To be FREE, clear, exempt from guilt or penalty — a legal-forensic word, not an emotional one. This translation has already used it three times without naming it: the sotah ordeal’s own acquittal formula turns on it twice (Numbers 5:19, ‘be free from this water of bitterness’, and v28, ‘she shall be free’) and the husband’s parallel exemption at v31, ‘the man shall be free from iniquity’. ⭐ Numbers 32:22 puts the SAME word to a new kind of use: not an individual woman’s ritual verdict but Reuben and Gad’s whole tribal standing, pronounced in the plural and doubled — ‘you shall be free before Jehovah, and before Israel’, one acquittal for a divine audience and one for a national one. ⚠ The condition is symmetrical with the sotah’s: a status is named in advance, contingent on a fact that cannot yet be checked — whether every armed man actually crosses, the same way the water cannot yet know whether the woman actually strayed. → first discussed at Num 32:22