What Does 1 Chronicles 21:18 Mean?
Then the messenger of the LORD commanded Gad to say to David, that David should go up and raise an altar to the LORD on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.
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
Then the angel of the LORD commanded Gad to say to David, that David should go up, and set up an altar unto the LORD in the threshingfloor of Ornan the Jebusite.THE KEY
The command to “go up” shares its Hebrew root with the burnt offering, the thing that rises, so David’s ascent already echoes the altar’s upward movement.
THE MEANING
David is directed to a particular threshing floor, where an altar is to be established. A place where grain is separated becomes a place of approach to the LORD; separation is not the end of what can happen there.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that a place of separation can hold only loss: here, that very ground receives an altar.
THE ROOT
לַעֲלוֹת
laʿalot
GROWS FROM
עלה
ʿ-l-h
to rise, ascend, or go up
The command to go up shares its root with עֹלָה (ʿolah), a burnt offering, literally, that which rises. English separates David’s ascent from the offering associated with the altar, while Hebrew lets both echo the movement of rising.
ALSO GROWS
ʿolah: burnt offering; that which rises
עֹלָה
Its shared root makes the upward movement toward the altar resonate with the rising offering.
maʿalah: ascent, step, or degree
מַעֲלָה
This branch carries the same root into the idea of a rising path or level, widening “go up” beyond a single physical movement.
מִזְבֵּחַ
mizbēaḥ
GROWS FROM
זבח
z-b-ḥ
to slaughter or offer sacrifice
The altar’s name grows from the act of sacrifice, so the verse prepares a place for offering rather than setting up an abstract sacred marker. At a threshing floor, where grain is separated from its stalk, the root places the altar’s act of giving over beside another kind of separation.
ALSO GROWS
zevaḥ: sacrifice
זֶבַח
This noun names what is offered at the mizbeach, joining the altar to the act it receives.
zōvēaḥ: one who sacrifices; sacrificing
זֹבֵחַ
This active form names the person performing the act, showing the root moving from the offering place to the one who offers.
THE PATTERN
An altar turns a place of offering into a meeting point where God comes near.
And they came to the place of which God had said to him, and Abraham built the altar there, and arranged the wood, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.You shall make an altar of soil for me, and upon it you shall slaughter your rising offerings and your wholeness offerings, your sheep and your herd. In every place where I cause my name to be remembered, I will come to you, and I will bless you.You also, as living stones, are built up into a house of breath, a set-apart priesthood, to carry up sacrifices of breath, well received by God through Jesus, the Anointed One.THE THREAD
Then Solomon began to build the house of the LORD at Jerusalem, in Mount Moriah, where the LORD was seen by David his father, in the place David had set firm on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.This verse names the threshing floor as the ground where the house of the LORD is built. The altar commanded there opens into architecture: the same place of separation becomes a place of dwelling.
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