What Does Numbers 31:20 Mean?
Purify every garment, everything made of skin, every work of goats' hair, and every vessel of wood.
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 purify all your raiment, and all that is made of skins, and all work of goats’ hair, and all things made of wood.THE KEY
The root that names missing also names the clearing of impurity, so cleansing is the removal of what has gone awry.
THE MEANING
Cleansing reaches beyond your body to the things that surround and serve it: cloth, leather, goat hair, and wood all enter the clearing. The verb translated “purify” shares its root with chet, “missing,” holding the condition and its removal in one word-family.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that cleansing concerns only the body: here garments and implements also carry what must be cleared.
THE ROOT
תִּתְחַטָּאוּ
titḥatta'u
GROWS FROM
חטא
ḥ-ṭ-ʾ
To miss or err; in this reflexive form, to purify oneself from ritual impurity.
“purify” in this verse is titḥatta'u. This verb belongs to the same root-family as words for missing or offense. Its use for purification holds the movement from what is out of order to its clearing within one word-family; here, that clearing extends across every named material.
ALSO GROWS
ḥēṭ: Missing; an offense or failure.
חֵטְא
This branch names what has gone wrong; its shared root with titḥatta’u gives the cleansing verb the sense of clearing what has become defiled.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: Missing; also the term for an offering addressing the missing.
חַטָּאת
The root-family can name both the condition and a ritual means of clearing it, echoing the work of purification here.
THE PATTERN
Cleansing reaches every place contamination leaves its trace, from household materials to inner life.
And whatever any of them falls upon when they are dead is unclean, whether it is a wooden vessel, or a garment, or a skin, or a sack, whatever vessel it is in which any work is done. It must be put into waters, and it is unclean until evening; so it is clean.Tread me thoroughly clean of my crookedness, and cleanse me of my falling short.Having therefore these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every stain of flesh and breath, completing our set-apartness in the awe of God.THE THREAD
And the clean person shall sprinkle upon the unclean on the third day, and on the seventh day. On the seventh day he shall cleanse himself, and wash his garments, and bathe himself in waters, and shall be clean at evening.Both verses use a reflexive form of חטא (ḥ-ṭ-ʾ) for purification, the same root-family that names missing or offense. Numbers 19:19 joins the person’s cleansing with washing clothes; Numbers 31:20 carries that clearing outward to the materials around them.
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