TO FORGIVE, pardon — and in the Hebrew Bible it has only ever had one subject. People forgive one another with other verbs (nasa, to lift; kipper, to cover); salach is what God does. Its great moment is Numbers 14:20, two words long — salachti kidvarekha, 'I have forgiven, according to your word' — answering Moses' selach-na of v19 with the perfect tense rather than a promise. ⚠ And the very next word is ve-ulam, 'but': the sentence on the generation follows in the same speech. Whatever the verb grants, it did not cancel the consequence. The noun selichot, 'forgivenesses', gives its name to the Jewish penitential prayers, and Nehemiah 9:17 (not yet on these pages) calls God 'a God of selichot' in the middle of a prayer retelling this very chapter. → first discussed at Num 14:20