What Does Leviticus 18:24 Mean in the King James?
Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The same root makes defilement a condition produced by these practices, not a label reserved for another people.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks to the reader now: practices can make a person and a community unclean. The same root describes both the reader’s possible state and the nations’ state, while the ending shows that defilement reaches the boundary of belonging.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that what happens in private cannot alter the person or the people around them.
THE ROOT
תִּטַּמְּאוּ
titamməʾu
GROWS FROM
טמא
ṭ-m-ʾ
Be or become unclean; be contaminated or impure.
The verse uses this same root for “defile yourselves” and “the nations are defiled.” That repetition links the reader’s possible condition with the nations’ condition: the word describes what these practices do, not a separate kind of people.
ALSO GROWS
ṭāmēʾ: Unclean; impure.
טָמֵא
This adjective names the state the verse says these practices produce.
tumʾāh: Uncleanness; impurity.
טֻמְאָה
This noun makes the root’s shared condition visible as something that can mark a person or a people.
מְשַׁלֵּחַ
meshallēaḥ
GROWS FROM
שלח
š-l-ḥ
Send, send forth, or send away; let go.
The word translated “cast out” comes from the root for sending or letting go. The verse joins the nations’ defilement with their being sent away from before the reader, making expulsion part of the sentence’s force.
ALSO GROWS
shallach: Send away; let go.
שַׁלַּח
This is the verb used in the familiar command “Let my people go” (Exodus 5:1); here the sending is an expulsion.
mishloach: A sending; a dispatch.
מִשְׁלוֹחַ
This noun carries the same seed of sending, illuminating the movement expressed by “cast out.”
THE PATTERN
A corrupting practice can move beyond the scale where it begins and mark an entire people or body.
Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.THE THREAD
And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.The same impurity root moves from the people in this verse to the land itself, showing that defilement reaches the place a community inhabits. The next verse gives that consequence a stark image: the land vomits out its inhabitants.
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