What Does Numbers 31:10 Mean?
And they burned all their cities where they settled, and all their fortresses, with fire.
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 they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire.THE KEY
The fire reaches both the cities people inhabit and the fortified enclosures meant to shelter them.
THE MEANING
This verse holds destruction in full view: the places of dwelling and the places of defense alike are burned. In its telling, neither settlement nor stronghold remains outside the reach of the fire.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A fortified place can guarantee safety: even the strongholds are named as burned.
THE ROOT
שָׂרְפוּ
śārəp̄ū
GROWS FROM
שרף
to burn or consume with fire
“burnt” in this verse is śārəp̄ū. The Hebrew verb שָׂרְפוּ (śārəp̄ū, “they burned”) comes from שרף (saraph, “to burn”). Related forms carry the same fiery image into a burning and a fiery creature, gathering the cities and strongholds under one consuming act.
ALSO GROWS
śərēp̄āh: burning; conflagration
שְׂרֵפָה
This noun from the same root names the consuming fire behind the verse’s action.
śārāp̄: fiery serpent; seraph
שָׂרָף
This related form carries the root’s fiery quality into a creature-name, showing the image extends beyond the verb “burn.”
THE PATTERN
Scripture uses fire to depict destruction that reaches through an entire place or order, leaving little intact.
And he burned the house of the LORD, and the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great man's house he burned with fire.Therefore her blows shall come in one day, death, and mourning, and hunger; and she shall be burned down with fire, for strong is the LORD God who judges her.But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass by with a rushing roar, and the building blocks shall melt in scorching heat; the earth also, and the works in it, shall be burned down.THE THREAD
And you shall gather all the spoil of it into the midst of its wide place, and shall burn the city with fire, and all its spoil whole, for the LORD your God; and it shall be a mound for the ages; it shall not be built again.The same Hebrew root שרף (saraph, “to burn”) appears in the command to burn a city and its spoil. Numbers names the cities and fortified places as consumed; Deuteronomy spells out the destruction’s reach to the city’s goods as well.
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