What Does Numbers 31:17 Mean in the King James?
Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
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
Sexual knowing becomes a dividing line for women here, while every male child is included without that test.
THE MEANING
The command speaks in repeated, direct verbs: kill the male children among the little ones, and kill the women who have known a man through sexual union. It sorts human lives by age, sex, and sexual history, and names death as the fate attached to those categories. The violence remains explicit in the wording.
THE ROOT
יֹדַעַת
yoda'at
GROWS FROM
ידע
To know, recognize, or perceive; knowing through encounter.
“known” in this verse is yoda'at. The woman is described with yada, the ordinary word for knowing, within a phrase that specifies sexual union. Her category is defined by an encounter, and that distinction becomes part of the command’s boundary between life and death.
ALSO GROWS
yada: To know or perceive.
יָדַע
The verse uses this same verb for the woman’s sexual knowing, keeping the sense of encounter present.
da'at: Knowledge or understanding.
דַּעַת
This noun shares the root and shows how the verse’s word for sexual knowing belongs to the wider language of knowing.
הִרְגוּ
hirgu
GROWS FROM
הרג
To kill or slay.
“kill” in this verse is hirgu. The same root governs both commands: the targets differ, but the verb remains direct and repeated. The Hebrew gives no separate or softened term for either group’s death.
ALSO GROWS
harag: To kill or slay.
הָרַג
This verb form names the act commanded in the verse.
harug: Slain or killed.
הָרוּג
This related form describes the state produced by the same root’s act.
THE PATTERN
A killing command makes its scope explicit by naming the people and ages it includes.
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.THE THREAD
And he said, Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? intendest thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian? And Moses feared, and said, Surely this thing is known.Exodus uses the same root, הרג, when a man confronts Moses over the killing of the Egyptian. Here that root returns twice as a direct command, linking the challenged killing there with the violence named in this verse.
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