What Does Leviticus 20:21 Mean?
And if a man takes his brother's wife, it is a thing of separation. He has uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be bare of children.
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 shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.THE KEY
The brother’s bond remains inside the act: what looks like a private taking is named as an exposure of kinship.
THE MEANING
This verse places the sexual bond inside a wider family relationship: the brother’s nakedness is exposed, and the act is called unclean. It states the consequence without softening it: they are childless. The brother’s place remains part of what this union touches.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that sexual intimacy concerns only the two people who enter it; here, the brother’s bond remains part of the act’s meaning.
THE ROOT
טָמֵא
ṭāmēʾ
GROWS FROM
טמא
ṭ-m-ʾ: to be unclean or impure; to defile.
The root joins the condition “unclean” to the act “defile”: טֻמְאָה (ṭumʾāh, impurity) names a state, while טִמֵּא (ṭimmēʾ, to defile) names an action from the same consonants. That shared seed makes “unclean” more than a label; it carries the act’s status into the relationship it crosses.
ALSO GROWS
ṭumʾāh: Impurity, uncleanness.
טֻמְאָה
This noun names the condition formed from the same consonants as the verse’s word for “unclean.”
ṭimmēʾ: To defile, make unclean.
טִמֵּא
This verb shows the action side of the same root family: the state and the act share one seed.
THE PATTERN
A sexual bond carries the kinship ties it crosses, so its meaning is shaped by the whole family relation.
Do not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife. It is your brother's nakedness.If brothers settle together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead shall not go out to a stranger. Her husband's brother shall go in to her, and take her to himself as a wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother toward her.It is heard commonly that there is the trade of bodies among you, and such trade as is not even named among the nations, that one should hold his father's wife.THE THREAD
Do not soil yourselves in any of these. For in all these the nations were soiled, which I send out before you.The Hebrew root טמא (ṭ-m-ʾ, to be unclean or to defile) appears in both verses: here in “unclean,” and there in “defile” and “are defiled.” The shared root connects the named condition with the acts the text says produce it.
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