What Does Numbers 35:3 Mean?
The cities shall be theirs to settle in, and the pasturelands shall be for their cattle, for their goods, and for all their beasts.
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 the cities shall they have to dwell in; and the suburbs of them shall be for their cattle, and for their goods, and for all their beasts.THE KEY
A dwelling includes the open land around it, where the creatures and goods that sustain life have room.
THE MEANING
Your dwelling is pictured with space around it: the city holds residence, while its open land makes room for cattle, goods, and other living creatures. The verse joins a place to dwell with the surrounding space that supports the lives within it.
THE ROOT
מִגְרְשֵׁיהֶם
migrashehem
GROWS FROM
גרש
garash
drive out, expel
“pasturelands” in this verse is migrashehem. The word for the open land around a city comes from the root of driving out or expelling. It gives the space beyond the city a sense of land extending outward from the settled center, so the dwelling includes more than its walls.
ALSO GROWS
garash: to drive out or expel
גָּרַשׁ
The verb carries the root sense behind the outward space named by migrash.
megorash: expelled or driven out
מְגֹרָשׁ
This form makes the root’s outward movement visible beside the land extending beyond the city.
חַיָּתָם
chayyatam
GROWS FROM
חיה
ch-y-h
live, be alive
The word translated “beasts” comes from the root for living, naming these animals as living beings. The verse places their lives within the town’s provision, alongside cattle and goods.
ALSO GROWS
chai: alive; a living being
חַי
It shares the root that names the animals sheltered by the surrounding land.
chayyim: life
חַיִּים
It shows the wider root meaning carried by the verse’s word for beasts.
THE PATTERN
A dwelling is held together with surrounding space and provision for the lives it supports.
And the LORD God planted a garden eastward, in Eden, and there he set Adam, whom he had shaped.He makes the grass sprout for the cattle, and the herb for the service of humankind, to bring bread out from the earth.Look at the birds of the air, for they do not sow, nor reap, nor gather into storehouses; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they?THE THREAD
And God said, "Let the earth bring out living soul after its kind, cattle, creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind." And it was so.The Hebrew word translated “beasts” in Numbers shares the חיה root for living with Genesis’s “living creature.” The connection lets the animals in the city’s open land appear as lives the place accommodates, not only as goods counted beside it.
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