What Does Leviticus 20:27 Mean?
A man or a woman who is a medium, or who knows, shall surely die. They shall stone them with stones; their blood is upon them.
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
A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.THE KEY
The word translated “wizard” is linked to “knowing,” so the verse frames a claim to hidden knowledge and then gives it the text’s most severe consequence.
THE MEANING
You encounter a command for communal execution in direct terms: a man or woman associated with an ʾob or yiddeʿoni is to be stoned to death. The sentence says the condemned person’s blood is upon them, assigning responsibility within the text rather than leaving the killing implicit. Its force now includes the violence it commands.
THE ROOT
יִדְּעֹנִי
yiddeʿōnī
GROWS FROM
ידע
Know, recognize, perceive.
“who knows” in this verse is yiddeʿōnī. Yiddeʿoni is commonly connected with yadaʿ, “to know,” giving “wizard” the sense of a knowing or divining practitioner. The root makes the category more specific: the verse concerns a person claiming access to knowledge through this practice, and the sentence then commands stoning without softening the violence.
ALSO GROWS
yadaʿ: Know or perceive by encounter.
יָדַע
This verb supplies the root that links the condemned figure to knowing.
daʿat: Knowledge.
דַּעַת
This noun from the same root shows the knowledge-language carried by yiddeʿoni.
THE PATTERN
Scripture does not treat a spirit’s claim to hidden knowledge as self-authenticating; it names, bounds, and tests that source.
Or one who binds bindings, or one who asks the familiar spirit, or one who knows, or one who seeks the dead.And as we went toward prayer, a servant girl held by a breath of divination met us, who brought her masters much gain by divining.Beloved, do not lean your weight on every breath, but test the breaths, whether they come out of God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.THE THREAD
Or one who binds bindings, or one who asks the familiar spirit, or one who knows, or one who seeks the dead.The verse repeats yiddeʿoni, the term translated “wizard,” and places it beside consulting familiar spirits and necromancy. That parallel opens the term’s scope while leaving Leviticus’s lethal sentence fully visible.
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