What Does Leviticus 26:38 Mean?
And you shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.
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 ye shall perish among the heathen, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.THE KEY
The land that should hold life becomes, in the verse’s image, the mouth that consumes it.
THE MEANING
The verse confronts you with loss beyond survival: you perish among other peoples, and enemy ground is pictured as consuming you. The image makes displacement total, because even the land beneath your enemies’ rule offers no shelter.
THE ROOT
וְאָכְלָה
ve’akhla
GROWS FROM
אכל
’akhal
eat, consume
“eat you up” in this verse is ve’akhla. The land is cast as an eater, not a shelter. The same root אָכַל (’akhal, eat or consume) also forms words for food, so the image collapses the boundary between what sustains and what devours.
ALSO GROWS
’okhel: food, nourishment
אֹכֶל
The root can name what is eaten as well as the act of eating, sharpening the verse’s reversal of the land’s sustaining role.
ma’akhal: food, that which is eaten
מַאֲכָל
This branch makes the land’s people into what is consumed, completing the verse’s image of ground turned against its inhabitants.
וַאֲבַדְתֶּם
va’avadtem
GROWS FROM
אבד
’avad
be lost, perish
“perish” in this verse is va’avadtem. The root holds together perishing and being lost. Here the people are lost among other nations, and the next image makes that loss feel complete: the hostile land consumes them.
ALSO GROWS
’oved: one who is lost or perishing
אֹבֵד
This branch carries the sense of losing one’s place, not only ceasing to live.
’avaddon: destruction, ruin
אֲבַדּוֹן
This branch shows how the root extends from being lost to the ruin that follows.
THE PATTERN
When people are uprooted, the nations and ground around them can become agents of their undoing.
And they brought out an evil word about the land, which they had scouted out, to the children of Israel, saying, The land through which we have passed to scout it out is a land that eats up its inhabitants; and all the people we saw in it are men of great height.And the LORD shall scatter you among the nations, and you shall be left few in number among the nations, where the LORD shall lead you.They will fall by the mouth of the sword, and be led away captive into all the nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled by the nations until the seasons of the nations are filled.THE THREAD
And they brought out an evil word about the land, which they had scouted out, to the children of Israel, saying, The land through which we have passed to scout it out is a land that eats up its inhabitants; and all the people we saw in it are men of great height.The Hebrew root אכל (’akhal, eat or consume) appears in both verses: the land is described as eating its inhabitants. The shared verb makes the land’s usual role as a place of sustenance turn into the image of a consuming force.
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