What Does Leviticus 20:22 Mean in the King James?
Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes, and all my judgments, and do them: that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spue you not out.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The land is pictured not as passive property but as a body that can expel those who refuse its order.
THE MEANING
Your dwelling is bound to an order you are to guard and enact; the ground beneath you is pictured as an active body, not a passive possession. When that order is defiled, the land can expel its inhabitants as a body rejects what it cannot retain.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that residence is an unconditional entitlement and the land is merely passive property; the ground itself can reject those who defile it.
THE ROOT
תָּקִיא
tāqîʾ
GROWS FROM
קיא
q-y-ʾ
Vomit; expel from the body.
“spue” in this verse is tāqîʾ. The same root names bodily vomit and the land’s act of expulsion: the image is not simply that people lose a place, but that the land cannot retain them. The verse portrays dwelling as embodied and conditional, with the ground itself acting as the one that rejects.
ALSO GROWS
qîʾ: Vomit; what is vomited.
קִיא
The noun makes the bodily image explicit: the land’s expulsion is described with the language of what a body casts out.
wattāqiʾ: And it vomited out.
וַתָּקִא
This form describes the land itself expelling its inhabitants, showing that the verse’s image is active rejection.
וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם
ûšĕmartem
GROWS FROM
שמר
š-m-r
Guard, keep watch, preserve.
English ‘keep’ can sound like simple compliance, while שׁמר carries the work of guarding and watching over what is entrusted. The verse joins keeping with doing: the order is preserved by being enacted, and dwelling depends on that lived guarding.
ALSO GROWS
šōmēr: Keeper; watchman.
שֹׁמֵר
The watchman branch shows that keeping involves attentive guarding, not merely holding something in place.
mišmeret: Guard; charge entrusted to someone’s care.
מִשְׁמֶרֶת
This branch reveals keeping as an active responsibility that protects what has been entrusted.
THE PATTERN
A place of dwelling remains inhabitable only while life is enacted in alignment with the order that sustains it.
And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.That thou mayest love the LORD thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him: for he is thy life, and the length of thy days: that thou mayest dwell in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:THE THREAD
That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you.This verse repeats the same root behind “spue” and makes the land the acting subject: it expels its inhabitants when defiled. That opens the present warning as a bodily and direct image, the ground itself can refuse to keep those who defile it.
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