What Does Leviticus 26:37 Mean?
And they shall stumble one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursues. You shall not be able to stand before your enemies.
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
And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursueth: and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies.THE KEY
The pursuer can be absent and the collapse still spread: one person’s stumble becomes the next person’s fall.
THE MEANING
This verse names what happens when a threat has already taken hold of a group: even with no one chasing, each person’s fall knocks another off balance. The enemies remain before them, but their ability to rise and stand has given way before an attack arrives.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that danger must be physically chasing you before it can control you; the pursuit can stop while its power over your movements remains.
THE ROOT
וְכָשְׁלוּ
wəḵāšəlū
GROWS FROM
כשל
To stumble, totter, or fail.
“stumble one upon another” in this verse is wəḵāšəlū. The verse says each person stumbles against a brother, and a related form of this root means to cause someone else to stumble. The image is a collapse that spreads: one person’s loss of footing becomes an obstacle for the next.
ALSO GROWS
mikshol: A stumbling block.
מִכְשׁוֹל
The same root gives a name to what trips someone; here, each person’s fall becomes an obstacle to those beside them.
hikhshil: To cause someone to stumble or fail.
הִכְשִׁיל
This causative form shows how stumbling can pass from one person to another, matching the verse’s picture of people falling against one another.
תְּקוּמָה
təqūmāh
GROWS FROM
קום
To rise or stand; in a causative form, to raise or establish.
“No power to stand” uses a noun from the root for rising. The verse describes more than losing a position: the people have lost the capacity to rise and establish themselves before their enemies.
ALSO GROWS
qum: To rise or stand.
קוּם
This is the root’s basic action, which the verse says is no longer available to them before their enemies.
heqim: To raise or establish.
הֵקִים
This causative form adds the sense of being set upright or established, deepening the verse’s image of a people unable to recover their footing.
THE PATTERN
A threat can govern a group before pursuit begins, and one person’s collapse can destabilize the next.
The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the aligned are bold as a lion.There they tremble with a trembling, where no trembling is; for God scatters the bones of the one who camps against you. You put them to shame, for God spurns them.Then on that same evening, the first day of the week, when the doors were locked where the disciples had gathered together for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, Wholeness be with you.THE THREAD
When evildoers, those who press me narrow and my foes, drew near against me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.Psalm 27 uses the same root, כשל (kashal), for stumbling. In Leviticus the people stumble before their enemies; in the psalm, the advancing enemies stumble, showing how the same root can describe either side losing its footing.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us