What Does Numbers 5:29 Mean?
This is the instruction of jealousies, when a wife turns aside to another instead of her husband, and is soiled;
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
This is the law of jealousies, when a wife goeth aside to another instead of her husband, and is defiled;THE KEY
The verse makes a wife’s turning aside the hinge between the bond she leaves and the law of jealousy that names the breach.
THE MEANING
This verse names a law whose terms are jealousy, a wife’s turning aside from her husband, and defilement. It holds the act, the relationship, and the resulting condition together in a single legal sentence.
THE ROOT
הַקְּנָאֹת
haqqənāʾōt
GROWS FROM
קנא
q-n-ʾ
To be zealous or jealous.
“jealousies” in this verse is haqqənāʾōt. The law’s name comes from a root whose word family carries both jealousy and zeal. Here that intensity sits beside the wife’s turning aside and shapes how the breach is named.
ALSO GROWS
qānāʾ: To be jealous or zealous.
קָנָא
The verb shows the active force contained in the law’s name.
qinʾāh: Jealousy or zeal.
קִנְאָה
This noun shares the root of the verse’s “jealousies,” keeping its relational intensity visible.
תִּשְׂטֶה
tiśṭeh
GROWS FROM
שׂטה
ś-ṭ-h
To turn aside or deviate.
“turns aside” in this verse is tiśṭeh. The Hebrew root makes movement the core of “goeth aside”: the wife turns from the relationship named in the verse. That movement is the hinge linking the bond to the law’s terms.
ALSO GROWS
śāṭāh: To turn aside or stray.
שָׂטָה
This verb is the root form behind the verse’s description of the wife’s departure.
tiśṭeh: She turns aside.
תִּשְׂטֶה
This is the verse’s inflected form, making the turning itself the stated condition.
וְנִטְמָאָה
wəniṭmāʾāh
GROWS FROM
טמא
ṭ-m-ʾ
To be unclean or impure.
“soiled” in this verse is wəniṭmāʾāh. The root family connects “defiled” with impurity and an unclean state, giving the word a ritual as well as relational register. The verse ends by naming a condition alongside the act of turning aside.
ALSO GROWS
ṭāmēʾ: Unclean or impure.
טָמֵא
This root form reveals the state carried by the verse’s word “defiled.”
ṭumʾāh: Impurity or uncleanness.
טֻמְאָה
This noun shows the wider condition named by the same root.
THE PATTERN
Scripture pictures a bond as joining, then describes its breach as departure from that bond.
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother, and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.Surely, as a wife has dealt treacherously away from her companion, so you have dealt treacherously with me, O house of Israel, says the LORD.You adulterers and adulteresses, have you not seen that the friendship of the world is hostility toward God? Whoever therefore desires to be a friend of the world stands as an enemy of God.THE THREAD
Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them, If any man's wife turns aside, and crosses over against him,The phrase “go aside” uses the same root שׂטה (śṭh), “turn aside,” as this verse. Numbers 5:12 states the turning as the condition; verse 29 names the law attached to it.
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