Leviticus 26:32

Summary

The verse states that the speaker will personally devastate the land, and as a result the enemies who come to live in it will themselves be appalled or desolated by its condition. The sentence uses two forms of the same Hebrew root to link the land's destruction with the enemies' reaction.

Key words

• hashimoti ("I will devastate", H8074G) — hiphil (causative) sequential perfect; the causative stem indicates the subject actively brings about desolation, not merely experiences it.
• ani ("I", H0589) — independent personal pronoun added after the verb, which already encodes "I" in its conjugation; this doubling emphasizes the subject.
• shammu ("they will be appalled", H8074H) — qal (simple) sequential perfect, same root as hashimoti but in the basic stem, meaning "to be desolate/appalled" rather than "to cause desolation."
• oyveikhem ("your enemies", H0341) — qal participle, construct, masculine plural; a participle used substantively ("the ones being enemies"), grammatically linked to "your" (H9026).
• ha-yoshvim ("who dwell", H3427) — qal participle, masculine plural, with definite article functioning as a relative ("the ones dwelling"), modifying oyveikhem.

What the text says

The clause opens with a narrative va- (H9001) attached to hashimoti, continuing a sequence of prior actions in the chapter. The causative stem of the root sh-m-m here produces "I will devastate," with the object marked explicitly by et (H0853) before ha'aretz ("the land", H0776G). The addition of the independent pronoun ani directly after the verb is grammatically redundant, since person is already marked in the verb form — this construction places rhetorical weight on the subject performing the devastation.

The second half of the verse reuses the same consonantal root sh-m-m but shifts to the qal (basic) stem: shammu, "they will be desolate/appalled." The subject of this verb is oyveikhem, "your enemies" (H0341), a participle used as a noun and further specified by a second participle, ha-yoshvim ("who dwell", H3427), joined by the preposition ba- ("in", H9003) plus a pronominal suffix referring back to "the land." The construction thus builds a chain: the land is made desolate (causative form) by one subject, then those who inhabit it experience the same root-condition (simple form) as a reaction to what they see.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew connects both halves of the verse through the same root sh-m-m, producing an internal echo between "devastate" and "be appalled/desolate." The LXX renders the second occurrence with θαυμάσονται ("they will marvel/wonder"), and the Vulgate uses stupebunt ("they will be stunned"), both of which shift toward an emotional reaction of astonishment rather than reproducing the shared root of physical desolation found in the Hebrew wordplay. The BSB’s "will be appalled" and RV1909’s "se pasmarán" similarly render the qal form as an emotional response rather than echoing "devastate" as in the first clause.