TO BURN, consume — the ordinary verb for a fire eating what it is given. ⭐ In Deuteronomy it hardens into a formula for judicial purging: u-viarta ha-ra mi-kirbecha, ‘you shall burn out the evil from your midst’, which stands in nine verses of the Hebrew Bible, every one of them in this book, beginning at Deuteronomy 13:6 and returning at 17:7, 17:12, 19:19, 21:21, 22:21, 22:22, 22:24 and 24:7, the last of them the kidnapper who traffics in a brother and sells him. ⚠ Whether the fire is actually in it is genuinely disputed: the lexicons separate a second root meaning to graze or sweep bare, which would make the formula ‘you shall sweep the evil out’. The shelf renders the effect and spends the image — KJV ‘put the evil away’, ASV ‘put away the evil’, NWT 1984 ‘clear out what is evil’ — so the uncertainty is invisible in English unless somebody says it out loud. ⭐ Three of those nine verses turn out to be a single chapter: Deuteronomy 22:21, 22:22 and 22:24 close three consecutive sexual cases with the formula, which is the densest concentration of it anywhere in the Bible. Whatever else that chapter's case law is, the book files it under the same heading as apostasy, perjury and the rebellious son. ⭐ Deuteronomy 26:13 (now on these pages) is the one time the verb is used of something holy: I have cleared out the holy portion from the house, bi'arti ha-qodesh — the tithe leaves the house by the same verb a criminal leaves the camp by, and 26:14 uses it a second time, nor have I cleared out any of it while unclean. → first discussed at Deut 13:6