What Does Numbers 31:4 Mean in the King James?

Of every tribe a thousand, throughout all the tribes of Israel, shall ye send to the war.

Numbers 31:4 · KJV

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 word for sending also holds the sense of release: every tribe is ordered to release a thousand people into war.

THE MEANING

This verse places war inside a deliberate collective order: a thousand from each tribe are sent into battle. Every tribe is named in the dispatch, distributing the cost across the whole people. Sending here carries people toward the violence the sentence names.

WHAT THIS UNDOES

The verse undoes the belief that organized violence belongs only to a ruler or one tribe: the command reaches every tribe.

THE ROOT

תִּשְׁלְחוּ

tishlechu

GROWS FROM

שלח

To send away, send forth, or release.

The word holds dispatch and release together: to send is also to let someone go toward a destination. Here that destination is war, so the root’s movement remains bound to the violence the verse names.

ALSO GROWS

shilluaḥ: Sending away; release.

שִׁלּוּחַ

This related noun preserves the letting-go sense within the act of sending, which makes the command a release of people toward its stated destination.

mishloach: Sending forth; dispatch.

מִשְׁלוֹחַ

This related noun names the act of dispatch itself, echoing the verse’s organized sending of a thousand from each tribe.

THE PATTERN

Sending releases people into a destination, so its meaning is inseparable from what waits there.

Then the LORD said unto Moses, Go in unto Pharaoh, and tell him, Thus saith the LORD God of the Hebrews, Let my people go, that they may serve me.

Exodus 9:1 · KJVThe same Hebrew root names release as Pharaoh is told to send the people out; the destination gives the act its particular weight.

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.

Isaiah 6:8 · KJVThe same root marks a person being sent, extending the pattern from a collective dispatch to one speaker’s response.

Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves.

Luke 10:3 · KJVThe sending leads into danger, keeping the exposure of those sent together with the act of dispatch.

THE THREAD

Then the LORD said unto Moses, Go in unto Pharaoh, and tell him, Thus saith the LORD God of the Hebrews, Let my people go, that they may serve me.

Exodus 9:1 · KJV

Exodus uses the same root, ⁨שלח⁩ (shalach), meaning send or release, in the command “Let my people go.” In Numbers, that root sends people into war; the shared word shows how the act of release takes its weight from the destination.

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