What Does Leviticus 5:1 Mean in the King James?
And if a soul sin, and hear the voice of swearing, and is a witness, whether he hath seen or known of it; if he do not utter it, then he shall bear his iniquity.
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 verse treats knowledge as something that can move outward: the witness who keeps it within ends up carrying the crookedness.
THE MEANING
When you hear the voice of an oath and stand as a witness through what you have seen or know, silence does not dissolve your part in the matter. What you know remains yours to declare, and withholding it leaves you bearing the crookedness named by the verse.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that silence makes what you know disappear from your responsibility.
THE ROOT
יָדָע
yādaʿ
GROWS FROM
ידע
To know, recognize, or perceive.
The verse does not limit testimony to what the eye sees; it explicitly includes what is known. This root also forms a verb meaning to make known, so the hidden hinge is whether knowledge moves outward into disclosure.
ALSO GROWS
yōdēaʿ: One who knows; a knower.
יֹדֵעַ
This participle from the same root names the person who holds the knowledge.
hōdīaʿ: To inform; to make known.
הוֹדִיעַ
This form carries the root’s knowing into disclosure, echoing the movement from private knowledge to spoken testimony.
תֶחֱטָא
teḥĕṭāʾ
GROWS FROM
חטא
To miss, err, or incur fault.
“sin” in this verse is teḥĕṭāʾ. This root connects missing or error with the term for a purification offering, holding breach and purification in one word family. Here the passage narrows the failure to the witness who does not speak what is known.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāṭāʾ: To miss, err, or do wrong.
חָטָא
It is the same root in a basic verbal form, naming the fault that opens the verse.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: Missing or guilt; also a purification offering.
חַטָּאת
The same consonants connect the language of the breach with the offering associated with purification.
THE PATTERN
Knowledge that reaches a witness creates responsibility to bring it into the open.
But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand.Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction.For we can not but speak the things which we have seen and heard.THE THREAD
If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?Proverbs uses the same root, יָדַע (yādaʿ, know), in the speaker’s claim, “we knew it not.” Its question exposes the same hinge as Leviticus: denial cannot remove knowledge from the one who bears it.
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