Leviticus 26:39

Summary

The verse describes those who survive from the community as "rotting away" in the lands of their enemies, attributing this decay both to their own iniquity and to the iniquity of their ancestors. The Hebrew text frames this with the same verb repeated at the beginning and end of the sentence.

Key words

• nish'arim ("[who] remain", H7604) — niphal participle, masculine plural, describing those left over/surviving as a passive state resulting from an external action (being left).
• yimmaqqu ("they will rot away", H4743) — niphal imperfect, appearing twice in the verse (once after "their iniquity," once after "the iniquities of their ancestors"), marking future/ongoing decay.
• avonam ("their iniquity", H5771) — masculine singular construct with 3mp suffix, tying the first instance of decay to the survivors' own guilt.
• oyveikhem ("your enemies", H0341) — qal participle construct, masculine plural, with 2mp suffix, identifying the land as belonging to those hostile to "you" (plural addressee).
• itam ("with them", H0854) — preposition with 3mp suffix, linking the ancestors' iniquity directly to the survivors' fate in the second occurrence of yimmaqqu.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built as an inclusio: the verb yimmaqqu ("they will rot away") opens the description of consequence and closes it again at the end, after the clause about the ancestors. Between these two occurrences, the text lists two causes — "in their iniquity" (ba'avonam) and "also in the iniquities of their ancestors" (ba'avonot avotam) — both governed by the same repeated verb. The repetition ties the survivors' present decay to two layers of guilt: their own and their forebears', with the phrase itam ("with them") reinforcing that the ancestors' guilt operates "together with" the current generation. The subject throughout, ha-nish'arim ("those who remain"), is a niphal participle, marking the survivors as objects of an action already performed on them (being left/remaining), not simply people who stayed by their own initiative. The locational phrase be-artzot oyveikhem ("in the lands of your enemies") shifts to second person plural suffix, even though the surrounding participles and pronouns describing the survivors are third person — a grammatical mix within the verse itself.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the sentence with two different verbs — καταφθαρήσονται ("will be destroyed") and τακήσονται ("will melt away") — rather than repeating one verb as the Hebrew does, and it does not include a clause corresponding to "also in the iniquities of their ancestors, with them." The LXX also gives ἁμαρτίας ὑμῶν ("your sins," second person) where the Hebrew has avonam ("their iniquity," third person). The Vulgate preserves both causal clauses (own iniquity and fathers' iniquity) but adds "et sua" ("and their own") to the ancestors' clause, and uses two distinct verbs, tabescent and affligentur, rather than repeating one verb as the Hebrew text does.