What Does Exodus 21:20 Mean?
And if a man strikes his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and the servant dies under his hand, then he is surely avenged.
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 if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.THE KEY
The verse names vengeance as the consequence when a servant dies under his master’s hand, so that death cannot be absorbed into the master’s authority.
THE MEANING
When a person in power strikes a servant with a rod and the servant dies under that hand, the verse declares that the one who struck is answerable. Its repeated verb names vengeance, placing the death and its consequence in the same sentence. The violence remains starkly visible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A master’s authority makes a servant’s death a private matter beyond consequence.
THE ROOT
נָקֹם יִנָּקֵם
nāqōm yinnāqēm
GROWS FROM
נקם
n-q-m
to avenge; to exact retribution
The verse repeats the root in an infinitive and a verb: literally, “avenging, he shall be avenged.” “Surely punished” conveys certainty, while the Hebrew also names vengeance explicitly: the hand responsible for the death remains answerable.
ALSO GROWS
nāqām: vengeance; retribution
נָקָם
This noun makes explicit the force carried by the repeated verb in the verse: the servant’s death calls for reckoning.
yuqqam: shall be avenged (Genesis 4:15)
יֻקַּם
This form uses the same root in the phrase “vengeance shall be taken,” linking the verse’s consequence to a wider language of vengeance.
THE PATTERN
A person’s power over another does not erase accountability when the vulnerable person is harmed.
Whoever pours out the blood of man, by man his blood shall be poured out, for in the shape of God he made man.You shall not press a hired hand who is bowed down and needy, whether he is of your brothers or of your sojourners who are in your land within your gates. On his day you give him his wage, and the sun does not go down upon it, for he is bowed down and carries his living soul toward it. Lest he call out against you to the LORD, and it be missing in you.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
And the LORD said to him, Therefore, whoever kills Cain, sevenfold shall be avenged. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, so that whoever found him would not kill him.The same נקם (n-q-m, “avenge”) root stands behind “vengeance shall be taken” here and the repeated verb translated “he shall surely be punished” in Exodus 21:20. Genesis uses that language to mark the consequence of killing Cain; Exodus uses it when a servant dies under his master’s hand.
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