What Does Numbers 31:34 Mean?
And sixty-one thousand donkeys,
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 threescore and one thousand asses,THE KEY
The inventory reaches even the animals: 61,000 living creatures appear as a number in the tally of spoils.
THE MEANING
Here, 61,000 donkeys enter the tally of what has been seized. The verse’s stark arithmetic makes the scale of that taking visible, while its inventory language presents living creatures as counted property.
THE ROOT
חֲמֹרִים
ḥămōrîm
GROWS FROM
חמר
ḥ-m-r
The animal name is traditionally linked to a sense of reddish-brown, though the etymology is uncertain.
“asses” in this verse is ḥămōrîm. The Hebrew name may carry a color association beneath the familiar animal term, but that link is not certain enough to bear the passage’s main meaning. What the verse makes unmistakable is the plural count: the donkeys enter the inventory as a class of seized property.
ALSO GROWS
ḥămōr: Donkey
חֲמוֹר
This is the singular form behind the verse’s plural; the counted 61,000 are individual animals gathered into one tally.
ḥōmer: Clay, mud, or mortar
חֹמֶר
The same consonants appear in this word, sometimes treated as related to the animal name, though the connection is uncertain.
THE PATTERN
A tally of seized goods can reveal how power turns living creatures and people into countable property.
But the women, the little ones, the cattle, and all that is in the city, all its plunder, you shall take for yourself; and you shall eat the plunder of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you.And the children of Israel took the plunder of these cities and the cattle for themselves. But every man they struck with the mouth of the sword until they had destroyed them, and they left no breath.And cinnamon, and fragrances, and incense, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and bodies, and living souls of humankind.THE THREAD
Leap greatly, daughter of Zion. Shout, daughter of Jerusalem. Look, your king comes to you. He is aligned and delivered, bowed low, riding on a donkey, and on a colt, the son of a she-donkey.The same Hebrew word, חֲמוֹר (ḥămōr, donkey), appears here as the king’s mount. In Numbers the animals are counted among spoils; here one bears the king, and that shift in role makes the starkness of the inventory stand out.
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