TO BREAK THE NECK — a narrow, physical verb, and the Torah keeps it for animals killed OUTSIDE the sacrificial system. Exodus 13:13 and Exodus 34:20 (both already on these pages) use it of the firstborn donkey that its owner declines to redeem with a lamb: an unclean animal that cannot be offered and may not simply be kept, so its neck is broken. ⭐ Deuteronomy 21:4 does the same to a heifer, in a valley, for an unsolved murder — which is one reason that rite is not a sacrifice: no knife, no blood caught, nothing burned, nothing eaten. Isaiah 66:3 (not yet on these pages) confirms the register from the other direction by putting neck-breaking in a list of parodied worship, one who sacrifices a lamb is as one who breaks a dog’s neck. ⚠ The same three consonants also spell oref, the nape — the noun inside every ‘stiff-necked people’ in the Torah — and at Deuteronomy 32:2 a homonym meaning to drip, so the hits have to be read rather than counted. → first discussed at Deut 21:4