And the suburbs of the cities, which ye shall give unto the Levites, shall reach from the wall of the city and outward a thousand cubits round about.
| Word | Hebrew | Strong’s | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| suburbs | וּמִגְרְשֵׁי֙ u.mig.re.Shei | H4054 | a suburb (i.e. open country whither flocks are driven f… · conjunction + noun, common masculine plural construct |
| cities | הֶֽעָרִ֔ים he.'a.Rim | H5892 | a city (a place guarded by waking or a watch) in the wi… · definite article + noun, common masculine plural absolute |
| give | תִּתְּנ֖וּ ti.te.Nu | H5414 | to give · verb, qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural |
| Levites | לַלְוִיִּ֑ם lal.vi.Yim | H3881 | a Levite or descendant of Levi · preposition with the article + noun, gentilic masculine plural absolute |
| wall | מִקִּ֤יר mi.Kir | H7023 | a wall (as built in a trench) · preposition + noun, common masculine singular construct |
| city | הָעִיר֙ ha.'Ir | H5892 | a city (a place guarded by waking or a watch) in the wi… · definite article + noun, common feminine singular absolute |
| outward | וָח֔וּצָה va.Chu.tzah | H2351 | properly · conjunction + noun, common masculine singular absolute + directional suffix |
| thousand | אֶ֥לֶף 'E.lef | H505 | hence (the ox's head being the first letter of the alph… · cardinal number, both genders singular construct |
| cubits | אַמָּ֖ה 'a.Mah | H520 | properly · noun, common feminine singular absolute |
| about | סָבִֽיב sa.Viv | H5439 | (as noun) a circle · noun, common both genders singular absolute |
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
And the suburbs of the cities - shall reach from the wall of the city and outward a thousand cubits round about.
And the suburbs of the cities which ye shall give unto the Levites,.... The dimensions and bounds of them were not left to the Israelites, to give what ground they pleased for this purpose, but were fixed to what length they should be: these shall reach from the walls of the city, and outward, a thousand cubits round about; which was half a sabbath day's journey, and pretty near half a mile, which all around a city must contain a considerable quantity of ground, if the city was of any size, as it is certain that some of them given them at least were.
Numbers 35:1-8 1. And the LORD spake unto Moses in the plains of Moab by Jordan near Jericho, saying, 1. Et loquutus est Jehova in campestribus Moab juxta Jordanem. Jericho, dicendo: 2. Command the children of Israel, that they give unto the Levites of the inheritance of their possession cities to dwell in; and ye shall give also unto the Levites suburbs for the cities round about them. 2. Praecipe filiis Israel ut dent Levitis de haereditate possessionis suae urbes ad habitandum, et suburbana urbium ipsarum, per circuitus earum dabitis ipsis Levitis. 3. 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…
Read the whole note in the consoleThe pasture lands of the different towns were to measure "from the town wall outwards a thousand cubits round about," i.e., on each of the four sides. "And measure from without the city, the east side 2000 cubits, and the south side 2000 cubits, and the west side 2000 cubits, and the north side 2000 cubits, and the city in the middle," i.e., so that the town stood in the middle of the measured lines, and the space which they occupied was not included in the 2000 cubits. The meaning of these instructions, which have caused great perplexity to commentators, and have latterly been explained by Saalschtz (Mos. R. pp. 100, 101) in a marvellously erroneous manner, was correctly expounded by J. D.…
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
Readers have long attempted to explain the alleged contradiction between the 1,500 feet and the 3,000 feet. If the Hebrews conceived of a town as a fixed point, then the square of territory around each town would measure 3,000 feet on each side. Another solution is to see a distinction between pastureland (35:4) and larger pastureland (35:5) around the town. On the basis of this text, some Jewish interpreters restricted the distance that one could walk on the Sabbath to 3,000 feet (2,000 cubits) from home.
אלף אמה סביב A THOUSAND CUBITS ROUND ABOUT — But afterwards, (v. 5) it says, “two thousand cubits”!? How can that be? They assign two thousand for them (for the Levites) round about their cities, and of these, the innermost thousand serves as the “open space” and the outermost is for fields and vineyards (Sotah 27b).
Henry, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Clarke, Gill, Calvin and Keil & Delitzsch are in the public domain; Tyndale Open Study Notes © Tyndale House Publishers, CC BY-SA 4.0 — all from the Free Use Bible API (bible.helloao.org). Rashi: the Rosenbaum & Silbermann Pentateuch (public domain) and the Judaica Press and Metsudah Tanakh (CC BY), via Sefaria. Spurgeon's Treasury of David: public domain (lyteword's markdown edition, CC0).
