What Does Numbers 7:58 Mean?
One kid of the goats, as an offering for falling short.
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
One kid of the goats for a sin offering:THE KEY
The goat’s offering bears the same Hebrew root as the miss itself: what is missing gets named as part of what is brought.
THE MEANING
The missing has a distinct place among the gifts being named. Its purpose is stated plainly rather than blurred into the surrounding offerings. The verse speaks now of failure as something that can be named and met with a concrete response.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that what is missing cannot be named among what is brought: this verse gives the missing its own offering.
THE ROOT
חַטָּאת
chatta't
GROWS FROM
חטא
chata
To miss, fail to reach.
“as an offering for falling short” in this verse is chatta't. The offering’s name belongs to the same root as the act of missing. Hebrew holds the miss and the offering named for it in one word family, giving what is missing a concrete place in the verse.
ALSO GROWS
chata: To miss, to fail.
חָטָא
This verb shares the offering’s root, linking the act of missing to the thing named for that miss.
chet: A missing, a failure.
חֵטְא
This noun carries the same root into the name of the condition the offering addresses.
THE PATTERN
The missing is named as a distinct part of what is brought, rather than dissolved into the surrounding offerings.
If the anointed priest misses the mark so as to bring guilt upon the people, then let him bring near, for his falling short in which he has missed the mark, a young bull without blemish to the LORD as an offering for falling short.And he brings to the LORD, for his falling short in which he has missed the mark, his guilt offering, a female from the flock, a lamb or a kid of the goats, as an offering for it; and the priest makes a covering for him from his falling short.But in those slain offerings, a reminding of shortcomings is made again each year.THE THREAD
I make my falling short known to you, and my crookedness I do not cover. I say, I will speak my rebellion into the open before the LORD, and you release the crookedness of my falling short. Selah.The same root that names the offering here names the speaker’s own missing in this verse. The miss is not hidden; it is brought into open speech, and its crookedness is released.
This reading is from Selah Verse.
You can read any verse this way in the app, keep it as a card, and send it on.
A Bible app where you send verses from your keyboard and in Messages, and every verse has a Deep Dive.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us