What Does Leviticus 4:21 Mean?
And he carries the young bull out beyond the camp, and burns it as he burned the first young bull. It is the offering for the falling short of the assembly.
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 he shall carry forth the bullock without the camp, and burn him as he burned the first bullock: it is a sin offering for the congregation.THE KEY
The congregation’s missing is carried beyond its boundary and consumed, making the remedy part of the same word-family as the rupture.
THE MEANING
The congregation’s missing is named as shared, not private. Its offering is carried outside the camp and burned, giving the rupture a visible boundary and an outward passage.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a community’s failure is too diffuse to name: the verse names the missing as belonging to the congregation and gives its offering a visible removal.
THE ROOT
חַטָּאת
chatta’t
GROWS FROM
חטא
חָטָא (chata) means to miss or miss the mark; חַטָּאת can name both the missing and the offering for it.
“offering for the falling short” in this verse is chatta’t. Hebrew holds the congregation’s missing and the offering associated with it in one word-family. The offering is not linguistically detached from the rupture it addresses.
ALSO GROWS
chata: To miss; to miss the mark.
חָטָא
This verb names the kind of rupture the offering addresses, keeping the act and its response in the same root-family.
chet: A miss, offense, or fault.
חֵטְא
This noun makes the missing nameable, matching the verse’s direct naming of a failure belonging to the congregation.
וְהוֹצִיא
wehotzi
GROWS FROM
יצא
יָצָא (yatsa) means to go out or come out; its causative form means to bring out.
“carries out” in this verse is wehotzi. The action is a bringing out across the camp’s boundary. The same root-family describes departure and release through outward movement.
ALSO GROWS
yatsa: To go out or come out.
יָצָא
This is the basic movement beneath “carry forth”: the offering is taken out of the congregation’s shared space.
yetsi’ah: Going out; departure.
יְצִיאָה
This noun carries the same outward movement that the verse gives a concrete form in the offering’s passage beyond the camp.
THE PATTERN
The text marks the dealing with communal rupture as an outward movement that carries it away from the community’s center.
The bullock and the goat, the offerings for falling short, whose blood is brought within to make a covering in the set-apart place, one carries outside the camp. And they burn in the fire their skins, and their flesh, and their dung.For the bodies of those living ones, whose blood is carried into the set-apart places by the high priest for falling short, are burned outside the camp.As far as the east is from the west, so far he puts our rebellions from us.THE THREAD
And it came to be on this very bone of the day, that the LORD brought the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt by their hosts.“Carry forth” renders וְהוֹצִיא (wehotzi, bring out), from יָצָא (yatsa, go out); Exodus 12:51 uses the same verb when the LORD brings Israel out of מִצְרַיִם (Mitzrayim, the two narrows). The shared root lets the offering’s passage beyond the camp echo the larger movement out of constriction.
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