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Leviticus

About this book
Chapter 26

1 “‘You must not make for yourselves idols, so you must not set up for yourselves a carved image or a pillar,⁠ and you must not place a sculpted stone in your land to bow down before it, for I am the Lord your God. 2 You must keep my Sabbaths and reverence my sanctuary. I am the Lord. 3 “‘If you walk in my statutes and are sure to obey my commandments,⁠ 4 I will give you your rains in their time so that the land will give its yield and the trees of the field will produce their fruit.⁠ 5 Threshing season will extend for you until the season for harvesting grapes, and the season for harvesting grapes will extend until sowing season, so you will eat your bread until you are satisfied, and you will live securely in your land. 6 I will grant peace in the land so that you will lie down to sleep without anyone terrifying you.⁠ I will remove harmful animals from the land, and no sword of war will pass through your land. 7 You will pursue your enemies, and they will fall before you by the sword. 8 Five of you will pursue a hundred, and a hundred of you will pursue ten thousand, and your enemies will fall before you by the sword. 9 I will turn to you, make you fruitful, multiply you, and maintain my covenant with you.⁠ 10 You will still be eating stored produce from the previous year and will have to clean out what is stored from the previous year to make room for new. 11 “‘I will put my tabernacle in your midst, and I will not abhor you. 12 I will walk among you,⁠ and I will be your God, and you will be my people.⁠ 13 I am the Lord your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt, from being their slaves, and I broke the bars of your yoke and caused you to walk upright.⁠ 14 “‘If, however, you do not obey me and keep all these commandments—⁠ 15 if you reject my statutes and abhor my regulations⁠ so that you do not keep all my commandments and you break my covenant— 16 I for my part will do this to you: I will inflict horror on you, consumption and fever, which diminish eyesight and drain away the vitality of life. You will sow your seed in vain because your enemies will eat it. 17 I will set my face against you. You will be struck down before your enemies; those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee when there is no one pursuing you. 18 “‘If, in spite of all these things, you do not obey me, I will discipline you seven times more on account of your sins.⁠ 19 I will break your strong pride and make your sky like iron⁠ and your land like bronze. 20 Your strength will be used up in vain; your land will not give its yield, and the trees of the land will not produce their fruit. 21 “‘If you walk in hostility against me and are not willing to obey me, I will increase your affliction seven times according to your sins. 22 I will send the wild animals against you,⁠ and they will bereave you of your children, annihilate your cattle, and diminish your population so that your roads will become deserted. 23 “‘If in spite of these things you do not allow yourselves to be disciplined and you walk in hostility against me, 24 then I myself will also walk in hostility against you and strike you seven times on account of your sins. 25 I will bring on you an avenging sword, a covenant vengeance.⁠ Although you will gather together into your cities, I will send pestilence among you, and you will be given into enemy hands. 26 When I break off your supply of bread, ten women will bake your bread in one oven; they will ration your bread by weight, and you will eat and not be satisfied.⁠ 27 “‘If in spite of this you do not obey me but walk in hostility against me, 28 I will walk in hostile rage against you, and I myself will also discipline you seven times on account of your sins. 29 You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.⁠ 30 I will destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars, and I will stack your dead bodies on top of the lifeless bodies of your idols. I will abhor you.⁠ 31 I will lay your cities waste and make your sanctuaries desolate,⁠ and I will refuse to smell your soothing aromas.⁠ 32 I myself will make the land desolate, and your enemies who live in it will be appalled. 33 I will scatter you among the nations and unsheathe the sword after you,⁠ so your land will become desolate and your cities will become a waste.⁠ 34 “‘Then the land will make up for its Sabbaths all the days it lies desolate while you are in the land of your enemies; then the land will rest and make up its Sabbaths.⁠ 35 All the days of the desolation it will have the rest it did not have on your Sabbaths when you lived on it. 36 “‘As for the ones who remain among you, I will bring despair into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a blowing leaf will pursue them, and they will flee as one who flees the sword and will fall down even though there is no pursuer. 37 They will stumble over each other as those who flee before a sword, though there is no pursuer, and there will be no one to take a stand for you before your enemies. 38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will consume you. 39 “‘As for the ones who remain among you, they will rot away because of their iniquity in the lands of your enemies, and they will also rot away because of their ancestors’ iniquities which are with them.⁠ 40 However, when they confess their iniquity and their ancestors’ iniquities which they committed by trespassing against me,⁠ by which they also walked in hostility against me⁠ 41 (and I myself will walk in hostility against them and bring them into the land of their enemies), and then their uncircumcised hearts become humbled and they make up for their iniquities,⁠ 42 I will remember my covenant with Jacob and also my covenant with Isaac and also my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.⁠ 43 The land will be abandoned by them in order that it may make up for its Sabbaths while it is made desolate without them, and they will make up for their iniquity because they have rejected my regulations and have abhorred my statutes. 44 In spite of this, however, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them and abhor them to make a complete end of them, to break my covenant with them, for I am the Lord their God.⁠ 45 I will remember for them the covenant with their ancestors whom I brought out from the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations to be their God. I am the Lord.’” 46 These are the statutes, regulations, and instructions which the Lord established between himself and the Israelites at Mount Sinai through Moses.⁠

Texts in conversation

Compare Leviticus 26:34 and 2 Chronicles 36:21 and Daniel 9:2

Hebrew Bible

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Summary

2 Chronicles links the 70-year exile to the land’s sabbath rest in Leviticus and ends it with Cyrus’s decree. Daniel reinterprets it as 70 “weeks” of years, moving its fulfillment into the future and implying that exile and restoration are unresolved.

Passages

Leviticus 26:34

Hebrew Bible
33 I will scatter you among the nations and unsheathe the sword after you, so your land will become desolate and your cities will become a waste. 34 “‘Then the land will make up for its Sabbaths all the days it lies desolate while you are in the land of your enemies; then the land will rest and make up its Sabbaths. 35 All the days of the desolation it will have the rest it did not have on your Sabbaths when you lived on it. 36 “‘As for the ones who remain among you, I will bring despair into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a blowing leaf will pursue them, and they will flee as one who flees the sword and will fall down even though there is no pursuer.
750–400 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Leviticus

2 Chronicles 36:21

Hebrew Bible
20 He deported to Babylon all who escaped the sword. They served him and his sons until the Persian kingdom rose to power. 21 This took place to fulfill the Lord’s message spoken through Jeremiah and lasted until the land experienced its sabbatical years. All the time of its desolation the land rested in order to fulfill the seventy years. 22 In the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, in fulfillment of the Lord’s message spoken through Jeremiah, the Lord motivated King Cyrus of Persia to issue a proclamation throughout his kingdom and also to put it in writing. It read: 23 “This is what King Cyrus of Persia says: ‘The Lord God of heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth. He has appointed me to build a temple for him in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Anyone of his people among you may go up there, and may the Lord his God be with him.’”
400–301 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in 2 Chronicles

Daniel 9:2

Hebrew Bible
1 In the first year of Darius son of Ahasuerus, who was of Median descent and who had been appointed king over the Babylonian empire— 2 in the first year of his reign I, Daniel, came to understand from the sacred books that the number of years for the fulfilling of the desolation of Jerusalem, which had come as the Lord’s message to the prophet Jeremiah, would be 70 years. 3 So I turned my attention to the Lord God to implore him by prayer and requests, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes.
200–101 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Daniel

References

"... It is generally accepted by scholars today that Daniel 9:24–27 reflects a paradigm of inner-biblical interpretation, according to which the later text has transformed and updated Jeremiah’s 70 years of exile into 70 weeks of years, or 490 years. According to this common reading, the author of Daniel 9 did not perceive the dismal Judean reality following the return to the Land in the Persian period – all the way down through the constant clashes between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires in the Hellenistic period – as the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s words of hope and restoration. Therefore, the writer found it necessary to extend the expiration date of the prophecy originally directed to the Babylonian exiles, all the way into the mid-second century B. C. E. The method by which this supposed reinterpretation was accomplished is similar in some degree to the mode of interpretation found in chapters 7 and 8. Those chapters contain vivid visions, which are interpreted symbolically on Daniel’s behalf. Each aspect of the visions is understood to reflect a particular idea, entity or event, and the divine revelation to Daniel is only meaningful on this interpretive level. In a similar vein, the suggested approach to Daniel 9 also assumes the use of “symbolic exegesis” according to which the word “year” is reinterpreted as “week.” The primary difference between the interpretive model of chapters 7 and 8 on the one hand and chapter 9 on the other, is that the former employs objects for the interpreted symbols, while the latter treats Jeremiah’s prophetic utterance in the same way. In this sense, the method of interpretation found in Daniel 9 (according to the prevalent view) is most similar to pesher exegesis, as evidenced extensively in the Qumran scrolls. An interesting consequence of this approach, according to which this vision extends Jeremiah’s original prophecy of 70 years, is that Daniel 9 stands in opposition to the position expressed explicitly at the end of the Book of Chronicles (2 Chronicles 36), which clearly assumes that Jeremiah’s prophecy was indeed fulfilled in the time of Cyrus, when the Judeans were allowed to return to the Land and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem ... the text of 2 Chronicles 36 has also been analyzed extensively as an example of inner-biblical interpretation, since it offers a basis for the length of the seventy-year exile, as the result of the nonobservance of the sabbatical years for the land as prescribed in Leviticus 26:34–35, 43 ..."
Michael Segal, “The Chronological Conception of the Persian Period in Daniel 9,” JAJ 2 (2011): 283–303.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

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Leviticus 26:34 and 2 Chronicles 36:21 and Daniel 9:2

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