🔢WEB · Numbers 5:6
What does Numbers 5:6 mean?
"“Speak to the children of Israel: ‘When a man or woman commits any sin that men commit, so as to trespass against Yahweh, and that soul is guilty;"
— Numbers 5:6 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
Both you shall put male and female outside of the camp; that they not defile their camp, in the midst of which I dwell.”
The children of Israel did so, and put them outside of the camp; as Yahweh spoke to Moses, so did the children of Israel.
Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying,
“Speak to the children of Israel: ‘When a man or woman commits any sin that men commit, so as to trespass against Yahweh, and that soul is guilty;
then he shall confess his sin which he has done, and he shall make restitution for his guilt in full, and add to it the fifth part of it, and give it to him in respect of whom he has been guilty.
But if the man has no kinsman to whom restitution may be made for the guilt, the restitution for guilt which is made to Yahweh shall be the priest’s; besides the ram of the atonement, by which atonement shall be made for him.
Every heave offering of all the holy things of the children of Israel, which they present to the priest, shall be his.
Explanation
Numbers 5:6 introduces a legal principle that God gave to Moses for the community of Israel: when any person—man or woman—commits a sin against another human being, that act is simultaneously a trespass against the Lord himself, and the person bears real guilt before God. The verse itself is the opening clause of a longer instruction (continuing through verse 8) that goes on to require confession and restitution, but this verse establishes the foundational premise on which those instructions rest.
The book of Numbers records the laws, census, and journey of Israel during their forty years in the wilderness after the Exodus from Egypt. Moses is the mediator through whom God speaks these instructions directly to the people. This particular law falls within a section of Numbers (chapters 5–6) dealing with the purity and order of the camp, since Israel understood itself as a nation in which God himself dwelt in their midst at the tabernacle. Because of that divine presence, sin was never merely a private or social matter—it disrupted the holiness of the community and offended God directly. The specific wrongs in view here (as verse 7 clarifies) are sins committed against a neighbor, such as theft, fraud, or breaking a trust, showing that interpersonal wrongs and covenant violations against God were inseparably linked.
Theologically, this verse teaches that sin against another person is never isolated from one's relationship with God. Even wrongs that seem purely "horizontal"—between two human beings—are also "vertical," since they violate God's own moral order and covenant. This reflects a consistent biblical theme: because
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