Leviticus 26:35

Summary

The verse describes the land continuing in desolation for as long as it lacks the rest it did not receive during the shabbetoteikhem ("your sabbaths", H7676) while the people dwelt on it. The Hebrew constructs a temporal frame: the land's future "resting" (during exile) compensates for sabbatical years it was owed but did not receive.

Key words

• ha.sha.Ma ("being made desolate", H8074G) — hophal infinitive construct, a causative-passive form indicating a state brought about by an external agent; here it defines the "days of desolation" as the temporal boundary for the land's rest.
• tish.Bot ("it will cease/rest", H7673A) — qal imperfect, third-person feminine singular (referring to the land), expressing an action not yet completed, i.e., future or ongoing rest.
• shav.Tah ("it ceased/rested", H7673A) — same root as tishbot, but qal perfect, denoting a completed action in the past; here negated by lo' ("not", H3808), so it describes the sabbatical rest that did NOT occur.
• sha.be.to.tei.Khem ("your sabbaths", H7676) — feminine plural construct with second-person plural suffix, naming the specific sabbatical periods that were withheld.
• shiv.te.Khem ("your dwelling", H3427) — qal infinitive construct with pronominal suffix, marking the temporal clause "when you dwelt" as the period during which the sabbaths were not observed.

What the text says

The verse builds a contrast using two forms of the same root, ש־ב־ת (rest/cease): the imperfect tishbot ("it will rest," future) and the perfect shavtah ("it rested," negated to mean "it did not rest," past). This grammatical pairing sets up an implicit balance — the land's future rest during ha-shammah ("the desolation," H8074G, itself from a different root, ש־מ־ם, "to be desolate") corresponds to the rest it lacked in the past. The relative clause asher lo shavtah ("which it did not rest") is governed by the object marker 'et (H0853), grammatically marking the "rest" as the object that the land will finally attain.

The double preposition be- (H9003) introduces two temporal anchors: be-shabbetoteikhem ("in your sabbaths") and be-shivtekhem ("in your dwelling"), both governed by the second-person plural suffix -khem, keeping the addressees grammatically present even though the subject of the main verbs is the land itself.

Differences between versions

The LXX preserves the wordplay with cognate verbs σαββατιεῖ ("it will sabbath") and ἐσαββάτισεν ("it sabbathed"), mirroring the Hebrew's repeated root. The Vulgate splits this into two distinct verbs, sabbatizabit and requiescet, then uses requieverit for the negated clause — partially retaining the sabbath-vocabulary but losing the single-root symmetry found in Hebrew and LXX. The Vulgate also opens with in terra hostili ("in the hostile land"), a phrase not present in this Hebrew verse. Modern translations (BSB, RV1909, SBLIBRE) render shavtah/tishbot as "rest" rather than "sabbath," which conveys the meaning but obscures the terminological link to shabbetoteikhem ("your sabbaths") visible in the Hebrew and LXX.