Leviticus 26:42

Summary

The verse states that God will remember his covenant with Jacob, his covenant with Isaac, and his covenant with Abraham, and will also remember the land. The three patriarchal names are each attached to a separate occurrence of "covenant," and the verb "remember" appears three times across the sentence.

Key words

• za.khar.Ti ("I will remember", H2142) — qal sequential perfect, first-person; opens the verse and links it to the preceding narrative sequence as a continuing action.
• be.ri.T ("covenant of", H1285) — feminine singular construct noun, repeated three times, each time bound to a suffix and then a proper name, producing three distinct "covenant of X" phrases rather than one shared covenant.
• 'Af ("also", H0637) — interjection appearing twice, before Isaac's and Abraham's covenants, marking each addition emphatically ("also... and also...").
• 'ez.Kor ("I will remember", H2142) — qal imperfect, first-person, used twice (for Abraham's covenant and for the land), grammatically distinct in form (imperfect) from the opening za.khar.Ti (perfect).
• 'A.retz ("land", H0776G) — feminine singular noun with definite article ha (H9009), the final object remembered, separated from the covenant list by its own conjunction and verb.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence lists three covenant-phrases in reverse chronological order — Jacob, then Isaac, then Abraham — each formed with the construct noun be.ri.T ("covenant of", H1285) plus the pronominal suffix i ("my", H9020) and the patriarch's name. The order moves backward through genealogy (grandson to grandfather), which differs from the usual forward-listing order (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob) found elsewhere in the text tradition.

The verb "remember" occurs three times with two different forms: za.khar.Ti (H2142, sequential perfect) opens the verse, while 'ez.Kor (H2142, imperfect) is used both after Abraham's name and again with "the land" ('A.retz, H0776G). This distributes the single verbal root H2142 across the sentence rather than repeating one uniform verb form, and the double appearance of 'Af ("also", H0637) before Isaac and Abraham creates a cumulative, emphatic listing structure: "and I will remember... and also... and also... I will remember." The land is treated as a separate object of remembrance, introduced with its own conjunction and its own instance of 'ez.Kor, rather than being grammatically joined to the covenant list itself.

Differences between versions

The LXX (Swete) renders the three "covenant of X" constructions using the noun διαθήκης ("of the covenant") with each patriarch's name in genitive, structurally paralleling the Hebrew's threefold construct repetition. The Vulgate (Clementine) compresses this differently: it uses fœderis mei ("my covenant," singular) only once, followed by quod pepigi cum Jacob, et Isaac, et Abraham ("which I made with Jacob, and Isaac, and Abraham"), treating it as one covenant enacted with all three rather than three separate "covenant of X" phrases as in the Hebrew and LXX. The Vulgate also lists the names in forward order (Jacob, Isaac, Abraham), matching the Hebrew's backward-to-forward sequence starting with Jacob.