What Does Numbers 5:4 Mean?
And the children of Israel did so, and sent them out beyond the camp; as the LORD spoke to Moses, so the children of Israel did.
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 children of Israel did so, and put them out without the camp: as the LORD spake unto Moses, so did the children of Israel.THE KEY
The Hebrew verb that sends Israel out of Egypt also names Israel sending these people beyond the camp.
THE MEANING
The verse shows a community making its boundary real through what it does to bodies: the people named in the command are sent outside the camp. Its repeated “so did” makes the response collective and concrete. Exclusion remains visible as the cost of that enacted order.
THE ROOT
וַיְשַׁלְּחוּ
vayeshalləḥu
GROWS FROM
שלח
š-l-ḥ
To send forth, release, or send away.
“sent them out” in this verse is vayeshalləḥu. The verb carries a sending across a boundary: the people do not merely mark the excluded as outside; they send them there together. The same root can name movement toward release or movement into exclusion, and the surrounding scene gives that movement its force.
ALSO GROWS
shilluaḥ: Sending away or dismissal.
שִׁלּוּחַ
This branch shows how the root can name a sending away that changes who belongs within a household, echoing the camp’s enacted boundary.
Shiloach: Sent forth; also the name of a water channel or pool.
שִׁלֹחַ
John 9:7 preserves the name’s meaning as “Sent”: a man goes to the pool to wash and returns seeing, showing the same root’s movement toward restoration.
THE PATTERN
Sending across a boundary changes who or what remains within a community’s center, with outcomes that can range from exclusion to release toward restoration.
And the Egyptians gripped the people hard, to send them out of the land in haste; for they said, “We are all dead.”And he shall sprinkle upon the one being cleansed from the striking of the skin seven times, and shall make him clean, and shall send the living bird out into the open field.And he said to him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, the Sent. So he went and washed, and came seeing.THE THREAD
And the Egyptians gripped the people hard, to send them out of the land in haste; for they said, “We are all dead.”The Hebrew root שלח (shalach, send forth or send away) names both Israel’s sending out from Egypt and the sending of people outside the camp here. The shared verb shows how sending redraws a boundary; the surrounding scene reveals whether that movement is deliverance or exclusion.
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