What Does Numbers 31:45 Mean in the King James?
And thirty thousand asses and five hundred,
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 exact tally makes the violence legible as bookkeeping: 30,500 living donkeys appear as a share of war’s spoils.
THE MEANING
You see thirty thousand five hundred asses entered into an inventory of captured property. The precise count keeps the living creatures in view even as the tally treats them as a divisible share.
THE ROOT
חֲמֹרִים
ḥămōrîm
GROWS FROM
חמר
ḥ-m-r
The donkey word is traditionally associated with a word family linked to redness and reddish earth, though its exact etymology is debated.
“asses” in this verse is ḥămōrîm. The same consonants appear in Hebrew words for earthy materials, but that echo does not establish that the donkey and those materials share one meaning. Here the word stays concrete: living animals named as animals, entered into a count of spoils.
ALSO GROWS
ḥōmer: Clay, mud, or mortar.
חֹמֶר
Shares the חמר consonants and an association with reddish earth; the lexical link to the donkey word is uncertain.
ḥēmār: Bitumen or asphalt.
חֵמָר
Another earthy term with the same consonants; it offers a sound-shape echo rather than a certain shared derivation.
THE PATTERN
The language of spoil makes living creatures and goods countable as shares produced by violence.
But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.And all the spoil of these cities, and the cattle, the children of Israel took for a prey unto themselves; but every man they smote with the edge of the sword, until they had destroyed them, neither left they any to breathe.And David took all the flocks and the herds, which they drave before those other cattle, and said, This is David’s spoil.THE THREAD
And threescore and one thousand asses,This verse gives the total as 61,000 asses; the 30,500 here is exactly half of that count. The shared word exposes the arithmetic of division behind the inventory.
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