I will also let loose among you the animals of the field, which will deprive you of your children and eliminate your cattle, and reduce your number so that your roads become deserted.
Parallel translations
- WEB I will send the wild animals among you, which will rob you of your children, destroy your livestock, and make you few in number. Your roads will become desolate.
- KJV I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your high ways shall be desolate.
- BSB I will send wild animals against you to rob you of your children, destroy your livestock, and reduce your numbers, until your roads lie desolate.
- NKJV I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, destroy your livestock, and make you few in number; and your highways shall be desolate.
- NLT I will send wild animals that will rob you of your children and destroy your livestock. Your numbers will dwindle, and your roads will be deserted.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Quick answer
God warns of wild beasts that would kill children and livestock and leave roads desolate. Continued rebellion brings loss and emptiness.
Overview
Wild animals overrunning the land reverse the earlier promise to remove dangerous beasts (v. 6). The loss of children, herds, and safe travel pictures a society unraveling under judgment. Such desolation displays the cost of forsaking God, who alone gives security and life to His people.
Cross-references & the web
Cross-references · 16
- Ezek 14:15“If I cause evil animals to pass through the land, and they ravage it, and it is made desolate, so that no man may pass through because of the animals;
- Deut 32:24They shall be wasted with hunger, and devoured with burning heat and bitter destruction. I will send the teeth of animals on them, with the venom of vipers that glide in the dust.
- Judg 5:6“In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied. The travelers walked through byways.
- Lev 26:6“‘I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and no one will make you afraid. I will remove evil animals out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land.
- 2 Kgs 17:25So it was, at the beginning of their dwelling there, that they didn’t fear Yahweh. Therefore Yahweh sent lions among them, which killed some of them.
- Isa 33:8The highways are desolate. The traveling man ceases. The covenant is broken. He has despised the cities. He doesn’t respect man.
- Lam 1:4The ways of Zion mourn, because no one come to the solemn assembly; all her gates are desolate, her priests sigh: her virgins are afflicted, and she herself is in bitterness.
- Ezek 5:17I will send on you famine and evil animals, and they will bereave you. Pestilence and blood will pass through you; and I will bring the sword on you. I, Yahweh, have spoken it.’”
- Zech 7:14“but I will scatter them with a whirlwind among all the nations which they have not known. Thus the land was desolate after them, so that no man passed through nor returned: for they made the pleasant land desolate.”
- Ezek 14:21For thus says the Lord Yahweh: “How much more when I send my four severe judgments on Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the evil animals, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and animal!
- Ezek 33:28I will make the land a desolation and an astonishment; and the pride of her power shall cease; and the mountains of Israel shall be desolate, so that no one shall pass through.
- 2 Kgs 2:24He looked behind him and saw them, and cursed them in Yahweh’s name. Then two female bears came out of the woods, and mauled forty-two of those youths.
- Jer 15:3“I will appoint over them four kinds,” says Yahweh: “the sword to kill, and the dogs to tear, and the birds of the sky, and the animals of the earth, to devour and to destroy.
- 2 Chr 15:5In those times there was no peace to him who went out, nor to him who came in; but great troubles were on all the inhabitants of the lands.
- Mic 3:12Therefore Zion for your sake will be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem will become heaps of rubble, and the mountain of the temple like the high places of a forest.
- Isa 24:6Therefore the curse has devoured the earth, and those who dwell therein are found guilty. Therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left.
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Christ at the center
Every sacrifice, every priest, and every day of atonement points beyond itself to the one perfect offering and the great High Priest who, by his own blood, makes the unclean holy once for all.
How Leviticus 26:22 points to him is part of the one story that runs through all Scripture — meet Jesus at the heart of the web, or follow a trail that traces him from Genesis to Revelation.
Original language
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