What Does Exodus 12:38 Mean?
And a great mixture went up with them also, and flocks and herds, even very much livestock.
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
And a mixed multitude went up also with them; and flocks, and herds, even very much cattle.THE KEY
The ascent out of constriction carries a mixed company and its living abundance together.
THE MEANING
Release moves as a shared ascent: a mixed multitude goes with them, while flocks and herds travel in great number. The reader’s movement toward spaciousness can hold different people and the substance of life together; the verse keeps belonging and abundance in the same frame.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie this dissolves is that deliverance belongs only to a uniform people; the verse places a mixed company inside the same departure.
THE ROOT
עֵרֶב רַב
ʿērev rav
GROWS FROM
ערב
ʿ-r-b
To mingle or interweave; this root also has an attested sense of giving surety or pledging oneself.
“great mixture” in this verse is ʿērev rav. The phrase names a company by its mixture, and the root’s range also includes undertaking surety for another. The verse holds unlike people within one shared departure, making their joined movement part of the image.
ALSO GROWS
ʿārab: To mingle or intermix
עָרַב
This verb shows that “mixed” carries the sense of lives mingled together in one company.
ʿērābôn: A pledge or surety
עֵרָבוֹן
This branch extends the root’s range toward undertaking a bond with another, echoing the shared movement of the multitude.
וַיַּעַל
wayyaʿal
GROWS FROM
עלה
ʿ-l-h
To go up, ascend, or rise.
The verb names the departure as an ascent. The same root names an עֹלָה (ʿōlāh), a rising offering, so “went up” carries an image of rising beneath its plain sense of movement.
ALSO GROWS
ʿōlāh: A burnt offering; literally, something that ascends
עֹלָה
The shared root lets the verse’s upward movement echo the language of something rising.
ʿăliyāh: An ascent or going up
עֲלִיָּה
This noun keeps the root’s sense of upward movement visible in English’s simple “went up.”
THE PATTERN
Shared belonging gathers people across boundaries while their distinctions remain visible.
And Ruth said, Do not press me to let go of you, or to turn back from following after you. For where you walk, I will walk, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people are my people, and your God my God.And I have other sheep, which are not of this fold. I must lead them also, and they shall hear and respond to my voice, and there shall be one flock, and one shepherd.There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither servant nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus the Anointed One.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.“Bring them up” is לְהַעֲלֹתוֹ (ləhaʿălōtô, “to bring up”), from עָלָה (ʿālāh, “to go up, ascend”), the same root as “went up” here. Exodus 3:8 carries that ascent from the Egyptians’ hand toward “a good land and a large,” opening the movement from constriction toward spaciousness already present in this verse.
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