NOTES for Lev 26:1-46

At first glance it may appear that God's promises and God's threats, spoken of in Leviticus, fit perfectly into the traditional scheme of God's rewards and God's punishments. For right behavior He rewards His people; for wrong behavior He punishes them, and He does both in proportion to the people's right or wrong behavior. The pedagogy, it would seem, is evident, and quite proper, since both encouragement and punishment correspond to the deed. Yet it only appears this way at first glance.

Indeed, the people received their land from God from the very beginning. It did not belong to them originally, as happened with other lands and other peoples, although not only today but already in those times it was practically impossible to determine what originally belonged to whom. And if about someone else one could still say, even with some stretching, that they owned their land by right, whether by conquest or inheritance is another question, then about the Hebrews one can say only that they own their land by God's mercy. If for no other reason, then because without God's direct intervention there could have been no question not only of conquering Palestine, but even of the simple survival in the desert of Jacob's descendants who had fled Egypt.

God made this flight into the Exodus, just as God made Palestine the Hebrew land. In that case there is no room here to speak of punishment or encouragement. A good life is not a reward for obedience to God; faithfulness to God and following Him are simply its absolutely necessary condition, since what is at issue is God's land. Likewise the disasters that fall on the people in the event of apostasy are not punishments at all; they are only the consequence of the people's being left alone, without God's support.

Disasters are not punishment, but the normal life of a world without God, just as prosperity is not the natural state and not a reward, but a miracle, the very miracle of God without which a person cannot survive in the fallen world. This is true for every person and for every people, wherever a people may live, but it is all the more true for God's people on God's land, where all spiritual processes run brighter and faster than anywhere else. And the results, accordingly, are also seen more clearly than on any other land.