What Does Exodus 21:23 Mean?
And if harm follows, you give living soul for living soul.
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 any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life,THE KEY
The Hebrew נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh, “living soul/person”) makes “life for life” a measure of one human being against another, not an abstract unit.
THE MEANING
When harm reaches a person’s life, the verse names the consequence in the same measure: life for life. The lost person remains the measure; the verse does not reduce that loss to an abstraction.
THE ROOT
נֶפֶשׁ
nephesh
GROWS FROM
נ־פ־שׁ
The living self: a person or living being, life as embodied existence.
“living soul for living soul” in this verse is nephesh. Nephesh names the living person, not a detachable quantity called “life.” Repeated on both sides of תַּחַת (tachat, “in place of”), it keeps the consequence at the scale of the human life lost.
ALSO GROWS
nefashot: Persons; living beings, plural of nephesh.
נְפָשׁוֹת
The plural keeps the word personal: the lives being measured are living beings, not abstractions.
nafash: To be refreshed or rest.
נָפַשׁ
This related verb belongs to the same word family as the living self; the verse’s repeated nephesh makes that living reality the measure of its consequence.
THE PATTERN
Judgment answers in the measure of the harm or the measure one applies.
Whoever pours out the blood of man, by man his blood shall be poured out, for in the shape of God he made man.And whoever strikes a beast shall make it whole. And whoever strikes a living soul of man shall be put to death.For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with what measure you measure, it will be measured to you.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.The same word נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh, “living soul/person”) appears in “a living soul” (נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה, nephesh chayyah, “living soul”). That makes “life for life” concrete: the measure is a whole living person.
This reading is from Selah Verse.
You can read any verse this way in the app, keep it as a card, and send it on.
A Bible app where you send verses from your keyboard and in Messages, and every verse has a Deep Dive.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us