What Does Numbers 16:49 Mean?
Now those who died in the striking were fourteen thousand and seven hundred, apart from those who died about the word of Korah.
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
Now they that died in the plague were fourteen thousand and seven hundred, beside them that died about the matter of Korah.THE KEY
The plague’s count is not the whole count: the verse keeps Korah’s dead beside it as a distinct loss.
THE MEANING
Fourteen thousand and seven hundred appear under the plague, while those who die “about the matter of Korah” remain a separate group. This verse holds scale and circumstance together; one figure does not absorb every loss around it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the assumption that a total death count tells the whole story: this verse preserves deaths tied to Korah’s matter as a distinct loss.
THE ROOT
מַגֵּפָה
maggēp̄āh
GROWS FROM
נגף
to strike, smite, or strike down
English presents “plague” as a condition; the Hebrew noun is built from the root for striking. The verse names the outbreak as a striking and gives its toll, while keeping another group of deaths alongside it.
ALSO GROWS
nāgap̄: to strike, smite
נָגַף
This verbal form shows the force beneath the noun translated “plague.”
maggēp̄āh: a blow, plague, or defeat
מַגֵּפָה
The verse uses this noun for the outbreak whose dead it counts.
דְּבַר
dəḇar
GROWS FROM
דבר
word, speech, or matter; the root also means to speak
The word rendered “matter” belongs to a Hebrew word-family that also names speech. The phrase keeps Korah’s matter within that shared field of word and affair, while leaving the deaths attached to it distinct from the plague’s count.
ALSO GROWS
dāḇār: word, thing, or matter
דָּבָר
This noun’s range includes both “word” and “matter,” the sense carried in the phrase about Korah.
dibbēr: to speak
דִּבֵּר
This related verb shows the speech connection carried by the word-family behind “matter.”
THE PATTERN
A text can count mass death while naming the force or event tied to the loss.
So the LORD sent a plague upon Israel from the morning until the appointed time, and there died of the people from Dan to Beersheba seventy thousand men.And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses, and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.By these three is the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which comes out of their mouths.THE THREAD
And Moses said to Aaron, Take a censer, and place fire upon it from the altar, and set incense upon it, and go quickly to the congregation, and make a covering for them, for the boiling over has gone out from the face of the LORD. The striking has begun.“Plague” in both verses is מַגֵּפָה (maggēp̄āh), from נגף (ngf), “to strike.” Verse 46 names its beginning; verse 49 gives the count of those who die within it, joining onset and toll through the same Hebrew word.
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