to draw a dividing line between two things: to part them, to tell them apart, or to set one of them aside for a purpose
At its heart this verb draws a line. It takes two things that could run together and keeps each on its own side, or it lifts one thing out of a crowd and reserves it. The line falls in three different places:
- a division in space, as when God parts the light from the dark, or a curtain shuts the innermost room of the tent off from the rest
- a judgment that tells two kinds apart, as when a priest has to know the holy from the common and the clean from the unclean
- a change of standing, as when a tribe, a set of towns, or a whole nation is taken out of the wider group and kept for God
Those are not three separate words but one act seen in three settings, which is why English needs several words to carry the one Hebrew verb.
Much of the Bible's picture of order rests on this word. The creation account is built on it: God separates light from darkness and the waters above from the waters below, so the world becomes livable by being sorted out. Israel's priests are then handed the same verb as their job description. They are to separate the holy from the common and the clean from the unclean, and to teach the people the difference, which makes their daily work a continuation of God's own ordering of the world.
After the exile the word turns inward. The returned community separates itself from the peoples around it and from anything unclean, so the boundary God drew at creation is now drawn by a people around its own life. The same act can also fall on someone from the outside: a man can be singled out for disaster, a person can be put out of the assembly, and a foreigner who has joined himself to the LORD is told he need not fear being counted outside God's people.
Two neighboring words sharpen the sense. To make holy (קָדַשׁ) names the goal the dividing serves, the belonging to God, while this verb names the boundary itself. To part ways (פָּרַד) is about two things drifting off in different directions, with no boundary claimed between them at all.
Nuances
Whether the separation demanded in Ezra and Nehemiah is chiefly a boundary of worship and purity or one of ethnic descent.
- majorityIt is boundary work that constitutes the community's identity, in which purity language does social and ethnic work at the same time, so it cannot be sorted cleanly into one category.; Bob Becking, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Construction of Early Jewish Identity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011)
- minorityHoliness language is used here in an exclusionary sense, so that ethnic identity is being communicated in the form of religious regulation.; Katherine E. Southwood, Ethnicity and the Mixed Marriage Crisis in Ezra 9-10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
- minorityThese chapters preserve only one side of a genuine argument inside the community, so the demand should not be read as the settled view of the period.; Joseph Blenkinsopp, Ezra-Nehemiah: A Commentary, Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988)