What Does Leviticus 20:15 Mean?
And if a man lies down with an animal, he shall surely die; and you shall strike down the animal.
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 if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast.THE KEY
The Hebrew says a man “gives his lying” with the beast, then names both the man and the animal as targets of death.
THE MEANING
The sentence is explicit: the man is to be put to death, and the beast is to be killed. The violence is part of what the verse says; it offers no explanation here for the animal’s death.
THE ROOT
מוֹת יוּמָת
mot yumat
GROWS FROM
מות
m-w-t
To die; to be dead.
“shall surely die” in this verse is mot yumat. The Hebrew repeats the death root in an emphatic construction, rendered “he shall surely be put to death.” The same death language governs the man’s sentence and the command to kill the beast.
ALSO GROWS
māvet: Death.
מָוֶת
This noun makes the same root’s outcome explicit: the sentence is about death itself.
met: Dead; a dead person.
מֵת
This form shows the root can name the state that the verse’s sentence brings about.
יִתֵּן
yitten
GROWS FROM
נתן
n-t-n
To give, set, or place.
The Hebrew phrase is יִתֵּן שְׁכָבְתּוֹ (yitten shekhavto), “gives his lying.” English conveys the act with “lie with,” while the Hebrew also makes the verb “give” part of its wording.
ALSO GROWS
mattanah: Gift; present.
מַתָּנָה
This related noun shows the ordinary “give” sense carried by the root, without changing the verse’s stark meaning.
natun: Given; placed.
נָתוּן
This form keeps the root’s sense of something being given or placed visible beneath the English idiom.
שְׁכָבְתּוֹ
shekhavto
GROWS FROM
שכב
sh-k-b
To lie down.
The word means “his lying,” from the root for lying down. Together with “gives,” it preserves the physical wording of the act instead of naming it with a separate abstract term.
ALSO GROWS
mishkav: Bed; lying place.
מִשְׁכָּב
The same root names the place associated with lying down, keeping the word’s physical sense in view.
shokhev: One lying down.
שֹׁכֵב
This form describes a person by the same action expressed in the verse.
THE PATTERN
When Scripture names death as a consequence, it states the consequence plainly.
But from the tree of knowing good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.Then craving, when it has conceived, gives birth to falling short; and falling short, when it is full-grown, bears death.For the pay of falling short is death, but the gift of God is the life of the ages in Jesus, the Anointed One, our Lord.THE THREAD
If a man is found lying down with a woman who belongs to a husband, then both of them shall die, the man who lies with the woman and the woman. So you shall burn out the evil from Israel.Leviticus uses מות (m-w-t, “die”) in an emphatic death sentence; Deuteronomy uses the same root when it says they “shall both of them die.” The parallel makes Leviticus’s extension of the sentence to the beast especially stark: both the man and the animal are expressly named for killing.
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