BechukotaiVayikra (leviticus)

Reward for Fulfilling the Command­ments
God continued to instruct Moses what to convey in His name to the people: “If you make sure to advance in the knowledge of My rules by studying the Torah assiduously, i.e., beyond the minimal requirement, and you make sure to study the Torah with the intent to safeguard your proper performance of My commandments, and then indeed perform them properly,

I will reciprocate by granting you material beneficence that exceeds the limitations of nature: I will give you the rains in a manner most favorable to your benefit and convenience: They will fall in their time – i.e., the time I have designated for them exclusively – nighttime, when people are not outdoors working the land. This way, you will be able to work the land by day unhindered by rain. Moreover, I will further limit the rainfall to the time most convenient for you – the Sabbath night, when no one is usually about. Miraculously, the land will yield its full produce from the rain that falls during this short weekly period. Also miraculously, the naturally barren tree of the field will give forth its fruit.

There will be so much grain that threshing will occupy you until the grape harvest, and harvesting the grapes will occupy you until the time for sowing the fields again for grain. But you will not need this overabundance for yourselves, since your food will be so miraculously satiating that you will be able to eat just a small amount of your food to satiate yourselves. You will live in security in your land, i.e., without fear of drought.

I will not only bless you with abundance, but will ensure that you can enjoy it securely: I will grant peace in the land. You will lie down at night and sleep peacefully, for there will be no cause for fear. I will even remove wild beasts from the land so you will have no fear of them, and no foreign army will even pass through your land on its way elsewhere, so you will have no fear that they will plunder you on the way.

If you go to war outside your land, you will pursue your enemies but will not have to kill them yourselves, for they will fall before you, one by the sword of the other.

Five of the weakest among you will pursue a hundred of them. But the more of you who are loyal to My Torah, the less of you will be required proportionately to pursue your enemies, so thus, a hundred of you will pursue ten thousand of them, and moreover, in the merit of the increased number of those of you who observe My Torah, your enemies will fall before you by the sword in a miraculous way.

In recompense for your assiduous study of the Torah, I will turn My attention away from rewarding all My creatures for their obedience in order to focus on you, bestowing upon you special reward for serving Me beyond what is required. I will make you fruitful by increasing your fertility and guaranteeing that all your progeny be similarly fertile, and I will make all of you and your progeny physically robust and tall. I will ultimately establish My covenant with you in a new, permanent form, by making My teachings so much a part of your nature that you will never again transgress My will.

The produce will be of such high quality, last so long, and age so well that you will eat doubly old produce (i.e., the harvest of the year before last), for it will taste better than last year’s harvest, which will in turn taste better than this year’s harvest. For the same reasons, you will have to clear out the old, already dried produce from the storehouses – since you have not had a chance to eat it yet – in order to make room for the new harvest to dry there.

I will place My permanent dwelling – the Temple – in your midst, and My soul – My Divine Presence – will not reject you by departing from you.

You will become so accustomed to My presence that in the afterlife, I will, so to speak, walk among you and you will not be afraid of Me. Nonetheless, this familiarity will not make you any less aware of My transcendence, and therefore, you will still revere Me: I will be your God and you will be My people.

You should not hesitate to trust that I can perform all these miracles, for, after all, I am GOD, your God, who miraculously took you out of Egypt, from being slaves to them; I broke the crossbars of your yoke and led you upright into freedom.

and if you consequently despise those who do follow My rules; reject the sages, who teach you My ordinances; prevent others from performing the commandments; deny that I gave the Torah and that its rules are all My commandments; and finally break My covenant with you by denying My very existence,

then I too, will do likewise to you, punishing you with a sevenfold train of calamities. I will set upon you disorientation, consumption and blisters, fever, diseases that dash the hopes and depress the soul of the sufferer’s family, who longs in vain for his recovery. You will sow your seed in vain, for it will either not grow, or if it does grow, your enemies will eat it.

Besides the above seven punishments, which are mainly for not studying the Torah and performing My commandments (the first two sins), I will turn toward you, according you special attention in punishing you for hating and forsaking Me beyond this (the last five sins). You will be smitten before your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you. You will flee, although no one will be pursuing you. These same words contain additional, more serious threats: I will angrily do the same to you. I will cause the following punishments to assail you in overlapping succession – before one is finished, the next will begin: disorienting pestilence, which will confine you to bed but not afflict your skin; but this will progress to consumption and blisters, which will damage your skin but not give you a fever; but this will progress to fever, which will make you feel ill but not destroy your hopes of recovery; but this will progress to diseases that dash your hopes of recovery but still allow others to entertain the hope that you will recover; but this will progress to diseases that depress the soul by depriving others, as well, of any hope for your recovery. One year you will sow your seed in vain, but the next year it will grow, but before you can harvest it for yourselves, your enemies will lay siege to your city, and, finding your crops waiting for them in the field, they will eat it, while you have nothing stored up in your city from the previous year to eat. Allegorically, you will sow your seed, i.e., your children, with great effort, but sin, your enemy, will consume them. I will turn toward you, according you special attention in punishing you for your disloyalty to Me. You will be smitten by pestilence within your cities before your enemies, who are laying siege outside the city. Those among you who hate you – traitors from among your own ranks – will rule over you. In contrast to foreign enemies, who only seek to plunder you of your observable wealth, traitors – who are privy to your secrets and harbor more deep-seated hatred for you – will plunder you of your hidden wealth, as well. You will flee in panic, although no one from among these traitors will actually be pursuing you, since they, just like you, will be starving as a result of the enemy’s siege.

I will break, i.e., destroy, the magnificent edifice of the holy Temple, the pride of your strength. I will make your skies dry like iron, which does not sweat, meaning that there will be no rain to water new crops, and your land moist like copper, which does sweat, causing any existing produce to rot.

Your strength will be expended in vain, making you frustrated over the futility of your work. Your land will not even yield a quantity of produce equal to the amount of seed that you planted in it. The tree will be debilitated by the lack of nutrients in the earth, and will therefore not give forth any ripe fruit in season, and it will drop its fruit before ripening it.

If, in your stubbornness, you continue to walk with Me – i.e., perform My commandments – irregularly, and you do not wish to listen to Me, I will add seven more punishments, corresponding to your above-listed seven sins that you continue to commit:

I will incite both the wild beasts of the field and your domesticated animals against you, both of which will bite you (miraculously, in the case of the domesticated animals that do not usually bite) lethally. They will bereave you of your young children. They will attack both you and your other livestock, but whereas they will utterly destroy your livestock, which, being outside in the fields, will be unable to escape their attack, they will only diminish you, since you will be able to seek refuge inside your homes. All your roads, both major and minor thoroughfares, will become desolate.

If, in your continued stubbornness, you will not be corrected by these punishments enough to return to Me, and you therefore continue to walk with Me – i.e., perform My commandments – irregularly,

then I, too, will treat you stubbornly: I will smite you reciprocally sevenfold for persisting in your above-listed seven sins, as follows.

I will bring an army against you that will avenge your disloyalty to the covenant that you made with Me; it will avenge your disloyalty only with the punishments that I am presently describing in this covenant. As this army approaches, you will gather into your cities. I will send an epidemic into your midst, and those of you who remove the corpses from the city in order to bury them will be delivered into the enemy’s hands.

When I eliminate your every source of food, ten women will bake your bread in one oven because of the lack of wood for fuel. Moreover, the grain will rot, causing the bread to crumble in the oven. The women will therefore weigh and divide the crumbs among themselves, and will bring back your bread by weight. Your food will be so miraculously unsatiating that no matter how much you will eat, you will not be satisfied.

If, despite all this, you do not listen to Me, and you therefore continue stubbornly to walk with Me – i.e., perform My commandments – irregularly,

then I will treat you with furious stubbornness: I will chastise you reciprocally sevenfold for persisting in your above-listed seven sins, as follows.

You will eat the flesh of your sons, and you will eat the flesh of your daughters.

I will demolish your tall and fortified edifices and thereby cut down your idols that you place on their roofs. I will make your corpses fall upon the ‘corpses’ of your smashed idols. My soul – the Divine presence – will reject you by departing from you.

I will destroy your cities so completely that even passersby will find no reason to enter them. Inasmuch as your cities will be razed, I will by that very fact make your holy places desolate, devoid of the throngs of pilgrims that used to visit them. I will therefore not be able to derive any pleasure from your sacrifices, which you would have offered up to please Me.

God’s Mercy
Despite all these punishments, I will still have mercy on you: Although I will indeed make the land desolate of its inhabitants, it will be deserted also by your enemies, who will try unsuccessfully to live in it. Thus, they will have no desire to claim it as their own.

I will scatter you among the nations, spreading you so thinly that you will not be able to take comfort in one another in your exile. I will unsheathe the sword after you persistently, allowing your enemies to harass you constantly. Since you will not return to it quickly, your land will be persistently desolate; since you will despair of returning to it, you will view your cities as being truly destroyed.

I will be appeased in this way because during the entire time that the land remains desolate, it will rest the way it should have rested during your sabbatical years, when you lived upon it.

Each man will stumble over his brother Israelite, fleeing as if from the sword, although there is no pursuer. You will not even be able to stand up to face your enemies. Furthermore, you will – at that time – be held accountable for each other’s wrongdoings, so each of you will figuratively ‘fall’ because of the other’s faults.

You will become lost to one another, due to having been scattered among the nations. The land of your enemies will figuratively consume you as you die and are buried in it.

for, as mentioned previously, the land will have been forsaken by them in order to thereby appease Me over its unobserved sabbatical years by being devoid of them. Through this, too, they will appease Me for their iniquity. This was all in retribution for their many sins, as mentioned above, but only in retribution for their having despised My ordinances and for their having rejected My rules; I exacted no retribution for their having rejected Me.

Donating the Value of Human Life
the fixed monetary endowment he will have thereby obligated himself to pay for having pledged the life of a male person will be dependent solely upon the age of the person whose value he pledged, as follows: If the person whose life is being pledged is from 20 to 60 years old, the endowment will be 50 shekels of silver, the shekel being valued according to the weight of the sacred shekel, i.e., the shekel I have designated for use in all holy purposes: 20 gerah per shekel [by which 50 shekels equals 800 g or 1.76 lb].

If the person is from five to 20 years old, the endowment for a male will be 20 shekels [320 g or 11.2 oz], while that for a female will be 10 shekels [160 g or 5.6 oz].

Exchanging, Substituting, and Redeeming Sacrifices
If a person pledges part of an animal whose type is fit to be brought as an offering to GOD (i.e., cattle, sheep, or goats), the value of whatever part of it the person is donating to GOD will become holy: The said animal must be sold to someone who needs to offer up such an animal as a sacrifice; the proceeds of the sale are given to the pledger, minus the value of the limb he pledged, which is given to the Tabernacle treasury.

Once someone has consecrated an animal by designating it to be offered up as a sacrifice, he must not exchange it with someone else’s animal nor substitute one of his own animals for it, whether he proposes to exchange or substitute a good (i.e., unblemished) unconsecrated one for a bad (i.e., blemished) consecrated one, which cannot be sacrificed – thereby seeking to provide the institution of the Tabernacle with an animal that can be sacrificed; or whether he proposes to exchange or substitute a bad (i.e., blemished) unconsecrated one for a good (i.e., unblemished) consecrated one – thereby appropriating for himself the more valuable animal. Since it is forbidden to exchange or substitute sanctified animals even when doing so would be to the advantage of the institution of the Tabernacle, it is self-evident that it is forbidden to do so when there is no such advantage, i.e, to exchange or substitute a blemished unconsecrated animal for a blemished consecrated one or an unblemished unconsecrated animal for an unblemished consecrated one. If he nevertheless does substitute one animal for another animal, both it and its replacement will be holy. If the original animal was consecrated as an ascent- or peace-offering, its replacement must be also offered up as an ascent- or peace-offering. If the original was consecrated as a sin-offering, its replacement must be left to die. If the original was consecrated as a guilt-offering, its replacement must be set out to pasture until it develops a blemish, after which it must be sold and the proceeds used to purchase animals that will be offered up as ascent-offerings when the Altar is idle. If a replacement for any of these types of offerings is blemished, it, too, must be sold and the proceeds used to purchase animals that will be offered up as ascent-offerings when the Altar is idle.

Donating and Redeeming Property
A person is allowed to consecrate his house to the Tabernacle. In such a case, the house becomes the property of the Tabernacle treasury, which can then sell (‘redeem’) the house. The sale (‘redemption’) money must be used for the upkeep of the Tabernacle, whereas the redeemed house reverts to its original, non-consecrated status. The full procedure is as follows: If a man consecrates his house to be holy to GOD, and someone else then wishes to redeem it, the priest must evaluate it, deciding whether it is good (i.e., of high monetary value) or bad (i.e., of low monetary value), or in between. Its monetary value will be established in accordance with how the priest evaluates it, and this is the value that must be paid by anyone wishing to redeem the house from the Tabernacle treasury.

But if he consecrates his field more than a year after the Jubilee year has ended, and someone else wishes to redeem it immediately, the priest must calculate the money that the person redeeming the field must pay in accordance with the remaining years until the next Jubilee year, and thus the proportionate value from the Jubilee year until the year of redemption will be deducted from the full value in order to arrive at the amount that he has to pay. Similarly, if the field remains in the possession of the Tabernacle treasury for a number of years, its redemption price must be adjusted accordingly. Thus, if a is the number of areas sown by a chomer of barley seed involved in the transaction, and b is the number of years left until the Jubilee year when the field is redeemed, the redemption value of the field is given by the formula (50/49)ab, or (1.02)ab. (Since this uneven multiplier will almost invariably result in the product including some small fraction of coinage, the redeemer must round up his payment to the nearest actual coin. This extra amount will be the Temple treasury’s consideration for having to eventually change these small coins into larger ones.)

If the person who consecrated it redeems the field, he must add to it a fifth of the prorated valuation money, and only then will it be his.

If the person who consecrated it does not redeem the field by the next Jubilee year, or if the Tabernacle treasurer has sold the field to someone else in the interim, it may no longer be redeemed by the person who consecrated it.

Similarly, if someone consecrates to GOD a field that he had purchased, which is not one of his inherited fields, and then either he or someone else wishes to redeem it,

Segregating
Although it is generally possible to redeem something that has been consecrated to God, anything that a person segregates for GOD from any of his property – whether it be the person of his non-Jewish bondservant, an animal, or part of his inherited field – if he segregates it for the priests, it may neither be sold nor redeemed until it comes into their possession. Any segregation of animals that have been designated as sacrifices, whether sacrifices of superior holiness or lesser holiness, must be given to GOD.

Redeeming the Second Tithe
You will be taught later that every year (except for sabbatical and Jubilee years), you must tithe the grain you grow and the wine and oil you produce and give these tithes to the Levites. From what remains after this first tithe, you must then remove a second tithe; in the first, second, fourth, and fifth years of the sabbatical cycle, you must take this second tithe to the Temple city and consume it there while ritually undefiled. All such produce that you must set aside as the second tithe of the land – whether it be from the seed of the land, i.e., grain, or the fruit of the tree, i.e., wine or oil – belongs to GOD. He requires you to consume it in the Temple city while ritually undefiled; it is thus holy to GOD and must be consumed in this way.

Tithing Animals
Just as you are required to tithe every year’s produce, so must you tithe all cattle, sheep, and goats born every year. Gather all such animals (each species separately) in a pen, open the gate enough to allow them to exit single file, and as they leave, mark with red paint every tenth animal as a tithe. All tithes of cattle or flock – i.e., all that pass under the red-painted rod – every such tenth animal will be holy to GOD, meaning that you must bring it to the Temple city, sacrifice it, and have its fats burned up on the Altar, similar to a peace-offering. However, unlike regular peace-offerings, you do not have to give the priests any of its meat; you, your family, and your guests may eat all its meat yourselves, as long as you do so in the Temple city. Furthermore, you must not use these animals (before they are sacrificed) to do work in your field, nor may you shear them for their wool.

When tithing his animals, the owner must not select a choice one to be the tithe, even though you will be instructed later on to offer up your choicest animals as sacrifices. Furthermore, you may not even distinguish between a good (i.e., unblemished) one or a bad (i.e., blemished) one, because the tenth animal must be treated as “holy” even if it is blemished. Although, as you know, you are not permitted to offer up a blemished animal as a sacrifice, and you are not required to eat it in the Temple city, you must otherwise treat it as holy: until you slaughter it, you may not use it to do work in the field or shear it; you must eat it with the intention to thereby fulfill the commandment to eat the animal tithe; and if you cannot eat all its meat yourself, you may not sell it by weight, but only according to its estimated value. Whether it is blemished or unblemished, as is the case with all consecrated animals, the owner may not substitute another animal for it. If he nevertheless does substitute another animal for it, then both it and its replacement will be holy; both must be treated as tithed animals. Finally, although, like the second tithe, if it is unblemished it must be eaten in the Temple city, unlike the second tithe, it may not be redeemed.’”

These are the commandments that GOD commanded Moses to tell the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai.