What Does Leviticus 14:34 Mean?
When you have come into the land of Canaan, which I give to you as a holding, and I set the striking of the skin on a house in the land of your holding.
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
When ye be come into the land of Canaan, which I give to you for a possession, and I put the plague of leprosy in a house of the land of your possession;THE KEY
The Hebrew repeats one verb, נתן (natan), “give, set, place”, for both the land God gives and the plague God puts inside a house.
THE MEANING
The verse holds gift and affliction together: a place can be given, and a plague can still appear in a house within it. It names both as actions of the same speaker, without explaining here why the plague appears.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the assumption that a place received as a gift must be untouched by affliction: this verse names the gift and the plague in the same breath.
THE ROOT
נֹתֵן
noten
GROWS FROM
נתן
n-t-n
give, set, place
The verse uses נֹתֵן (noten, “giving”) for the land and וְנָתַתִּי (venatatti, “I will put”) for the plague, forms of the same root, נתן (natan, “give, set, place”). The language binds provision and disturbance as two acts of one speaker, while leaving their tension unexplained.
ALSO GROWS
noten: giving
נֹתֵן
This form names the land as given by the speaker.
venatatti: and I will put or place
וְנָתַתִּי
The same root is rendered “put” when the object is a plague in the house.
mattanah: gift
מַתָּנָה
This related noun carries the root’s giving sense, close to the land given into possession.
נֶגַע
nega
GROWS FROM
נגע
n-g-ʿ
touch, reach, strike
“striking of the skin” in this verse is nega. The word translated “plague” comes from a root of touching or striking, giving the affliction the sense of an impact or mark upon the house. The root holds contact and affliction together without explaining the cause of the mark.
ALSO GROWS
naga: touch, reach, come into contact
נָגַע
The verb behind “plague” frames the condition through contact or impact.
nagua: stricken, affected
נָגוּעַ
This related form describes one bearing the impact, echoing the house marked by the affliction.
THE PATTERN
The same divine agency is named as the source of both human well-being and calamity, with the tension left intact.
But he said to her, You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we receive good from the hand of God, and shall we not receive harm? In all this Job did not miss the mark with his lips.I shape the light and create the darkness; I make wholeness and create harm. I, the LORD, do all these things.In the day of good, be in goodness, and in the day of harm, see. God also makes this beside that, so that humankind finds nothing behind him.THE THREAD
And God set them in the expanse of the heavens, to shine upon the earth.Genesis uses נתן (natan, “give, set, place”) where the KJV says God “set” the lights in the sky. It reveals the placement sense carried by the same verb that Leviticus renders “give” for the land and “put” for the plague.
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