; you must set up neither carved image nor standing-stone, set up no sculptured stone in your land, to prostrate yourselves in front of it; for it is I, Yahweh, who am your God.

² You must keep my sabbaths and reverence my sanctuary. I am Yahweh.

³ If you live according to my laws, if you keep my commandments and put them into practice,

⁴ I will give you the rain you need at the right time; the earth shall give its produce and the trees of the countryside their fruits;

⁵ you shall thresh until vintage time and gather grapes until sowing time. You shall eat your fill of bread and live secure in your land.

⁶ I will give peace to the land, and you shall sleep with none to frighten you. I will rid the land of beasts of prey. The sword shall not pass through your land.

⁷ You shall pursue your enemies and they shall fall before your sword;

⁸ five of you pursuing a hundred of them, one hundred pursuing ten thousand; and your enemies shall fall before your sword.

⁹ I will turn towards you, I will make you be fruitful and multiply, and I will uphold my Covenant with you.

¹⁰ You shall eat your fill of last year’s harvest, and still throw out the old to make room for the new.

¹¹ I will set up my dwelling among you, and I will not cast you off.

¹² I will live in your midst; I will be your God and you shall be my people.

¹³ It is I, Yahweh your God, who have brought you out of the land of Egypt so that you should be their servants no longer. I have broken the yoke that bound you and have made you walk with head held high.

¹⁴ But if you do not listen to me, and do not observe each one of these commandments,

¹⁵ if you refuse my laws and disregard my customs, and break my Covenant by not observing each one of my commandments,

¹⁶ then I will deal in like manner with you. “I will inflict terror on you, consumption and fever that waste the eyes away and exhaust the breath of life. You shall sow your seed in vain – your enemies shall feed on it.

¹⁷ I will turn against you and you shall be defeated by your enemies. Your foes shall have the mastery over you, and you shall take flight when there is no one pursuing you.

¹⁸ And if in spite of this, you do not listen to me, I will still punish you sevenfold for your sins.

¹⁹ I will break your proud strength. I will give you a sky of iron, an earth of bronze.

²⁰ You shall wear out your strength in vain, your land shall not yield its produce any longer nor the trees their fruit.

²¹ If you set yourselves against me and will not listen to me, I will heap these plagues on you in sevenfold punishment for your sins.

²² I will let wild beasts loose against you to make away with your children, destroy your cattle, and reduce you in number until your roads are deserted.

²³ And if that does not reform you, and you still set yourselves against me,

²⁴ I too will set myself against you and I will strike you with sevenfold punishment for your sins.

²⁵ I will send out the sword against you, to avenge the Covenant. You may huddle inside your towns: I will send pestilence among you, and you shall be delivered into the hands of the enemy.

²⁶ I will take away from you your bread, which is your staff, and one oven shall suffice for ten women to bake your bread; they shall dole this bread out by weight, and you shall eat and not be filled.

²⁷ And if, in spite of this, you do not listen to me but set yourselves against me,

²⁸ I will set myself against you in fury and punish you sevenfold for your sins.

²⁹ You shall eat the flesh of your own sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your own daughters.

³⁰ I will destroy your high places and smash your altars of incense; I will pile your corpses on the corpses of your idols, and I will cast you off.

³¹ I will reduce your cities to ruins; I will lay your sanctuaries waste; I will no longer breathe the fragrance that would appease me.

³² I, yes I, will make such a desolation of the land that your enemies who come to live there will be appalled by it.

³³ And I will scatter you among the nations. I will unsheathe the sword against you to make your land a waste and your towns a ruin.

³⁴ Then the land will observe its sabbaths indeed, lying desolate there, while you are in the land of your enemies. Then indeed the land will rest and observe its sabbaths.

³⁵ And as it lies desolate it will rest, as it never did on your sabbaths when you lived in it.

³⁶ I will strike fear into the hearts of those of you that are left; in the land of their enemies the sound of a falling leaf shall send them fleeing as men flee from the sword, and they shall fall though there is no one pursuing them.

³⁷ They shall stumble over one another as if the sword were upon them even when there is no one pursuing them. You shall be powerless to stand before your enemies;

³⁸ you shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall swallow you up.

³⁹ For their sins, those of you who are left shall perish in the lands of their enemies; they shall perish too for the sins of their fathers added to their own.

⁴⁰ Then they shall confess their sins and the sins of their fathers, sins by which they betrayed me worse, by which they set themselves against me.

⁴¹ I in my turn will set myself against them and take them to the land of their enemies. Then their uncircumcised heart will be humbled, then they will atone for their sins.

⁴² I shall remember my Covenant with Jacob, and my Covenant with Isaac and my Covenant with Abraham; and I shall remember the land.

⁴³ Abandoned by them, the land will keep its sabbaths, as it lies desolate when they are gone. But they must atone for their sin, for they have spurned my customs and abhorred my laws.

⁴⁴ Yet this is not the end. When they are in the land of their enemies, I will not so spurn them or abhor them as to destroy them altogether and break my Covenant with them; for I am Yahweh their God.

⁴⁵ For their sake I will remember the Covenant I made with those first generations that I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I would be their God, I, Yahweh.”‘

⁴⁶ These are the laws, customs and rules which Yahweh laid down between himself and the sons of Israel on Mount Sinai through the mediation of Moses.