What Does Leviticus 11:29 Mean?
These also are unclean to you among the swarming things that creep upon the earth. The weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise 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
These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind,THE KEY
The Hebrew says “the swarm that swarms,” so what English narrows to creeping motion carries the wider force of teeming life.
THE MEANING
The verse gives you a concrete boundary: these named creatures belong to the unclean category for you. Its doubled swarm-language emphasizes their teeming movement across the earth, while “unclean” names a ritual status rather than moral worth.
THE ROOT
בַּשֶּׁרֶץ הַשֹּׁרֵץ
bash-sheretz ha-shoretz
GROWS FROM
שׁרץ
sh-r-ts
To swarm, teem, or multiply abundantly
“swarming things” in this verse is bash-sheretz ha-shoretz. English repeats “creep,” making the category sound like motion close to the ground. Hebrew repeats the swarm-root; elsewhere it describes waters teeming with life and people multiplying, while the verse’s separate word “unclean” supplies the ritual boundary.
ALSO GROWS
sheretz: A swarming or teeming creature
שֶׁרֶץ
This is the noun behind “creeping things”; the root describes abundant movement without itself meaning evil or unclean.
sharats: To swarm, teem, or multiply
שָׁרַץ
Genesis 1:20 uses this root for the waters bringing forth living creatures abundantly; Exodus 1:7 uses it for Israel multiplying.
טָמֵא
tamei
GROWS FROM
טמא
ṭ-m-ʾ
To be unclean or ritually impure
Here “unclean” places these creatures within a ritual category. The same word describes Isaiah’s lips, showing that this vocabulary reaches beyond animal classification while retaining its language of impurity.
ALSO GROWS
tamei: Unclean or impure
טָמֵא
This is the word applied to the named creatures in the verse and to Isaiah’s lips in Isaiah 6:5.
tum'ah: Uncleanness or impurity
טֻמְאָה
This noun names the state of uncleanness and makes clear that the verse describes a status, not a creature’s moral character.
THE PATTERN
Scripture makes the clean and unclean boundary concrete through named conditions, then revisits how far that label extends.
By these you are made unclean. Whoever touches their limp body is unclean until evening.Then I said, Woe is me! I am cut off, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I settle in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.And he said to them, You know how unlawful it is for a man who is a Jew to cling to, or come near, one of another nation; but God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean.THE THREAD
And God said, "Let the waters swarm with swarming living soul, and let birds fly over the earth, upon the face of the expanse of the heavens."“Bring forth abundantly” translates the same שׁרץ root found in “creeping things that creep” here. Genesis uses it for waters teeming with living creatures, so the root carries abundance and movement; uncleanness is the verse’s distinct classification, not the root’s meaning.
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