What Does Leviticus 18:24 Mean?
Do not soil yourselves in any of these. For in all these the nations were soiled, which I send out before you.
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
Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:THE KEY
The same root makes defilement a condition produced by these practices, not a label reserved for another people.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks to the reader now: practices can make a person and a community unclean. The same root describes both the reader’s possible state and the nations’ state, while the ending shows that defilement reaches the boundary of belonging.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that what happens in private cannot alter the person or the people around them.
THE ROOT
תִּטַּמְּאוּ
titamməʾu
GROWS FROM
טמא
ṭ-m-ʾ
Be or become unclean; be contaminated or impure.
“soil” in this verse is titamməʾu. The verse uses this same root for “defile yourselves” and “the nations are defiled.” That repetition links the reader’s possible condition with the nations’ condition: the word describes what these practices do, not a separate kind of people.
ALSO GROWS
ṭāmēʾ: Unclean; impure.
טָמֵא
This adjective names the state the verse says these practices produce.
tumʾāh: Uncleanness; impurity.
טֻמְאָה
This noun makes the root’s shared condition visible as something that can mark a person or a people.
מְשַׁלֵּחַ
meshallēaḥ
GROWS FROM
שלח
š-l-ḥ
Send, send forth, or send away; let go.
“send out” in this verse is meshallēaḥ. The word translated “cast out” comes from the root for sending or letting go. The verse joins the nations’ defilement with their being sent away from before the reader, making expulsion part of the sentence’s force.
ALSO GROWS
shallach: Send away; let go.
שַׁלַּח
This is the verb used in the familiar command “Let my people go” (Exodus 5:1); here the sending is an expulsion.
mishloach: A sending; a dispatch.
מִשְׁלוֹחַ
This noun carries the same seed of sending, illuminating the movement expressed by “cast out.”
THE PATTERN
A corrupting practice can move beyond the scale where it begins and mark an entire people or body.
Alignment lifts up a nation, but falling short is a reproach to any people.Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?And the tongue is fire, a world of crookedness. It is set among our limbs, staining the whole body and setting the wheel of becoming ablaze, and it is lit by Gehenna.THE THREAD
And the land is soiled. Therefore I visit its crookedness upon it, and the land itself vomits out those who settle in her.The same impurity root moves from the people in this verse to the land itself, showing that defilement reaches the place a community inhabits. The next verse gives that consequence a stark image: the land vomits out its inhabitants.
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