Lévitique (NAB) 26

Rewards for Obedience

26 1 "Do not make false gods for yourselves. You shall not erect an idol or a sacred pillar for yourselves, nor shall you set up a stone figure for worship in your land; for I, the LORD, am your God.2 Keep my sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary. I am the LORD.3 "If you live in accordance with my precepts and are careful to observe my commandments, 4 I will give you rain in due season, so that the land will bear its crops, and the trees their fruit;5 your threshing will last till vintage time, and your vintage till the time for sowing, and you will have food to eat in abundance, so that you may dwell securely in your land.6 I will establish peace in the land, that you may lie down to rest without anxiety. I will rid the country of ravenous beasts, and keep the sword of war from sweeping across your land.7 You will rout your enemies and lay them low with your sword.8 Five of you will put a hundred of your foes to flight, and a hundred of you will chase ten thousand of them, till they are cut down by your sword.9 I will look with favor upon you, and make you fruitful and numerous, as I carry out my covenant with you.10 So much of the old crops will you have stored up for food that you will have to discard them to make room for the new.11 I will set my Dwelling among you, and will not disdain you.12 Ever present in your midst, I will be your God, and you will be my people;13 for it is I, the LORD, your God, who brought you out of the land of the Egyptians and freed you from their slavery, breaking the yoke they had laid upon you and letting you walk erect.


Penalties for Disobedience

14 "But if you do not heed me and do not keep all these commandments,15 if you reject my precepts and spurn my decrees, refusing to obey all my commandments and breaking my covenant,16 then I, in turn, will give you your deserts. I will punish you with terrible woes-- with wasting and fever to dim the eyes and sap the life. You will sow your seed in vain, for your enemies will consume the crop.17 I will turn against you, till you are beaten down before your enemies and lorded over by your foes. You will take to flight though no one pursues you.18 "If even after this you do not obey me, I will increase the chastisement for your sins sevenfold,19 to break your haughty confidence. I will make the sky above you as hard as iron, and your soil as hard as bronze,20 so that your strength will be spent in vain; your land will bear no crops, and its trees no fruit.21 "If then you become defiant in your unwillingness to obey me, I will multiply my blows another sevenfold, as your sins deserve.22 I will unleash the wild beasts against you, to rob you of your children and wipe out your livestock, till your population dwindles away and your roads become deserted.23 "If, with all this, you still refuse to be chastened by me and continue to defy me,24 I, too, will defy you and will smite you for your sins seven times harder than before.25 I will make the sword, the avenger of my covenant, sweep over you. Though you then huddle together in your walled cities, I will send in pestilence among you, till you are forced to surrender to the enemy.26 And as I cut off your supply of bread, ten women will need but one oven for baking all the bread they dole out to you in rations-- not enough food to still your hunger.27 "If, despite all this, you still persist in disobeying and defying me,28 I, also, will meet you with fiery defiance and will chastise you with sevenfold fiercer punishment for your sins,29 till you begin to eat the flesh of your own sons and daughters. 30 I will demolish your high places, overthrow your incense stands, and cast your corpses on those of your idols. In my abhorrence of you,31 I will lay waste your cities and devastate your sanctuaries, refusing to accept your sweet-smelling offerings.32 So devastated will I leave the land that your very enemies who come to live there will stand aghast at the sight of it.33 You yourselves I will scatter among the nations at the point of my drawn sword, leaving your countryside desolate and your cities deserted.34 Then shall the land retrieve its lost sabbaths during all the time it lies waste, while you are in the land of your enemies; then shall the land have rest and make up for its sabbaths35 during all the time that it lies desolate, enjoying the rest that you would not let it have on the sabbaths when you lived there.36 "Those of you who survive in the lands of their enemies I will make so fainthearted that, if leaves rustle behind them, they will flee headlong, as if from the sword, though no one pursues them;37 stumbling over one another as if to escape a weapon, while no one is after them-- so helpless will you be to take a stand against your foes!38 You will be lost among the Gentiles, swallowed up in your enemies' country.39 Those of you who survive in the lands of their enemies will waste away for their own and their fathers' guilt.40 "Thus they will have to confess that they and their fathers were guilty of having rebelled against me and of having defied me,41 so that I, too, had to defy them and bring them into their enemies' land. Then, when their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they make amends for their guilt,42 I will remember my covenant with Jacob, my covenant with Isaac, and my covenant with Abraham; and of the land, too, I will be mindful.43 But the land must first be rid of them, that in its desolation it may make up its lost sabbaths, and that they, too, may make good the debt of their guilt for having spurned my precepts and abhorred my statutes.44 Yet even so, even while they are in their enemies' land, I will not reject or spurn them, lest, by wiping them out, I make void my covenant with them; for I, the LORD, am their God.45 I will remember them because of the covenant I made with their forefathers, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt under the very eyes of the Gentiles, that I, the LORD, might be their God."46 These are the precepts, decrees and laws which the LORD had Moses promulgate on Mount Sinai in the pact between himself and the Israelites.


Votive Offerings

27 1 The LORD said to Moses,
2
"Speak to the Israelites and tell them: When anyone fulfills a vow of offering one or more persons to the LORD, who are to be ransomed at a fixed sum of money,
3
for persons between the ages of twenty and sixty, the fixed sum, in sanctuary shekels, shall be fifty silver shekels for a man,
4
and thirty shekels for a woman;
5
for persons between the ages of five and twenty, the fixed sum shall be twenty shekels for a youth, and ten for a maiden;
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for persons between the ages of one month and five years, the fixed sum shall be five silver shekels for a boy, and three for a girl;
7
for persons of sixty or more, the fixed sum shall be fifteen shekels for a man, and ten for a woman.
8
However, if the one who took the vow is too poor to meet the fixed sum, the person must be set before the priest, who shall determine the sum for his ransom in keeping with the means of the one who made the vow.
9
"If the offering vowed to the LORD is an animal that may be sacrificed, every such animal, when vowed to the LORD, becomes sacred.
10
The offerer shall not present a substitute for it by exchanging either a better for a worse one or a worse for a better one. If he attempts to offer one animal in place of another, both the original and its substitute shall be treated as sacred.
11
If the animal vowed to the LORD is unclean and therefore unfit for sacrifice, it must be set before the priest,
12
who shall determine its value in keeping with its good or bad qualities, and the value set by the priest shall stand.
13
If the offerer wishes to redeem the animal, he shall pay one fifth more than this valuation.
14
"When someone dedicates his house as sacred to the LORD, the priest shall determine its value in keeping with its good or bad points, and the value set by the priest shall stand.
15
If the one who dedicated his house wishes to redeem it, he shall pay one fifth more than the price thus established, and then it will again be his.
16
"If the object which someone dedicates to the LORD is a piece of his hereditary land, its valuation shall be made according to the amount of seed required to sow it, the acreage sown with a homer of barley seed being valued at fifty silver shekels.
17
If the dedication of a field is made at the beginning of a jubilee period, the full valuation shall hold;
18
but if it is some time after this, the priest shall estimate its money value according to the number of years left until the next jubilee year, with a corresponding rebate on the valuation.
19
If the one who dedicated his field wishes to redeem it, he shall pay one fifth more than the price thus established, and so reclaim it.
20
If, instead of redeeming such a field, he sells it to someone else, it may no longer be redeemed;
21
but at the jubilee it shall be released as sacred to the LORD; like a field that is doomed, it shall become priestly property.
22
"If the field that some man dedicates to the LORD is one he had purchased and not a part of his hereditary property,
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the priest shall compute its value in proportion to the number of years until the next jubilee, and on the same day the price thus established shall be given as sacred to the LORD;
24
at the jubilee, however, the field shall revert to the hereditary owner of this land from whom it had been purchased.
25
"Every valuation shall be made according to the standard of the sanctuary shekel. There are twenty gerahs to the shekel.
26
"Note that a first-born animal, which as such already belongs to the LORD, may not be dedicated by vow to him. If it is an ox or a sheep, it shall be ceded to the LORD;
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but if it is an unclean animal, it may be redeemed by paying one fifth more than its fixed value. If it is not redeemed, it shall be sold at its fixed value.
28
"Note, also, that any one of his possessions which a man vows as doomed to the LORD, whether it is a human being or an animal or a hereditary field, shall be neither sold nor ransomed; everything that is thus doomed becomes most sacred to the LORD.
29
All human beings that are doomed lose the right to be redeemed; they must be put to death.
30
"All tithes of the land, whether in grain from the fields or in fruit from the trees, belong to the LORD, as sacred to him.
31
If someone wishes to buy back any of his tithes, he shall pay one fifth more than their value.
32
The tithes of the herd and the flock shall be determined by ceding to the LORD as sacred every tenth animal as they are counted by the herdsman's rod.
33
It shall not matter whether good ones or bad ones are thus chosen, and no exchange may be made. If any exchange is attempted, both the original animal and its substitute shall be treated as sacred, without the right of being bought back."
34
These are the commandments which the LORD gave Moses on Mount Sinai for the Israelites.


Lévitique (NAB) 26