Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Leviticus 26:13
I [am] the LORD your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye should not be their bondmen; and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright.
13. the bars ] with which the yoke was fastened to the animal’s neck.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
With heads lifted up, not pressed down with a yoke. It notes their liberty, security, confidence, and glory. See Exo 14:8 Num 33:3.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
13. I have broken the bands of youryoke, and made you go uprighta metaphorical expression todenote their emancipation from Egyptian slavery.
Le26:14-39. A CURSE TO THEDISOBEDIENT.
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
I [am] the Lord your Lord, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt,…. Who, having done that, was able to fulfil the above promises; and which may be considered as an earnest and pledge of them, as well as be a motive to the Israelites, and an obligation upon them to obey the commandments of God, and walk in his statutes:
that ye should not be their bondmen; this was the end of their being brought out of Egypt, that they might be no longer in a state of bondage to the Egyptians, nor to any other, but to serve the Lord their God, by whom they were delivered; as those who are redeemed by Christ from worse than Egyptian bondage, from sin, Satan, and the law, are redeemed, that they might not be the servants of any, but be a peculiar people, zealous of good works to serve the Lord Christ:
and I have broken the bands of your yoke; which fastened it on their shoulders, that is, set them at full liberty, from the yoke of all their enemies, particularly the Egyptians, who made their lives bitter in hard bondage, making the yoke of it heavy upon them; as Christ has broken the yoke of spiritual enemies from off the shoulders and necks of his people, Isa 10:27;
and made you go upright; who before stooped under the yoke, as well as were of dejected countenances, but now were made to walk in an erect stature, as the Targum of Jonathan, and so Jarchi and Aben Ezra, or in liberty, as Onkelos; see Ga 5:1; and with heads lift up and countenances cheerful.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
For He was their God, who had brought them out of the land of the Egyptians, that they might no longer be servants to them, and had broken the bands of their yokes and made them go upright. , lit., the poles of the yoke (cf. Eze 34:27), i.e., the poles which are laid upon the necks of beasts of burden (Jer 27:2) as a yoke, to bend their necks and harness them for work. It was with the burden of such a yoke that Egypt had pressed down the Israelites, so that they could no longer walk upright, till God by breaking the yoke helped them to walk upright again. As the yoke is a figurative description of severe oppression, so going upright is a figurative description of emancipation from bondage. , lit., a substantive, an upright position; here it is an adverb (cf. Ges. 100, 2).
Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament
(13) I have broken the bands of your yoke.The promises thus made to the Israelites of the extraordinary fertility of their land, of peace within and immunity from war without, and of the Divine presence constantly sojourning amongst them, if they will faithfully obey the commandments of the Lord, now conclude with the oft-repeated solemn appeal to the obligation they are under to the God who had so marvellously delivered them from cruel bondage and made them His servants. To remind them of the abject state from which they were rescued, the illustration is taken from the way in which oxen are still harnessed in the East. The bands or the rods are straight pieces of wood, which are inserted in the yoke, or laid across the necks of the animals, to fasten together their heads and keep them level with each other. These bands, which are then attached to the pole of the waggon, are not only oppressive, but exhibit the beasts as perfectly helpless to resist the cruel treatment of the driver. This phrase is often used to denote oppression and tyranny (Deu. 28:48; Isa. 9:3; Isa. 10:27; Isa. 14:25, &c.), but nowhere are the words as like those in the passage before us as in Eze. 34:27.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
13. Made you go upright The crushing yoke bowed the wearer to the earth, and assimilated him to the beast of burden often his yoke-fellow. Emancipation gave to him the erect form, and repeated the miracle of creation, “God will have no slavery of a social kind. He is against all bonds and restrictions that keep down the true aspirations of the human soul. God has always proceeded upon the principle of enlargement and the inheritance of liberty.” Joseph Parker.
Os homini sublime dedit, coelumque tueri
Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus.
To man he gave an upturned face,
And bade him scan the heavenly space,
And view, with countenance erect,
The firmament with stars bedecked.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
Lev 26:13. I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright Bondage is frequently compared in the Scriptures to the bearing a yoke, which, lying upon the neck, causes the bearer to stoop down, and hang the head; in which view, the allusion here is as plain as it is beautiful.
REFLECTIONS.God will not prove an unkind master to those who serve him: none follow him with fidelity whom he will not follow with blessings. We have,
1. A solemn repetition of those commands, on the observance of which their happiness especially depended, viz. Abstaining from idolatry, and keeping holy God’s sabbaths. Whilst they worshipped the true God, and in the ways of his own appointments, so long they would be a peculiar people to him.
2. Rich promises to the obedient. Plenty shall crown the year, and peace be in their borders. Their enemies shall bow before them, and their people multiply exceedingly. God’s favour shall he continually towards them, his presence in the midst of them, and his covenant perpetually established with them. They shall be his people, and he will be their God for ever. To the faithful Israel of God these promises are daily fulfilling: the rain of divine grace produces the abundance of spiritual gifts and holy dispositions; the peace of God shall keep their hearts and minds; their enemies, Satan, sin, and death, shall be vanquished; the in-dwelling presence of Jesus in their heart shall exceed the tabernacle-glory; and in death, and after death, he will be their God, and they shall be his people for ever and ever. Amen! Amen!
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Lastly, redemption-work is the sole cause, founded in the FATHER’S gift, the Saviour’s purchase, and the SPIRIT’s application. Here indeed the LORD hath broken the yoke of worse than Egyptian bondage, even the yoke of sin and Satan. See that sweet expression, in a gospel sense, Psa 107:14-15 .
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
“Handfuls of Purpose”
For All Gleaners
“I have broken the bounds of your yoke, and made you go upright.” Lev 26:13
God will have no slavery of a social kind. He is against all bonds and restrictions that keep down the true aspirations of the human soul. God has always proceeded upon the principle of enlargement and the inheritance of liberty. We know how much God has done for a man by the degree of that man’s uprightness. That is an excellent and undeniable standard of judgment. God has no crouching slaves cringing around his altar and afraid to look up to the Cross which has given them forgiveness. In proportion as we are carrying bands and yokes, have we not known the Spirit of the living God. This relates to all conduct and religious observances, to the keeping of times and seasons, and the offering of all manner of sacrifices. Whatever is done through a sense of servility and humiliation is wrongly done, and is in no sense done in obedience to the command of Christ. When all is right within we run in the way of God’s commandments, we sing at our work, we turn the very statutes of God into songs in the house of our pilgrimage. What God has been doing for man in the first instance has been the breaking of yokes. God has had much negative work to do for fallen humanity. We do not know how much of our progress is due to the breaking of cruel restrictions, the whole course of human history has been a course of enlargement and freedom in matters of education, knowledge, and the possession and exercise of personal and social rights. This is in accordance with the very spirit of the New Testament. Some men may not have made great progress in positive liberty, who yet have made some advance in the sense of having thrown off many restrictions and yokes, such throwing off being due to the operation of a gracious providence, which providence, indeed, is not always understood or gratefully appreciated; nevertheless, it works in human history with an undeviating and generous aim. There is an hereditary principle involved in this arrangement; it is impossible that the children of upright men can fail in some sense to partake of the advantages arising from parental uprightness; those conditions may not amount to personal righteousness, and, indeed, may have no necessary relation to such righteousness, but the whole atmosphere is the purer and healthier for our relation to forefathers who have been upright and wise and generous. More is expected of us, and the expectation is founded in reason and justice. We are the greater debtors to society on account of the liberty into which we were born, and the uprightness under whose blessing we were reared. Always acknowledge the divine hand in human history. Always see that theology is indeed the larger history. He knows nothing about history who is merely conversant with outward facts and the succession of measurable incidents: history lies in its spirituality: there is a genius of history, a religion of liberation and progress.
Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker
Lev 26:13 I [am] the LORD your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye should not be their bondmen; and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright.
Ver. 13. Which brought you forth. ] This they often hear of, not by way of exprobration, Jam 1:5 but to incite them to thankful obedience. Deu 8:11 Jos 24:1-33 Servati sumus, ut serviamus.
Leviticus
EMANCIPATED SLAVES
Lev 26:13 The history of Israel is a parable and a prophecy as well as a history.
The great central word of the New Testament has been drawn from it, viz. ‘redemption,’ i.e. a buying out of bondage.
The Hebrew slaves in Egypt were ‘delivered.’ The deliverance made them a nation. God acquired them for Himself, and they became His servants.
The great truths of the gospel are all there.
Henceforth the fact of their deliverance became the basis of all His appeals to them; the ground of His law; the reason for their obedience. In the previous context it has shaped the institution of slavery. Here it is the foundation of a general exhortation to obedience. The emphatic picture of the men stooping beneath the yoke, and then straightening themselves up, erect, illustrates the joyful freedom which Christ gives. That freedom is our subject.
I. Jesus gives freedom from the slavery of sin.
When Jesus promised freedom through the truth, the Jews indignantly spurned the offer with the proud boast, which the presence of a Roman garrison in Jerusalem should have made to stick in their throats: ‘We were never in bondage to any man.’ A like hardy shutting of eyes to plain facts characterises the attitude of multitudes to the Christian view of man’s condition. Jesus answered the Jews by the deep saying: ‘He that committeth sin is the servant of sin.’ A man fancies himself showing off his freedom by throwing off the restraints of morality or law, and by ‘doing as he likes,’ but he is really showing his servitude. Self-will looks like liberty, but it is serfdom. The libertine is a slave. That slavery under sin takes two forms. The man who sins is a slave to the power of sin. Will and conscience are meant to guide and impel us, and we never sin without first coercing or silencing them and subjecting them to the upstart tyranny of desires and senses which should obey and not command. The ‘beggars’ are on horseback, and the ‘princes’ walking. There is a servile revolt, and we know what horrors accompany that.
But that slavery under sin is shown also by the terrible force with which any sin, if once committed, appeals to the doer to repeat it. It is not only in regard to sensual sins that the awful insistence of habit grips the doer, and makes it the rarest thing that evil once done is done only once.
But he who sins is also a slave to the guilt of sin. True, that sense of guilt is for the most part and in most men dormant, but the snake is but hibernating, and often wakes and stings at most unexpected moments. ‘The deceitfulness of sin’ lies to the sinner, so that for the most part he ‘wipes his mouth, saying I have done no harm,’ but some chance incident may at any time, and certainly something will at some time, dissipate the illusion, as a stray sunbeam might scatter a wisp of mist and show startled eyes the grim fact that had always been there. And even while not consciously felt, guilt hampers the soul’s insight into divine realities, clips its wings so that it cannot soar, paralyses its efforts after noble aims, and inclines it to ignoble grovelling as far away from thoughts of God and goodness as may be.
Christ makes the man bound and tied by the cords of his sins lift himself up and stand erect. By His death He brings forgiveness which removes guilt and the consciousness of it. By His inbreathed life He gives a new nature akin to His own, and brings into force a new motive, even transforming love, which is stronger than the death with which sin has cursed its doers. ‘The law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.’
II. Jesus gives freedom from a slavish relation to God.
But from all such slavish, and therefore worthless, obedience, and all such reluctant, and therefore unreal, submission, Jesus liberates those who believe on Him and abide in His word. He declares God as our loving Father, and through Him we have authority to become sons of God. He ‘sends forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts,’ and that makes us to be no more slaves but sons. Sullen obedience becomes glad choice, and it is the inmost desire, and the deepest delight, of the loving child to do always the things that please the loving Father. ‘I ought’ and ‘I will’ coalesce, and so there is no slavery, but perfect freedom, in recognising and bowing to the great ‘I must’ which sweetly rules the life.
III. Christ gives deliverance from servility to men.
Because all men are redeemed by Christ, because by that redemption all stand in the same relation to Him, because all have equal access to Him, and are taught and guided by His Spirit, because ‘we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ,’ therefore class prerogatives and subject classes fade away, and there is ‘neither bond nor free,’ but ‘all are one in Christ Jesus.’
But there are other ways in which men tyrannise over men and in which Christ’s redemption sets us free.
There is the undue authority of favourite teachers and examples.
There is the tyranny of public opinion.
There is undue regard to human approbation.
There is the sway of priestcraft.
How does Christianity deliver from these? It makes Christ’s law our unconditional duty. It makes His approbation our highest joy. It gives legitimate scope to the instinct of loyalty, submission, and imitation, and of subjection to authority. It reduces to insignificance men’s judgment, and all their loud voices to a babble of nothings. ‘With me it is a very small matter to be judged of man’s judgment.’ It brings the soul into direct communion with God, and sweeps away all intermediaries.
‘Not for that we have dominion over your faith but are helpers of your joy; for by faith ye stand.’
So personal independence and individuality of character are the result of Christianity. ‘I have made you go upright.
IV. Christ gives us freedom from the power of circumstances.
But Christ gives us-
a A great aim for our lives high above these.
b A foothold in Him outside of them. We are not the slaves of our circumstances, but their masters.
c The power to utilise them.
So Christians are ‘free’ in all senses of the word.
The great Act of Emancipation has been passed for us all. Only Christ has rule over us, and we have our perfect freedom in His service. We have been sitting in the prison-house, and He has come and declared ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me to proclaim liberty to the captives.’
broken broken in pieces. Hebrew. shabar, as in verses: Lev 26:19, Lev 26:26; not parar, as in verses: Lev 26:15, Lev 26:24.
upright. The yoke makes the wearer stoop. The above structure shows God’s fivefold threatening for disobedience. We have the fivefold execution in Isa 5:25; Isa 9:12, Isa 9:17, Isa 9:21; Isa 10:4; and His fivefold lamentation in Amo 4:6-12.
Exo 20:2, Psa 81:6-10, 1Co 6:19, 1Co 6:20
I am: Lev 25:38, Lev 25:42, Lev 25:55
and I have: Psa 116:16, Isa 51:23, Jer 2:20, Eze 34:27
Reciprocal: Exo 15:26 – If thou Lev 5:15 – thy estimation Isa 9:4 – For thou hast broken Hos 11:4 – I was Hos 12:9 – I that
26:13 I [am] the LORD your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye should not be their bondmen; and I have broken the {e} bands of your yoke, and made you go upright.
(e) I have set you at full liberty, while before you were as beasts tied in bands.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes