What Does Leviticus 11:16 Mean?
And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckoo, and the hawk after his kind,
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind,THE KEY
The hawk is marked by its kind, linking this boundary to the language that names distinct kinds throughout creation.
THE MEANING
The verse sets a particular boundary around four named birds, including the hawk and its kind. Even within exclusion, the creature remains distinct: the line is drawn without making what lies beyond it a blur.
THE ROOT
מִין
min
GROWS FROM
מ־י־ן
m-y-n
Kind, species, or class.
The phrase here is לְמִינֵהוּ (leminéhu, according to its kind), built from מִין (min, kind or species). The same kind-language marks living creatures in the creation account, so this boundary attends to a named distinction rather than reducing the hawk to a generic bird.
ALSO GROWS
leminéhu: According to its kind.
לְמִינֵהוּ
This is the form used for the hawk in this verse; the boundary includes its kind.
leminah: According to her kind.
לְמִינָהּ
This feminine form uses the same kind-word, showing the distinction carried across different creatures.
minim: Kinds or species.
מִינִים
The plural gathers distinct kinds without collapsing them into one undifferentiated group.
THE PATTERN
A boundary can distinguish what is received while preserving the identity of each kind.
And God created the great sea serpents, and every living soul that creeps, which the waters swarmed with after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind. And God saw that it was good.To part between the unclean and the clean, and between the beast that may be eaten and the beast that may not be eaten.There are, perhaps, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without voice.THE THREAD
And God created the great sea serpents, and every living soul that creeps, which the waters swarmed with after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind. And God saw that it was good.Both verses use מִין (min, kind or species) in the phrase לְמִינֵהוּ (leminéhu, according to its kind). The creation verse shows the same distinction at work among living creatures; here, that kind-language marks the hawk within a boundary.
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