Exodus 23:29 · World English Bible
Exodus 23:29 Meaning I Will Not Drive Them Out From
I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate, and the animals of the field multiply against you.
What does Exodus 23:29 mean?
The old occupying tendencies of the lower nature are not cleared out of the body all at once, and the reason is protective. If every habit and animal drive were stripped from a person in a single turn of the year, the ground of the self would be left empty and untended, and the wild appetites of the field would breed unchecked in the vacancy.
From the Esoteric reading below.
Exodus 23:29 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Esoteric
ESOTERIC
Esoteric
The old occupying tendencies of the lower nature are not cleared out of the body all at once, and the reason is protective. If every habit and animal drive were stripped from a person in a single turn of the year, the ground of the self would be left empty and untended, and the wild appetites of the field would breed unchecked in the vacancy. Transformation is gradual because consciousness must grow into each stretch of reclaimed ground before the next is opened. The slowness keeps the inner land inhabited and worked, so that nothing raw rushes in to fill a space cleared faster than the self can hold it.
One year: a single full turn of time, the whole cycle in which sudden clearing would empty the ground before it could be tended. Land: the body and its ground of habit, the inner territory reclaimed only as fast as awareness can settle it. Beast of the field: the wild appetites and animal drives of the lower nature, ready to breed in any ground left empty.
Esoteric lensGo deeper in the app
Esoteric lens
Live Exodus 23:29 today
- Change one habit today, not five. Pick the single smallest version of it, ten minutes of reading or one meal without your phone, and let the rest of your life stay exactly as it is.
- When someone close to you is slowly working on something, resist telling them to go faster. Ask what this week looked like instead, and let the answer be small.
- When you want to clear everything at once, the inbox, the apartment, the whole way you live, pick one shelf. An empty life you cannot yet fill gets taken over by whatever is nearest.
What am I trying to clear out faster than I can actually live into?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching
What grows well grows slowly. Hurry the shoot and you only pull it out of the ground.
Zen
How long does it take to master this? A lifetime. And if I work twice as hard? Twice as long. Pushing is not the same as growing.
Stoicism · Epictetus
No great thing comes into being all at once. The fig needs its blossom, its fruit, and its ripening, and so does any real change in a person.
Free · No account needed
Read all of Exodus 23 through 17 lenses
Lensightful opens every verse of the Bible through the traditions you choose. Save readings, ask a follow-up question, and get one verse a day.
Get Lensightful on the App Store