What Does Deuteronomy 12:31 Mean?
You shall not do so to the LORD your God, for every recoiling thing to the LORD, which he hates, they have done to their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burned in the fire to their gods.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.THE KEY
What is offered to a god remains detestable to the LORD when it is the burning of children.
THE MEANING
The verse meets you wherever devotion is used to justify violence: the burning of sons and daughters remains abhorrent before the LORD. By naming them as sons and daughters, it refuses to let the language of sacrifice erase the people being burned.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that an act becomes sacred or acceptable just because it is offered to a god.
THE ROOT
תּוֹעֵבָה
toʿevah
GROWS FROM
תעב
to detest, abhor
“recoiling thing” in this verse is toʿevah. Toʿevah names something as detestable, not merely unfamiliar or different. The verse places that abhorrence beside the explicit act, sons and daughters burned, so devotion cannot hide the violence inside an abstract ritual label.
ALSO GROWS
taʿav: To regard with detestation.
תָּעַב
The verb makes the response inside the noun audible: this is something to be abhorred.
toʿevah: Something regarded as abhorrent.
תּוֹעֵבָה
This is the noun used in the verse, naming the act itself as detestable.
THE PATTERN
Devotion to God cannot sanctify harm; justice and mercy remain the measure of what is offered.
Do not give any of your seed to pass through the fire to Molech, and do not pierce the nature of your God. I am the LORD.He has shown you, O human, what is good. And what does the LORD seek from you, but to do justice, and to hold fast to faithful love, and to walk low with your God?But if you had known what this means, I desire faithful love and not offering, you would not have condemned those without fault.THE THREAD
And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it rise up into my heart.Jeremiah uses the same root שׂרף (ś-r-p; saraph, burn) for the burning of sons and daughters, then says it was neither commanded nor even entered God’s heart. The shared root keeps the act concrete and makes it impossible to disguise as divine desire.
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