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Leviticus 26

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1 "'You shall make for yourselves no idols, neither shall you raise up an engraved image or a pillar, neither shall you place any figured stone in your land, to bow down to it: for I am Yahweh your God.

2 "'You shall keep my Sabbaths, and have reverence for my sanctuary. I am Yahweh.

3 "'If you walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them;

4 then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit.

5 Your threshing shall reach to the vintage, and the vintage shall reach to the sowing time; and you shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely.

6 "'I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and no one will make you afraid; and I will remove evil animals out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land.

7 You shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword.

8 Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall chase ten thousand; and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword.

9 "'I will have respect for you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and will establish my covenant with you.

10 You shall eat old store long kept, and you shall move out the old because of the new.

11 I will set my tent among you: and my soul won't abhor you.

12 I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you will be my people.

13 I am Yahweh your God, who brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their slaves; and I have broken the bars of your yoke, and made you go upright.

14 "'But if you will not listen to me, and will not do all these commandments;

15 and if you shall reject my statutes, and if your soul abhors my ordinances, so that you will not do all my commandments, but break my covenant;

16 I also will do this to you: I will appoint terror over you, even consumption and fever, that shall consume the eyes, and make the soul to pine away; and you will sow your seed in vain, for your enemies will eat it.

17 I will set my face against you, and you will be struck before your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you; and you will flee when no one pursues you.

18 "'If you in spite of these things will not listen to me, then I will chastise you seven times more for your sins.

19 I will break the pride of your power, and I will make your sky like iron, and your soil like brass;

20 and your strength will be spent in vain; for your land won't yield its increase, neither will the trees of the land yield their fruit.

21 "'If you walk contrary to me, and won't listen to me, then I will bring seven times more plagues on you according to your sins.

22 I will send the wild animals among you, which will rob you of your children, destroy your livestock, and make you few in number; and your roads will become desolate.

23 "'If by these things you won't be reformed to me, but will walk contrary to me;

24 then I will also walk contrary to you; and I will strike you, even I, seven times for your sins.

25 I will bring a sword upon you, that will execute the vengeance of the covenant; and you will be gathered together within your cities: and I will send the pestilence among you; and you will be delivered into the hand of the enemy.

26 When I break your staff of bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver your bread again by weight: and you shall eat, and not be satisfied.

27 "'If you in spite of this won't listen to me, but walk contrary to me;

28 then I will walk contrary to you in wrath; and I also will chastise you seven times for your sins.

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

30 I will destroy your high places, and cut down your incense altars, and cast your dead bodies upon the bodies of your idols; and my soul will abhor you.

31 I will lay your cities waste, and will bring your sanctuaries to desolation, and I will not take delight in the sweet fragrance of your offerings.

32 I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies that dwell therein will be astonished at it.

33 I will scatter you among the nations, and I will draw out the sword after you: and your land will be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste.

34 Then the land will enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate and you are in your enemies' land. Even then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths.

35 As long as it lies desolate it shall have rest, even the rest which it didn't have in your sabbaths, when you lived on it.

36 "'As for those of you who are left, I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies: and the sound of a driven leaf will put them to flight; and they shall flee, as one flees from the sword; and they will fall when no one pursues.

37 They will stumble over one another, as it were before the sword, when no one pursues: and you will have no power to stand before your enemies.

38 You will perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies will eat you up.

39 Those of you who are left will pine away in their iniquity in your enemies' lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall they pine away with them.

40 "'If they confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, in their trespass which they trespassed against me, and also that, because they walked contrary to me,

41 I also walked contrary to them, and brought them into the land of their enemies: if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled, and they then accept the punishment of their iniquity;

42 then 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 also will be left by them, and will enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them: and they will accept the punishment of their iniquity; because, even because they rejected my ordinances, and their soul abhorred my statutes.

44 Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break my covenant with them; for I am Yahweh their God;

45 but I will for their sake remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God. I am Yahweh.'"

46 These are the statutes, ordinances and laws, which Yahweh made between him and the children of Israel in Mount Sinai by Moses.

   

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Woman

  
woman looking to sky
woman looking to sky

The word "woman" is used a number of different ways in the Bible – as a simple description, as someone connected to a man ("his woman"), as a temptation to the men of Israel (women of other nations) and even as a term of address (Jesus addresses Mary as "woman" twice). There are also various spiritual meanings, and context is important. In most cases, a "woman" in the Bible represents a church, either a true one following the Lord or a false one out to deceive. This follows from the idea that the true character of an organization – or of an individual person – is determined by its goals, its mission, what it cares about most. This is well represented by women, because women are, at their inmost levels, forms of affection and love. Men, by contrast, are forms of thought and intellect, which appear prominent but actually play the secondary role of describing and supporting the defining loves and affections. The most central of a woman's loves and affections is the love of truth. On an individual scale this is central to the union between a wife and a husband: She loves his intellect and ideas, and blends them with her own to produce acts of love and kindness; meanwhile her love inspires him to seek more true ideas and greater wisdom so those acts of love and kindness can be ever better. The relationship between the church and the Lord is different, obviously, because the Lord is perfect love and perfect wisdom in balance, and is ultimately both masculine and feminine. The church is also not specifically feminine, being made up of men and women working in harmony. Even so, the defining aspect of a church is its love for truth, and how it receives ideas from the Lord. So while "woman" sometimes represents a church in general, it can also represents the love of truth that exists in that church, or the love of truth itself. Not all churches are true, of course. The reason the people of Israel were so strongly forbidden to intermarry with the people that surrounded them was that the foreign women represented false churches and false beliefs. And for an Israeli woman to take a foreign husband represented introducing falsity into the Israeli church. Two other uses of "woman" are more limited, primarily to the Book of Genesis. One of them is Eve, the first woman, formed from the rib of Adam. In that story Adam represents the Most Ancient Church, and the woman represents what the Writings call the "proprium," a sense of self, of identity, of control that the Lord gave to people of the church at that time. In a way this fits with the more general representation, because the love of truth is an important way we can feel a sense of power in our own spiritual growth, but the representation of Eve is relatively unique. Much of the rest of Genesis is dealing rather directly with the Lord's own development during his childhood on earth. Since the Lord thought and felt more deeply than we can possibly imagine, the women in this stories – Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, Rachel and others – represent true ideas themselves, rather than affections for truth.