Leviticus 26:9

Summary

Leviticus 26:9 presents a divine promise consisting of four consecutive actions: turning favorably toward the people, making them fruitful, multiplying them, and establishing the covenant with them. The verse forms part of a series of blessings promised for obedience to the covenant stipulations.

Key words

• faniti ("I will turn", H6437G) — Qal sequential perfect, first person; expresses a deliberate turning of attention or favor toward the addressees.
• hifreiti ("I will make fruitful", H6509) — Hiphil (causative) sequential perfect; the causative stem indicates that the subject actively causes fruitfulness, rather than fruitfulness occurring on its own.
• hirbeiti ("I will multiply", H7235A) — Hiphil sequential perfect; again causative, paired with the previous verb to intensify the idea of increase.
• haqimoti ("I will establish", H6965I) — Hiphil sequential perfect of the root meaning "to stand/rise"; causative sense of "causing to stand," i.e., setting up or confirming something firmly.
• beriti ("my covenant", H1285) — feminine singular noun in construct form with the first-person suffix -i ("my"), naming the object that is established.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of four sequential perfect verbs, each introduced by the narrative vav (H9001), a grammatical pattern that links successive future actions as a continuous sequence flowing from what precedes in the passage. All four verbs share the first-person singular subject (the divine speaker), creating a rhythmic accumulation of action: faniti ("I will turn"), hifreiti ("I will make fruitful"), hirbeiti ("I will multiply"), haqimoti ("I will establish"). The first verb uses the preposition 'alei ("to", H0413) with the second-person plural suffix, marking the direction of the turning. The following two verbs govern the second-person plural directly through the object marker 'et (H0853), which itself carries no independent meaning but signals that "you" (the people) is the direct object being made fruitful and multiplied.

The final clause shifts syntactic pattern: instead of the pronoun serving as direct object, the object marker 'et attaches to beriti ("my covenant"), a construct noun phrase meaning "covenant of me," and the people appear instead in a separate prepositional phrase, 'itkem ("with you", built on H0854 with suffix H9036). This distinguishes the covenant as the object being established, while the people are those with whom it is established — a grammatical distinction not always visible in translation, since English typically renders both structures similarly as "you."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders faniti ("I will turn") as ἐπιβλέψω ("I will look upon"), shifting the image from turning toward someone to looking with favor upon them. The Vulgate's respiciam similarly conveys "I will look back at" or "regard," aligning more with the LXX's visual sense than the Hebrew's more general verb of turning. For haqimoti ("I will establish"), the LXX uses στήσω ("I will set up/stand"), closely matching the Hebrew's causative "to stand" root, while the Vulgate's firmabo ("I will make firm") emphasizes stability rather than the act of establishing.