What Does Leviticus 19:29 Mean?
Do not pierce your daughter to make her a harlot; lest the land play the harlot and be filled with schemes.
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
Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness.THE KEY
The same Hebrew root first names the daughter’s prostitution and then makes the land itself prostitute, showing how the harm spreads beyond one person.
THE MEANING
This verse names the sexual exploitation of a daughter as a profaning act with consequences beyond her household. Its repeated prostitution language makes the land itself the next subject, and its final word points to a land filled with deliberate lewdness. The harm is intimate and public at once.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that sexual exploitation can remain a private wrong inside one household; it says the land itself becomes part of its consequence.
THE ROOT
תִזְנֶה
tizneh
GROWS FROM
זנה
zanah
To prostitute oneself or commit sexual unfaithfulness.
“harlot” in this verse is tizneh. The verse uses this root first in the command about the daughter, then again of the land. English can make those sound like separate things, but the Hebrew repeats one word-family: the exploitation of a person becomes a condition of the place.
ALSO GROWS
zonah: A prostitute; a woman who prostitutes herself.
זֹנָה
This branch names the person behind the verse’s first use of the root and makes its human cost explicit.
zenunim: Prostitution or acts of sexual unfaithfulness.
זְנוּנִים
This related form shows how the root can name a wider pattern, matching the verse’s movement from one daughter to the land.
זִמָּה
zimmah
GROWS FROM
זמם
zamam
To devise, plan, or plot.
“filled with schemes” in this verse is zimmah. The closing word can mean lewdness or a shameful scheme, so “wickedness” here is more pointed than general wrongdoing. It carries the sense of corruption devised and enacted.
ALSO GROWS
zamam: To devise or plot.
זָמַם
This verb reveals the deliberate design contained in the verse’s description of the land’s corruption.
mezimmah: A plan or device; sometimes discretion.
מְזִמָּה
This related noun shows the root can name a conceived purpose, shading toward a corrupt scheme in this passage.
THE PATTERN
A wrong treated as private spreads into the shared life of the land and community.
The earth also was ruined before God, and the earth was filled with violence.Therefore the land shall mourn, and every one who settles in it shall wither, along with the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens. Even the fish of the sea shall be swept away.Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?THE THREAD
The beginning of the word of the LORD by Hosea. And the LORD said to Hosea, Go, take for yourself a wife of harlotry, and her children, for the land has surely played the harlot, turning from following the LORD.Hosea uses the same זנה (zanah) root and, like Leviticus, makes the land the subject of prostitution. Leviticus shows this language arising from a daughter’s exploitation; Hosea extends it to the land’s departure from the LORD.
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