What Does Numbers 31:17 Mean?
Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by lying with 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
Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.THE KEY
Sexual knowing becomes a dividing line for women here, while every male child is included without that test.
THE MEANING
The command speaks in repeated, direct verbs: kill the male children among the little ones, and kill the women who have known a man through sexual union. It sorts human lives by age, sex, and sexual history, and names death as the fate attached to those categories. The violence remains explicit in the wording.
THE ROOT
יֹדַעַת
yoda'at
GROWS FROM
ידע
To know, recognize, or perceive; knowing through encounter.
“known a man” in this verse is yoda'at. The woman is described with yada, the ordinary word for knowing, within a phrase that specifies sexual union. Her category is defined by an encounter, and that distinction becomes part of the command’s boundary between life and death.
ALSO GROWS
yada: To know or perceive.
יָדַע
The verse uses this same verb for the woman’s sexual knowing, keeping the sense of encounter present.
da'at: Knowledge or understanding.
דַּעַת
This noun shares the root and shows how the verse’s word for sexual knowing belongs to the wider language of knowing.
הִרְגוּ
hirgu
GROWS FROM
הרג
To kill or slay.
“kill” in this verse is hirgu. The same root governs both commands: the targets differ, but the verb remains direct and repeated. The Hebrew gives no separate or softened term for either group’s death.
ALSO GROWS
harag: To kill or slay.
הָרַג
This verb form names the act commanded in the verse.
harug: Slain or killed.
הָרוּג
This related form describes the state produced by the same root’s act.
THE PATTERN
A killing command makes its scope explicit by naming the people and ages it includes.
Now go and strike Amalek, and devote all that they have to destruction, and do not spare them; but put to death man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.But from the cities of these peoples, which the LORD your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall keep alive nothing with breath.Then Herod, when he perceived that he had been mocked by the wise men, burned with rage, and sent forth and killed all the children who were in Bethlehem and in all its borders, from two years old and under, according to the time he had carefully learned from the wise men.THE THREAD
And he said, Who set you as ruler and judge over us? Do you intend to slay me, as you slew the Egyptian? And Moses feared, and said, Surely this word is known.Exodus uses the same root, הרג, when a man confronts Moses over the killing of the Egyptian. Here that root returns twice as a direct command, linking the challenged killing there with the violence named in this verse.
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