What Does Deuteronomy 23:15 Mean?
You shall not hand over to his master the servant who has escaped from his master to you.
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 deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee:THE KEY
This verse makes refuge a verdict against ownership: one person’s claim does not make another person theirs to retrieve.
THE MEANING
The verse draws a boundary around someone who reaches you after escaping another’s control: their arrival means refuge, not restoration to the one claiming them. Returning them would close the opening they have reached and put their life back within another’s grasp.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that a powerful person’s claim makes another human being theirs to retrieve.
THE ROOT
תַּסְגִּיר
tasgir
GROWS FROM
סגר
To shut or close; in this form, to hand someone over.
“hand over” in this verse is tasgir. The Hebrew word behind “deliver” here comes from סגר, “to shut”; the word for “escaped” comes from נצל, a rescue root. The verse sets two motions against each other: shutting someone back into mastery and being pulled clear of it.
ALSO GROWS
sāgar: Shut, close.
סָגַר
This root’s image of closure illuminates the handover: it shuts the fugitive back into the master’s power.
hisgir: Hand over, surrender.
הִסְגִּיר
This related form makes the consequence plain: a person is surrendered into another’s control.
יִנָּצֵל
yinnatsel
GROWS FROM
נצל
To snatch away or rescue; in this form, to escape or be delivered.
“escaped” in this verse is yinnatsel. The fugitive’s escape is expressed with a root that also means rescue and deliverance. The word thus presents the person as already pulled clear of the master’s grasp, not merely as someone who has changed location.
ALSO GROWS
nāṣal: Rescue, deliver, snatch away.
נָצַל
This active form shows the root’s core movement: someone is pulled out of another’s power.
hitsil: Bring out, rescue, deliver.
הִצִּיל
This causative form shares the rescue sense behind the fugitive’s escape: a person is brought clear of danger or control.
THE PATTERN
Refuge is defined by whether it keeps someone beyond the power they escaped.
Snatch away the low and the needy; from the hand of the wicked, pluck them out.Is this not the fast I have chosen, to open the bonds of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to send the crushed away free, and to tear away every yoke?Stand, then, in the freedom for which the Anointed One set us free, and do not be caught again in the yoke of slavery.THE THREAD
And I have come down to snatch them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land into a good and wide land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.The Hebrew root נצל appears in both verses: here it describes the person who has escaped, and in Exodus it describes God delivering people from an oppressor’s hand. One arrives already pulled clear; the other names deliverance as being brought out toward spacious land.
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