To be pure (physical sound, clear, unadulterated; Levitically, uncontaminated; morally, innocent or holy)
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The Hebrew verb ṭāhēr carries a range that no single English word fully captures: it means to be pure, to be clean, to be declared clean, and to cleanse. It moves across three registers simultaneously — the physical (clean water, clean animals, clean skin), the ritual (the priestly adjudication of what is fit for approach to God), and the moral (the heart washed of its guilt and aligned with God's own holiness).
Reader summary
Full entry for טָהֵר (H2891) · Open the biblical lexicon
The Hebrew verb ṭāhēr carries a range that no single English word fully captures: it means to be pure, to be clean, to be declared clean, and to cleanse. It moves across three registers simultaneously — the physical (clean water, clean animals, clean skin), the ritual (the priestly adjudication of what is fit for approach to God), and the moral (the heart.
The BSB source-word alignment has 94 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include of the one to be cleansed (6), and you will be clean (4), clean (4), to cleanse (4), and he will be clean (3).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Genesis 35:2. Its strongest book concentrations include Leviticus (43), Ezekiel (12), Numbers (10), 2 Chronicles (7).
This entry includes 2 verse guides that explain exact original-language forms in context.
The Hebrew verb ṭāhēr carries a range that no single English word fully captures: it means to be pure, to be clean, to be declared clean, and to cleanse. It moves across three registers simultaneously — the physical (clean water, clean animals, clean skin), the ritual (the priestly adjudication of what is fit for approach to God), and the moral (the heart washed of its guilt and aligned with God's own holiness).
That triple range is not accidental. Israel's Levitical system used physical cleanness as a visible grammar for the invisible reality of standing before a holy God. When David cries to be purified with hyssop (Ps. 51:7), he is reaching for temple-ritual language to describe what he needs inwardly — not soap, but the mercy that only God can apply. The verb appears in the great Sinai narrative, in the prophetic vision of Ezekiel, and in the Levitical law of Yom Kippur, often converging on the same theological center: God himself is the one who makes clean.
No act of self-purification can replace divine cleansing; what ṭāhēr announces in its highest register is the divine act of cleansing that restores a person or a people to covenant standing. The New Testament hears this verb speaking through the rituals and finds its fulfillment in the blood of the new covenant and the sanctifying work of the Spirit.
ṭāhēr appears roughly 95 times in the Hebrew Bible, concentrated in Leviticus, Numbers, and the Psalms. Its ritual home is the priestly literature of the Pentateuch, where it governs the status of persons, objects, and spaces in relation to the sanctuary. Its prophetic deployment — especially in Ezekiel and the lament psalms — lifts that ritual grammar into the register of covenant restoration and inner renewal.
Because on this day atonement will be made for you to cleanse you, and you will be clean from all your sins before the Lord.
The Day of Atonement text places ṭāhēr at the centre of Israel's annual liturgical calendar. Cleanness here is not achieved by Israel's effort but declared over them through the high-priestly ritual — atonement precedes cleanness, and both are Yahweh's gift. This is the most important occurrence for understanding the word's theological weight in the Law.
Wash me clean of my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.
David's penitential psalm deploys ṭāhēr as a plea addressed directly to God, not to a priest. This shifts the verb from its cultic setting into a prayer register, revealing that Israel understood ritual purity as pointing toward something God does in the conscience, not merely in the ceremony. The Psalm drives the verb toward its deepest possible meaning.
Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
Hyssop was the instrument of Levitical sprinkling (Lev. 14:4, 6; Num. 19:18). David invokes the ritual implements of cleansing not as a request for a ceremony but as metaphor for what God alone can do — a moral and spiritual laundering that exceeds any temple rite. The hyperbole 'whiter than snow' signals the complete sufficiency of divine cleansing.
I will also sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and all your idols.
Ezekiel's new-covenant vision places ṭāhēr in a passage of eschatological restoration. The divine 'I will cleanse you' is paired with the gift of a new heart and a new spirit (36:26), demonstrating that in the prophets, ritual cleanness language becomes the vehicle for announcing the inward transformation that God promises to accomplish for exiled Israel.
He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear deceitfully.
The entrance liturgy of Psalm 24 bridges the outer and inner dimensions of ṭāhēr: clean hands (ritual, behavioral) and a pure heart (moral, dispositional) are named together as the qualification for ascending to Yahweh's hill. The word here shows that Israel never understood ritual purity as a substitute for moral integrity — both are required of those who draw near to God.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Verse-level guides showing how this original-language form works in its specific context, including grammar, verse function, and guarded interpretation.
Hebrew word. Ranges from physical cleansing through ritual purity to moral innocence; fundamentally means freedom from contamination.
Ranges from physical cleansing through ritual purity to moral innocence; fundamentally means freedom from contamination.
to be pure (physical sound, clear, unadulterated; Levitically, uncontaminated; morally, innocent or holy) BDB: be clean Usage: be (make, make self, pronounce) clean, cleanse (self), purge, purify(-ier, self).
How the stem changes the meaning of this verb across the biblical text.
This verb appears through different tense, voice, mood, or stem patterns. Those forms help readers see how the action is presented in context.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 2 selected witnesses from 95 lexical occurrence verses.
טָהֵר is a primitive root - no further derivation.
The final purification emphasizes restored covenant holiness. Nehemiah 13:23-31
Purification restores holiness and rightful worship after corruption. Nehemiah 13:4-9
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
ṭāhēr announces that cleanness before God is not a state we maintain but a condition he grants. Every ritual use of the word in the Levitical code trained Israel to see a truth they could not generate on their own: approach to a holy God requires a purity that only God himself can supply. The preacher who traces this word discovers that the sacrificial system was never a technology for self-purification — it was a school of dependence, teaching each generation that God must cleanse what humanity has soiled.
When Ezekiel 36 lifts this word into the prophetic horizon, the ritual becomes a promise: God will do for a defiled people what they cannot do for themselves, washing them from idolatry and giving them a new heart. The New Testament hears Ezekiel 36 in the background of Spirit-baptism, and the Letter to the Hebrews presents the blood of Christ as accomplishing the real cleansing that the Levitical sprinklings signified.
For the preacher, ṭāhēr is an invitation to distinguish between external conformity and genuine purity — not to despise the external but to insist that only inner transformation satisfies the God who looks at the heart.
Lev.16.30
ṭāhēr is a stative and active verb — it can describe being in a state of cleanness or the act of becoming or being made clean. The niphal stem (ṭāhēr) often describes the state; the piel (ṭihēr) often describes the act of cleansing. That grammatical distinction matters pastorally: sometimes Scripture asserts that God's people are clean (stative — a positional truth), and sometimes it commands them to pursue cleanness (factive — an ethical call). Confusing the two readings produces either legalism or passivity.
The Levitical cleanness system that ṭāhēr governs is the typological background for the New Testament's language of purification. The Letter to the Hebrews argues that the blood of bulls and goats could cleanse the flesh (Heb. 9:13) but could not cleanse the conscience — only the blood of Christ accomplishes that inner work (Heb. 9:14). First John 1:9 uses the Greek katharizō in a context unmistakably shaped by ṭāhēr: 'If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to purify us from all unrighteousness.'
The Ezekiel 36 promise of divine sprinkling and inner renewal is picked up in the Johannine and Pauline language of the Spirit's sanctifying work, and Revelation describes the redeemed as those who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7:14) — the final, complete fulfilment of what ṭāhēr always pointed toward.
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