(Leviticus 26:1 - 26:46)
"You must not make idols or carved images, or erect pillars or stone sculptures in your land for the purpose of worshiping them. Thus says Jehovah your god. You must keep my sabbaths and revere my Tabernacle. Thus says Jehovah your god.
"If you follow my statutes, respect my commandments and observe them faithfully, I will send you rain in good season. The land will yield its crops and the trees will bring forth their fruit. Your threshing will continue until it is time to harvest the grapes, and you will still be harvesting grapes when it is time to plant the grain. You will able to eat your fill and live securely on the land. I will bring peace to your land. You will be able to lie down to sleep without fear. I will banish the wild beasts from your land and no warfare will threaten your country. When you pursue your enemies, they will be routed. Five of you will put to flight a hundred of them, and a hundred, ten thousand! By your arms your enemies will be overcome.
"I will look with approval upon you. You will be fruitful and multiply. I will keep the pact I made with you. You will still be eating the grain of last year's harvest when it is time to store the new. I will place my Tabernacle among you and will not spurn you. My spirit will always be with you. I will be your god and you will be my people. I am Jehovah your god, who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves. I broke the yoke of slavery that bound your neck, so that you could walk erect.
"However, if you do not heed me or obey these commandments, if you break my contract by rejecting my decrees, showing contempt for my laws, or ignoring my commands, then what follows will happen to you. Terrible calamity will fall precipitously upon you. Debilitating disease and fever will steal your sight and sap your strength. Your seeds will be planted in vain, for it will be your enemies who will eat the crop. I will turn against you so that you will be conquered by your enemies. Those who hate you will lord over you. You will flee even when no one pursues you.
"If, after all this, you still disobey me, I will punish you sevenfold for your sins. I will break your rebellious spirit. Your sky will become as dry as iron and your land as hard as copper. Your labor will all be to no purpose, because crops will not grow in your soil and the trees in your land will bear no fruit.
"If you still remain hostile toward me and refuse to obey me, then I will increase your afflictions sevenfold, in punishment for your sins. I will send wild beasts to attack you, to rob you of your children and prey upon your livestock. They will so decrease the population that your roads will be deserted and desolate.
"If, despite these afflictions, you haven't learned your lesson and are still hostile to me, then I will be hostile to you. I will afflict you sevenfold for your sins. In retribution for the breaking of my contract with you, I will bring warfare down upon you. You will seek refuge in your cities, but I will afflict you with disease and you will be delivered into the hands of your enemy. When I cut off your grain supply, it will only take ten women and a single oven to bake all the bread you have. The bread will be doled out by weight and when you eat your meager ration, it won't be enough to keep you from being hungry.
"If you then continue to disobey me and be hostile to me, my full wrath will vented upon you and I will punish you for your sins sevenfold. You will end up as cannibals, eating the flesh of your children. I will destroy your pagan shrines and topple your altars. Your corpses will be heaped upon the ruins of your smashed idols. I will revile you. I will devastate your cities and lay waste your places of worship. I will find no pleasure in the otherwise pleasurable aroma of your burnt offerings. I will make the land a place of such desolation that even the enemies occupying it will be shocked. I will scatter you among foreign lands where you will be harassed by warfare. Your country will be a wasteland and your cities will lie in ruins. The land in its desolation will have a Sabbath Year every year. While you are in exile in the land of your enemies and the land remains desolate, the land will enjoy the rest and the Sabbath Years it was deprived of when you were living there.
“You who survive will live in the land of your enemies with such fear that even so much as the rustle of a wind-blown leaf will drive you to into a panicked flight. You will flee as if from an army, but will fall and stumble over one another, even when no one pursues you. You will have no strength to oppose your foes. You will find death in foreign countries and the lands of your enemies will swallow you up. Those who do survive will waste away there, not only because of their own sins, but because of the sins of their ancestors.
"But, if finally my people will confess their sins and the sins of their ancestors, if they will regret their infidelity and hostility to me, (which made me so hostile to them they I banished them to the land of their enemies), if their hard hearts will be softened and they will make amends for their trespasses, then I will remember the contract I made with Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham and remember the land I promised them. That land, evacuated by them, will enjoy a sabbath while they are absent making amends for their iniquity, for continually ignoring my ordinances and rejecting my regulations. Yet, despite that, when they are in exile in the land of their enemies, I will not spurn them or detest them so much as to utterly destroy them or break my contract with them, for I am still their god Jehovah. For their sakes, I will remember the ancient contract I made with their ancestors when, before the eyes of all the world, I brought them out of Egypt to be their god. Thus says Jehovah."
These are the laws and statutes and decrees that Jehovah gave to Moses on the mountain in Sinai as part of the contract between himself and the Israelites.
Notes
1. The prohibition against images, statues, idols, etc. is specific, but only if they are used for idolatrous worship. It is not, therefore, forbidden to make a statue, a painting, and carving of anything; worshiping them is what is sinful. This prohibition has been too strictly interpreted by many religious who regard the Old Testament as scripture.
2. Success, good fortune, peace and prosperity are all predicated on ones' obedience to Jehovah and proper observance of his laws and statutes. Good things will happen to those who are good, evil things to those who are evil -- this is the kind of earthly justice we all yearn for and hope for. But experience repeatedly tells us it does not exist. Jehovah makes these glowing promises to his followers. When they are not fulfilled there is always the excuse that his people have not been holy enough, that their sins, and there are always sins, have deprive them of Jehovah's blessings. This mindset is not peculiar to the Israelites or even to the ancient world. That God in this earthly life will reward the righteous and punish the sinful is a belief that persists among the faithful of all religions, however much empirical evidence militates against its reality.
3. The worship of Jehovah was apparently so distasteful to the Israelites that they had to be bribed and threatened to be observant. The inducements to devotion are so great, the punishments that befall the apostate so horrendous, it is hard to understand why would the Israelites not remain dutifully faithful. But there is always skepticism and obstinacy, indulgence and passion and venality. Jehovah doesn't seem to be able to compel obedience or to change the nature of his errant worshipers.
4. Jehovah (or the authors of the Old Testament) always exhibits a taste for the melodramatic and seems to derive almost sadistic pleasure from florid descriptions of cataclysm, catastrophe, and calamity on an epic, indeed biblical scale. Jehovah, definitely not a turn-the-other-cheek kind of chap, takes delight in threatening evil and violence upon his people. He is rather like a stern father who must never be crossed or challenged, who demands unquestioning obedience, and who will find any excuse to get out the strap and give his unworthy offspring a good lickin'.
5. The Israelites are to be punished not only for their own sins, but for that of their ancestors. The concept of collective and ancestral guilt is well established in the Old Testament and promoted by Jehovah, although it is generally rejected by moderns who feel that a man is responsible only for his own actions.
6. The prophecies of disaster, conquest and exile, are obvious references to the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzer and the subsequent conquest and captivity of the Israelites from the Kingdom of Judah. Even the cannibalism refers to a recorded incident during that siege. To the writers of the Old Testament, very conscious of their audience, these events were recent history. Readers needed to be comforted by the knowledge that Jehovah must have been aware of this many hundreds of years before.
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