What Does 1 Chronicles 17:21 Mean?
And who is like your people Israel, one nation on the earth, whom God went to ransom as a people for himself, to set for you a name of greatness and awe, by driving out nations from before your people, whom you ransomed out of Egypt?
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And what one nation in the earth is like thy people Israel, whom God went to redeem to be his own people, to make thee a name of greatness and terribleness, by driving out nations from before thy people, whom thou hast redeemed out of Egypt?THE KEY
The space that makes Israel “God’s own people” is created, in this verse, by driving other peoples out.
THE MEANING
The verse presents belonging as territorial: Israel is redeemed from Egypt and made God’s own as other nations are driven away. Its claim of greatness holds rescue and coercion together; the deliverance does not erase those displaced by it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the idea that deliverance is always gentle or that one community’s rescue is unrelated to another community’s loss of land.
THE ROOT
לְגָרֵשׁ
legarēsh
GROWS FROM
גרש
garash (גרש): to drive away, expel.
“driving out” in this verse is legarēsh. The Hebrew root garash (גרש) names forceful expulsion, not an abstract clearing away. Its branches keep the people driven out within the meaning of the verse, where redemption and displacement are joined.
ALSO GROWS
gerush: expulsion; divorce
גֵּרוּשׁ
The noun preserves the root’s sense of separation by force, sharpening what “driving out” entails.
megorash: driven out; expelled
מְגֹרָשׁ
This passive form names the people on the receiving end of the action described in the verse.
גְּדֻלָּה
gedullah
GROWS FROM
גדל
gadal (גדל): to grow, become great, or enlarge.
The greatness made for David’s name belongs to the grow-and-enlarge family of גדל. The verse presents that greatness as something God brings about amid the making and unmaking of peoples’ place.
ALSO GROWS
gadol: great; large
גָּדוֹל
This adjective shares the root’s sense of size or stature, giving “greatness” a quality that can be seen and recognized.
higdil: made great; magnified
הִגְדִּיל
This causative form echoes the verse’s claim that God makes the name great.
מִצְרַיִם
Mitsrayim
GROWS FROM
צר
tsar (צר): narrow, constricted.
“Egypt” in this verse is Mitsrayim. Mitsrayim (מִצְרַיִם) carries the sound of tsar (צר), narrowness: the verse names a people’s departure from constriction and, at the same time, the expulsion that makes room for them. The movement toward spaciousness here does not conceal the force used to create it.
ALSO GROWS
metzar: strait; narrow place
מֵצַר
This word makes the connection between Egypt’s name and constricted space audible.
tsarah: distress; trouble
צָרָה
It extends the family’s image of narrowness into the pressure and distress from which deliverance brings a people out.
THE PATTERN
In this scriptural pattern, deliverance establishes a people by bringing them into space through the removal of others.
And I have come down to snatch them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land into a good and wide land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.He drove out the nations before them, and let an inheritance fall to them by the measuring cord, and settled the tribes of Israel in their tents.And when he had pulled down seven nations in the land of Canaan, he divided their land to them by lot.THE THREAD
By small measures I will drive them out from before you, until you are fruitful and take hold of the land.“Drive them out” repeats the Hebrew root garash (גרש) from this verse. Exodus adds a sequence, expulsion happens “by little and little” as the people increase and inherit, making the process explicit without softening its force.
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