What Does Leviticus 18:28 Mean?
Lest the land vomit you out, when you soil it, as it vomited out the nations that were before you.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you.THE KEY
The land is not passive ground beneath you: when you defile it, it becomes an active force that can cast you out.
THE MEANING
This verse presents the land as bound up with the way you live: defilement reaches beyond you, and the ground itself answers. Its image is physical and unsettling, the land vomits out those it can no longer bear.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The ground is merely a passive container, untouched by what people do upon it.
THE ROOT
קָאָה
qāʾāh
GROWS FROM
קיא
q-y-ʾ
To vomit or disgorge.
“vomited out” in this verse is qāʾāh. The Hebrew verb gives the land a body’s action: it does not simply become a setting for consequences but expels what defiles it. The same root describes vomiting elsewhere, making the verse’s image blunt and embodied.
ALSO GROWS
tāqîʾ: It will vomit out.
תָּקִיא
Leviticus 20:22 repeats the land’s expulsion with this same root, showing the image is structural, not incidental.
yəqiʾennû: He will vomit it out.
יְקִאֶנּוּ
Job 20:15 uses the same root for riches expelled from the body, echoing the verse’s image of rejection from within.
בְּטַמַּאֲכֶם
bĕṭamməʾăkem
GROWS FROM
טמא
ṭ-m-ʾ
To be unclean or to make something unclean.
“soil” in this verse is bĕṭamməʾăkem. The verse names defilement as something done to the land, not only a private condition. The ground’s response is tied directly to what is done to it.
ALSO GROWS
ṭāmēʾ: Unclean.
טָמֵא
The root can describe a state of uncleanness, while this verse shows that state affecting the land itself.
ṭumʾāh: Uncleanness or defilement.
טֻמְאָה
This noun makes the same root’s condition explicit: what is done can leave a place marked by defilement.
THE PATTERN
The land and creation are portrayed as participants that bear the effects of human defilement and answer it.
And keep all my statutes and all my judgments, and do them, so that the land to which I bring you to settle does not vomit you out.The earth is soiled beneath those who settle in it, because they have crossed over the instruction, exchanged the statutes, broken the covenant of the ages.For we know that the whole creation groans together and labors together in the pangs of birth until now.THE THREAD
And the land is soiled. Therefore I visit its crookedness upon it, and the land itself vomits out those who settle in her.This verse joins the same two movements: the land is defiled, and it vomits out its inhabitants. It makes explicit that the land is an active participant in the chain described in verse 28.
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