What Does Leviticus 20:9 Mean?
For everyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely die. He has cursed his father or his mother; his blood is upon him.
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
For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him.THE KEY
The verb for “curse” carries the sense “make light,” while the sentence ends with blood and death.
THE MEANING
The verse declares cursing father or mother a capital offense and says the offender’s blood is upon him. Its wording is direct and violent: death is the stated sentence, with no figure of speech offered to soften it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that cursing a parent is weightless speech: the verb carries the sense “make light,” and the verse places blood-liability on the offender.
THE ROOT
יְקַלֵּל
yeqallel
GROWS FROM
קלל
Be light; make light or treat as slight.
“curses” in this verse is yeqallel. English “curse” can sound like a fixed category of bad speech; the Hebrew verb carries the sense of treating father and mother as negligible. Deuteronomy 27:16 makes that shade audible with “setteth light by,” while Leviticus names the consequence in stark terms: death and blood upon the offender.
ALSO GROWS
qal: Light, slight, or swift.
קַל
This related form reveals the root’s sense of lightness beneath the verb translated “curseth.”
qelalah: A curse.
קְלָלָה
The noun keeps the same root at the center of the act: a curse expresses contempt, treating someone as of little weight.
THE PATTERN
In these verses, contempt expressed against a parent is treated as a weighty rupture with public, dark, or death-dealing consequences.
Cursed be he who makes light of his father and his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen.Whoever curses his father or his mother, his lamp goes out in the pupil of darkness.For God commanded, saying, Honor your father and mother, and, Whoever speaks evil of father or mother, let him end in death.THE THREAD
Cursed be he who makes light of his father and his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen.Deuteronomy uses a form of the same root as Leviticus’s “curseth,” rendered here as “setteth light by.” That wording exposes the contempt within the curse: father and mother are treated as negligible, and Leviticus attaches the severe sentence of death and blood-liability to that act.
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