What Does Numbers 35:14 Mean?
You shall give three cities on this side of the Jordan, and three cities you shall give in the land of Canaan, which shall be cities of escape.
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
Ye shall give three cities on this side Jordan, and three cities shall ye give in the land of Canaan, which shall be cities of refuge.THE KEY
Refuge is placed on both sides of the boundary, so a person fleeing danger has somewhere concrete to arrive.
THE MEANING
A person who has caused a death unintentionally is given a place to flee. Those places are set across both sides of the Jordan, making refuge reachable within the land. The repeated “give” makes this shelter something placed in the landscape, ready to receive someone in motion.
THE ROOT
מִקְלָט
miqlāṭ a place
GROWS FROM
קלט
קלט (q-l-ṭ; qālaṭ) carries the sense of receiving or taking in.
“cities of escape” in this verse is miqlāṭ a place. The word for refuge is connected to receiving: the city is a place that takes in the person fleeing toward it. The verse’s six cities are not just marked on a map; they are placed as receiving places across the boundary.
ALSO GROWS
qālaṭ: to receive or take in
קָלַט
This verbal sense opens refuge as an arrival into shelter, not simply distance from danger.
miqlāṭ: a refuge or place of refuge
מִקְלָט
The noun names the place that receives the fugitive, giving the verse’s distributed cities their function.
נתן
nātan to give
GROWS FROM
נתן
נתן (n-t-n; nātan) means to give, set, or place.
“give” in this verse is nātan to give. The verb is repeated for the cities on each side of the Jordan. Refuge is given by being set in place across the land; provision takes a concrete, reachable form.
ALSO GROWS
nātan: to give, set, or place
נָתַן
The same verb names both acts of providing the cities and placing refuge within reach.
mattānāh: a gift
מַתָּנָה
This related form makes the provision’s given quality visible: refuge is assigned as a place, not left as an abstraction.
THE PATTERN
Refuge is established in reachable places before a person in danger needs to flee.
And if a man does not lie in wait, but God lets him come into his hand, then I set for you a place to which he flees.You shall separate three cities for yourself in the midst of your land, which the LORD your God gives you to take hold of.So that through two unshifting deeds, in which it is without power for God to lie, we might have a strong comfort, we who have fled for refuge to grip the hope lying before us.THE THREAD
Speak to the children of Israel, saying, Set for yourselves cities of refuge, of which I spoke to you by the hand of Moses.Joshua uses the same word, מִקְלָט (miqlāṭ, refuge), found here. Numbers describes the cities spread across the land; Joshua names them as appointed places where the fleeing person can be received.
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