What Does Leviticus 20:22 Mean?
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.
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
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 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.
“vomit you out” 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 soiled. Therefore I visit its crookedness upon it, and the land itself vomits out those who settle in her.That you may love the LORD your God, and that you may hear and respond to his voice, and that you may cling to him; for he is your life, and the lengthening of your days; that you may settle upon the ground the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house upon the rock.THE THREAD
Lest the land vomit you out, when you soil it, as it vomited 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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