A CAMP — from chanah, to pitch, settle, encamp; the ordinary word for an army's or a people's temporary settlement, and for forty years Israel's only address. Numbers 2 (already on these pages) lays it out by standards around the tent of meeting, and Numbers 5:3 says what makes it more than a bivouac: the unclean go outside the camp so they do not defile their camps, in the midst of which I dwell. ⭐ Deuteronomy 23:10–15 is the noun's densest passage, seven times across six verses, and it turns a military camp into a place that must be holy for the same reason: Jehovah your God walks about in the midst of your camp. The law that follows from that is a latrine outside the perimeter and a peg to dig with. ⚠ Outside the camp is where the Torah puts everything that cannot stay inside — Miriam for seven days (Numbers 12:14), the carcass of the sin-offering (Leviticus 16:27), and, at Exodus 33:7, the tent of meeting itself after the calf. ⚠ Jacob gave the word its first theological use: Genesis 32:3, this is God's camp, machaneh Elohim, and the place-name Mahanaim, two camps, comes from it. → first discussed at Deut 23:10