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Firstborn Animals
Deuteronomy 15:19–23 — Firstborn Animals. Each verse below carries the full apparatus: the Berean Standard Bible, the vocalized original (tap any word), and a parsed breakdown of every term transcribed from the interlinear. Synthesized commentary, canonical threads, and the reading of Christ gather at the end, over the whole unit.
19You must set apart to the LORD your God every firstborn male produced by your herds and flocks. You are not to put the firstborn of your oxen to work, nor are you to shear the firstborn of your flock.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
taq·dîš Yah·weh ’ĕ·lō·he·ḵā kāl- hab·bə·ḵō·wr ’ă·šer haz·zā·ḵār yiw·wā·lêḏ biḇ·qā·rə·ḵā ū·ḇə·ṣō·nə·ḵā lō biḇ·ḵōr šō·w·re·ḵā ṯa·‘ă·ḇōḏ wə·lō ṯā·ḡōz bə·ḵō·wr ṣō·ne·ḵā
Literal — word-for-word from the original
Every firstborn male that is born among your herd and among your flock you shall set apart as holy to YHWH your God; you shall not work with the firstborn of your ox, and you shall not shear the firstborn of your flock.
Where the English smooths the original
recognise them as the property of Jehovah by not using them for ordinary purposes.
The root meaning is to break ; and bekôr is defined ( Exodus 13:2 ; Exodus 34:19 ) as that which openeth , or cleaveth, the womb .Cambridge ties the firstling law to the Exodus passover; the work's title field in voices_raw is given as a dash.
they were not to use the first-born animals which were sanctified to the Lord for their own earthly purposes, but to offer them year by year as sacrifices to the Lord, and consume them in sacrificial meals.
these belonged to God, and were not to be put to any vulgar uses of menPulpit's note covers the whole pericope (vv. 19-23); excerpted here on the prohibition of common use.
devoting ourselves and the first of our time and strength to God; and using all our comforts and enjoyments to his praiseHenry's note is keyed to the whole pericope 15:19-23.
20Each year you and your household are to eat it before the LORD your God in the place the LORD will choose.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
šā·nāh ḇə·šā·nāh ’at·tāh ū·ḇê·ṯe·ḵā ṯō·ḵă·len·nū lip̄·nê Yah·weh ’ĕ·lō·he·ḵā bam·mā·qō·wm ’ă·šer- Yah·weh yiḇ·ḥar
Literal — word-for-word from the original
Year by year you shall eat it before the face of YHWH your God, in the place that YHWH will choose — you and your household.
Where the English smooths the original
year by year ] At one of the feasts, probably the Passover, hence the place of this law of firstlings; in D immediately before that on the Passover
the same person who was forbidden to work with these, Deu 15:19 , is here commanded to eat themPoole reads the eater as the lay Israelite, not only the priest.
This connects the eating of the firstlings with the “second” tithe ( Deuteronomy 14:23 )
in the solemn feasts, which returned upon them every yearBenson's note treats vv. 19-20 together; his comment on 'year by year' is keyed to the 15:19 page in voices_raw.
21But if an animal has a defect, is lame or blind, or has any serious flaw, you must not sacrifice it to the LORD your God.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
wə·ḵî- yih·yeh ḇōw mūm pis·sê·aḥ ’ōw ‘iw·wêr kōl rā‘ mūm lō ṯiz·bā·ḥen·nū Yah·weh ’ĕ·lō·he·ḵā
Literal — word-for-word from the original
But if there is in it a defect — lame or blind, any grievous defect — you shall not sacrifice it to YHWH your God.
Where the English smooths the original
blemishes in any beast made it unfit for sacrifices which were required; and so all peace offerings, vows, and freewill offerings, were to be free from any, Leviticus 22:19 , such were not fit for an holy sacrifice or an holy feast.
Thou shalt not sacrifice it , i.e. at the one altar where alone sacrifice was now lawful
if it be lame, or blind, or have any ill blemish, thou shalt not sacrifice it unto the LORD thy God.
22Eat it within your gates; both the ceremonially unclean and clean may eat it as they would a gazelle or a deer.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
tō·ḵă·len·nū biš·‘ā·re·ḵā yaḥ·dāw haṭ·ṭā·mê wə·haṭ·ṭā·hō·wr kaṣ·ṣə·ḇî wə·ḵā·’ay·yāl
Literal — word-for-word from the original
Within your gates you shall eat it — the unclean and the clean together — like the gazelle and like the deer.
Where the English smooths the original
Though it might not be sacrificed, nor eaten as an eucharistic feast at Jerusalem, it might be eaten as common food in their own houses
Thou shalt eat it within thy gates ] as an ordinary meal without rites
You will eat them, as well as the roe buck and other wild beasts.Geneva's marginal gloss (h/i marks omitted as in voices_raw).
23But you must not eat the blood; pour it on the ground like water.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
raq ’eṯ- lō ṯō·ḵêl dā·mōw tiš·pə·ḵen·nū ‘al- hā·’ā·reṣ kam·mā·yim
Literal — word-for-word from the original
Only its blood you shall not eat; on the ground you shall pour it out like water.
Where the English smooths the original
Only thou shalt not eat the blood thereof,.... Of the firstling: thou shalt pour it upon the ground as water
Only thou shalt not eat the blood thereof; thou shalt pour it upon the ground as water.
using all our comforts and enjoyments to his praise, and under the direction of his law, as we have them all by his gift.Henry's pericope note (15:19-23) read forward to the closing blood-clause.
The verse-by-verse work is done. What follows gathers the whole unit. All three layers below are machine-generated (⚙). Weigh them; they have no authority.
AI synthesis — woven from the public-domain voices above and the original text; generated and fallible.
The law opens with a verb of holiness: taqdîš, the Hifil of qâdash — 'you shall make holy.' Yet Ellicott rightly insists the owner creates nothing; he is only to recognise them as the property of Jehovah by not using them for ordinary purposes.
The firstling is already YHWH's, claimed at the Passover when He spared Israel's firstborn and struck Egypt's. The Cambridge Bible draws this out from the word itself: The root meaning is to break ; and bekôr is defined ( Exodus 13:2 ; Exodus 34:19 ) as that which openeth , or cleaveth, the womb .
The firstborn is the first rupture of life, and as such belongs to the Author of life. Keil & Delitzsch state the practical edge: the Israelites were not to use the first-born animals which were sanctified to the Lord for their own earthly purposes.
No ploughing with the ox, no shearing of the sheep — the most useful animal is withheld from its most useful work, because prior service to God outranks all earthly service.
What is given to God is not lost to the giver; it returns as communion. The firstling is eaten lip̄nê YHWH, 'before the face of YHWH,' year by year
at the chosen place — which Cambridge identifies with the pilgrim feasts, probably the Passover, hence the place of this law of firstlings.
Matthew Poole resolves the apparent tension over who eats: the same person who was forbidden to work with these, Deu 15:19 , is here commanded to eat them.
The lay Israelite who surrendered the animal sits at table with it in God's presence. Ellicott situates the meal within the larger economy of Deuteronomy's tithes, noting it connects the eating of the firstlings with the “second” tithe ( Deuteronomy 14:23 ).
Surrender and joy are one motion: devotion becomes festival.
Now the qualification: the firstling holy by birth is barred from the altar if it bears a mûm, a defect named twice and modified as ra‘ — an evil blemish. Gill grounds it in the wider sacrificial code: blemishes in any beast made it unfit for sacrifices which were required; and so all peace offerings, vows, and freewill offerings, were to be free from any, Leviticus 22:19 , such were not fit for an holy sacrifice or an holy feast.
Cambridge specifies the reason it must not be sacrificed: i.e. at the one altar where alone sacrifice was now lawful.
But the animal is not wasted — it is desacralized. Gill again: Though it might not be sacrificed, nor eaten as an eucharistic feast at Jerusalem, it might be eaten as common food in their own houses,
and Cambridge calls this eating an ordinary meal without rites,
shared by unclean and clean alike, classed with the wild gazelle and deer. The Verifier confirms the verbal density here: the rare words pissêach (lame, H6455, 13×), ‘ivvêr (blind, H5787, 23×) and mûm (H3971, 19×) bind this verse tightly to Leviticus 21:18 and Malachi 1:8.
Liberty with the meat runs straight into a single immovable wall: raq — 'only.' The blood is never eaten. Gill points the reader to the parallel commands: Only thou shalt not eat the blood thereof,.... Of the firstling: thou shalt pour it upon the ground as water.
Even when the firstling has been lowered to common food, its dâm keeps a sanctity nothing relaxes, for the life is in the blood. Matthew Henry, reading the whole pericope toward its gospel sense, gathers the unit into a single posture: using all our comforts and enjoyments to his praise, and under the direction of his law, as we have them all by his gift.
Read whole, the firstling law is a parable of belonging. The first-broken-open of every womb is God's before its owner can lift a finger to it — and the law's whole burden is to keep the owner from quietly skimming what is already not his: a furrow ploughed, a fleece shorn, a profit taken. Yet the God who claims the firstling does not hoard it; He gives it back as a feast eaten before His face. The blemish-clause guards the altar's holiness — only the whole may represent the worshiper before the Holy One — while mercifully refusing to waste the maimed animal, releasing it to the common table. And over the whole stands the blood, poured out, never consumed: the one thing that even desacralized life may not surrender to human appetite, because life answers to God alone. The pattern is the gospel pattern in miniature — what is wholly God's is given wholly back, and the blood is reserved unto Him.
The firstborn was holy before its owner could touch it — and holiness, it turns out, is something God gives back as a feast. (A reading, not a verse.)
AI-generated connections. Each carries a verification badge with a recorded basis; contested links are flagged.
Deuteronomy 15:21's catalogue of disqualifying defects — lame, blind, any evil blemish — restates the priestly standard for sacrificial animals. The Verifier records a verbal link on rare shared lexemes: pissêach (lame, H6455, in 13 verses), ‘ivvêr (blind, H5787, in 23 verses), and mûm (blemish, H3971, in 19 verses), all three present in Leviticus 21:18's parallel list of bodily defects that bar a priest from approaching the altar. The same words that disqualify a victim disqualify a mediator: both the offering and the one who offers must be without blemish.
Deuteronomy 15:21 · Leviticus 21:18
basis: rare shared Strong's lexemes: H6455 piççêach (13 vv), H3971 mʼûwm (19 vv), H5787 ʻivvêr (23 vv) — low-frequency verbal overlap
Malachi 1:8 arraigns a corrupted priesthood for doing precisely what Deuteronomy 15:21 forbids: 'when you offer the blind (‘ivvêr) for sacrifice (zâbach), is it not evil (ra‘)? ... when you offer the lame (pissêach)...' The Verifier confirms the basis on rare shared lexemes pissêach (H6455, 13 vv) and ‘ivvêr (H5787, 23 vv), with the sacrifice-verb zâbach (H2076) and the word ra‘ (H7451, 'evil') shared as well — and notably Malachi pairs ra‘ with the maimed offering exactly as 15:21 names a ra‘ mûm. The rare-word density warrants a verbal tier. We do not claim Malachi cites this verse to the exclusion of its parallels (the unblemished-victim standard runs through Leviticus 22 as well); the honest claim is that Malachi prosecutes the abuse in the cultic vocabulary this law shares.
Deuteronomy 15:21 · Malachi 1:8
basis: rare shared Strong's lexemes H6455 piççêach (13 vv) + H5787 ʻivvêr (23 vv), with H2076 zâbach + H7451 raʻ — low-frequency verbal overlap; recorded as verbal on the rare words, not as a claim that Malachi cites Deut 15:21 over its Leviticus parallel
The blemished firstling is permitted as ordinary food 'like the gazelle (tsᵉbî) and like the deer (ʼayyâl).' This is Deuteronomy's own standing formula for non-sacrificial slaughter, set out in Deuteronomy 12:15 and 12:22. The Verifier records shared lexemes ʼayyâl (deer, H354, in only 11 verses), tsᵉbî (gazelle, H6643, 32 vv), and the clean/unclean pair ṭâhôwr (H2889) / ṭâmê (H2931) — the rare word ʼayyâl giving the link real verbal weight. The cross-reference is internal to Deuteronomy's coherent system of sacred versus common eating.
Deuteronomy 15:22 · Deuteronomy 12:15 · Deuteronomy 12:22
basis: rare shared Strong's lexeme H354 ʼayâl (11 vv) plus H6643 tsᵉbîy, H2889 ṭâhôwr, H2931 ṭâmêʼ — Deuteronomy's fixed profane-slaughter formula
'Every firstborn you shall set apart to YHWH' (15:19) repeats the foundational command of Exodus 13:2, 12. The Verifier records the link on bᵉkôwr (firstborn, H1060, in 100 verses) and qâdash (sanctify, H6942, 152 vv) — neither rare, so the basis is the shared motif and command rather than a quotation of distinctive vocabulary. Deuteronomy adapts the older Passover law to its central-sanctuary world: same claim on the firstborn, new place of offering.
Deuteronomy 15:19 · Exodus 13:2 · Exodus 13:12
basis: shared Strong's lexemes H1060 bᵉkôwr (100 vv) + H6942 qâdash (152 vv); both common, so a shared command/motif rather than a rare-word quotation
The disqualifying defect of 15:21, pissêach (lame, H6455), reappears in Isaiah 35:6: 'then shall the lame man leap like a deer (ʼayyâl).' The Verifier returns only the rare word pissêach plus the common conjunction kîy as shared, yielding a structural/thematic tier, not verbal quotation: Isaiah does not cite the firstling law, but the same lameness that bars an animal from the altar becomes, in the messianic age, the very thing God heals. The blemish that excludes is the brokenness redemption answers.
Deuteronomy 15:21 · Isaiah 35:6
basis: shared Strong's lexeme H6455 piççêach (13 vv) only; no quotation claim — a thematic reversal of the disqualifying defect, not a verbal citation
The same paired defects that disqualify a firstling from the altar — pissêach (lame, H6455) and ‘ivvêr (blind, H5787) — recur together in David's capture of Jebus: 'the blind and the lame shall not come into the house' (2 Samuel 5:8). The Verifier confirms both rare words are shared (13 vv and 23 vv), but no quotation is claimed: the narrative is not citing the cultic law, and the motif runs the opposite direction (excluding persons rather than victims). It is the same symbolic logic — bodily wholeness as the condition of access to a holy place — surfacing in a different register, so the tier is structural/thematic, not verbal. The note on v. 21 already records 2 Samuel's saying; the link is recorded here as a thread because both disqualifying lexemes overlap.
Deuteronomy 15:21 · 2 Samuel 5:8
basis: rare shared Strong's lexemes H6455 piççêach (13 vv) + H5787 ʻivvêr (23 vv); but no quotation/citation — a shared symbolic motif (defect barring access to the holy), tiered down from verbal because the direction and genre differ
AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.
The firstling that is wholly God's, set apart and offered, prefigures Him whom the New Testament calls 'the firstborn (prōtotokos) of all creation' and 'the firstborn from the dead' (Colossians 1:15, 18). Luke records the Christ-child himself presented under the firstborn law: 'every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord' (Luke 2:23), the same bᵉkôwr / qâdash logic of Deuteronomy 15:19 enacted upon the infant Jesus. This is a Greek↔Hebrew connection of pattern, not of shared Strong's numbers, so it is read typologically and not as a verbal quotation. The figure is ancient: the firstborn devoted to God finds its fulfillment in the Son devoted wholly to the Father.
Deuteronomy 15:19 · Luke 2:23 · Colossians 1:15
The blemish-clause (15:21) — only the unblemished may be offered — is the Old Testament's insistent rehearsal of the standard the New Testament applies to Christ: 'a lamb without blemish and without spot' (1 Peter 1:19), who 'through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God' (Hebrews 9:14). The firstling rejected for a mûm throws the unblemished Victim into relief: the offering must be whole because it stands in for sinners who are not. As a cross-Testament reading this is typological — Greek text, no shared Hebrew lexeme — and it is the historic Christian reading of the sacrificial defect-laws, not a novel claim.
Deuteronomy 15:21 · 1 Peter 1:19 · Hebrews 9:14
'You must not eat the blood; pour it on the ground like water' (15:23). The blood reserved unto God, never to human appetite, anticipates the blood of Christ 'poured out for many for the remission of sins' (Matthew 26:28) — the one blood that is not poured uselessly to the earth but received by God as atonement. Where the firstling's blood is surrendered as common as water, the Messiah's blood is poured out as precious beyond price. This is a typological reading across Testaments (no shared Strong's number between the Hebrew dâm and the Greek haima); the figure of blood-reserved-to-God fulfilled at the cross is widely held in the church's reading of the blood prohibition.
Deuteronomy 15:23 · Matthew 26:28
The biblical text is the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain (CC0). Hebrew/Greek text, transliteration, morphology and Strong’s are transcribed from the Berean interlinear (CC0) + Strong’s lexicons (PD); the literal renderings, divergence notes, word notes and all synthesis are this tool’s own work (⚙) — fallible; verify them.
Named voices, quoted verbatim from public-domain works:
This unit is Hebrew-only (Deuteronomy 15:19-23), so every thread-basis rests on shared Strong's lexemes within the Hebrew canon; the Verifier's frequency counts are reported with each badge so the reader can weigh rarity. The strongest links (Leviticus 21:18, Malachi 1:8, 2 Samuel 5:8) turn on genuinely rare words — pissêach (13 vv), mûm (19 vv), ‘ivvêr (23 vv). Leviticus 21:18 and the Malachi indictment are tiered verbal on that rare-word density; we expressly decline to claim Malachi cites Deuteronomy 15:21 over its Leviticus 22 parallel, recording only that he prosecutes the abuse in the law's shared cultic vocabulary. The 2 Samuel 5:8 link, though it shares both rare defect-words, is tiered down to structural/thematic because the saying makes no citation and runs the motif in the opposite direction (barring persons, not victims). The Deuteronomy 12 links (gazelle/deer benchmark) rest on the rare word ʼayyâl (11 vv) within one coherent code, so verbal stands. The Isaiah 35:6 link is structural/thematic: one rare word shared, no citation, a thematic reversal. All three Christ readings are cross-Testament (Greek↔Hebrew): by rule these cannot claim 'verbal' tier on Strong's numbers and are presented as typological, each labeled with the church's historic attestation. Cambridge and Pulpit carry a dash for their 'work' field in voices_raw; we render Cambridge's title as 'Commentary' and Pulpit's editors as given, flagging the substitution in editorial notes. Several voices_raw entries (Henry, Barnes, JFB, Keil) repeat one block-comment across all five verses; we excerpt each where most apposite rather than five times over, and have diversified the under-used voices (Pulpit on v. 19, Benson on v. 20) so the pericope is not carried by two or three commentators. No NT-quotation provenance in this unit is disputed, so no thread is flagged 'verify source'; this Deuteronomy unit does not contain 1:5, so the Joshua 1:5 → Hebrews 13:5 rule does not apply.
✦ = human, public-domain source, quoted and named. ⚙ = machine synthesis, to be verified. Flagged cross-references are left visible on purpose — the verifier working in the open. “Search the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts 17:11)