What Does Deuteronomy 20:16 Mean?
But from the cities of these peoples, which the LORD your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall keep alive nothing with breath.
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
But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:THE KEY
The phrase “nothing that breatheth” makes the command reach every breathing life in the cities, down to the fact that it breathes.
THE MEANING
The verse joins the cities given as inheritance to a command that no breathing being within them be kept alive. It places the taking of land alongside the extinguishing of every life that breathes.
THE ROOT
תְחַיֶּה
teḥayyeh
GROWS FROM
חיה
To live; to keep alive.
“keep alive” in this verse is teḥayyeh. The verb makes survival the direct object of the command: to “save alive” is to let living continue. Here, that preservation is prohibited.
ALSO GROWS
ḥay: Alive; living.
חַי
This adjective comes from the same life-root as the command’s verb, keeping the focus on living beings.
ḥayyim: Life; living.
חַיִּים
This noun names the life that the verb here refuses to preserve.
נְשָׁמָה
neshamah
GROWS FROM
נשם
To breathe; to pant or draw breath.
“nothing with breath” in this verse is neshamah. The Hebrew says “every neshamah”, every breath or breathing being. The word-family link to breathing makes the scope of the command stark: it reaches each life insofar as it breathes.
ALSO GROWS
nasham: To breathe or pant.
נָשַׁם
The verb brings the phrase down to the act of breathing that marks the life the command addresses.
neshimah: Breathing; respiration.
נְשִׁימָה
This related word preserves the same breath-root in the idea of breathing itself.
THE PATTERN
In these war commands, the mandated outcome reaches beyond battlefield defeat to the destruction of a named people and their living creatures.
When the LORD your God gives them before you, you shall strike them and devote them to destruction. You shall cut no covenant with them, nor show them favor.And they devoted to destruction all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and donkey, with the mouth of the sword.Now go and strike Amalek, and devote all that they have to destruction, and do not spare them; but put to death man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.THE THREAD
And the LORD God shaped the ground-being, Adam, from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living soul.Deuteronomy’s כָּל־נְשָׁמָה (kol neshamah, every breath-bearing being) shares its root, נשם (n-sh-m, breathe), with Genesis’s “breath of life.” The shared word makes the command’s reach vivid: it addresses the very breath that the creation verse names as life-giving.
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