What Does 1 Chronicles 5:26 Mean?
And the God of Israel roused the breath of Pul, king of Assyria, and the breath of Tiglath-pileser, king of Assyria, and he stripped them bare, the Reubenites, and the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh, and brought them to Halah, and Habor, and Hara, and to the river Gozan, until this day.
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 the God of Israel stirred up the spirit of Pul king of Assyria, and the spirit of Tilgath-pilneser king of Assyria, and he carried them away, even the Reubenites, and the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh, and brought them unto Halah, and Habor, and Hara, and to the river Gozan, unto this day.THE KEY
The breath stirred within a ruler becomes a force that can uproot entire peoples.
THE MEANING
This verse meets you with a hard truth: the breath moving through rulers can be stirred into decisions that uproot whole peoples. It names the displaced tribes and their destinations, keeping exile visible instead of letting it blur into an abstraction.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the assumption that a movement stirred by God must feel like rescue to the people caught in it. Here, the stirred rulers’ action carries whole tribes into exile.
THE ROOT
וַיָּעַר
wayyaʿar
GROWS FROM
עור
To wake or rouse.
“roused” in this verse is wayyaʿar. The verb comes from עוּר (ʿûr, to wake or rouse): the verse portrays political force as an awakening, not as momentum arising on its own. What is awakened is the rulers’ רוּחַ (rûaḥ, breath), so an inward stirring becomes mass displacement.
ALSO GROWS
ʿûr: Awake; wake up.
עוּר
This basic form shows the waking at the heart of the verb translated “stirred up.”
hēʿîr: Awaken; rouse.
הֵעִיר
This causative form makes the act of bringing someone into motion explicit.
רוּחַ
rûaḥ
GROWS FROM
רוח
Moving air: wind or breath, and by extension an inner disposition or impulse.
רוּחַ (rûaḥ, breath) is the same word that can mean wind and inner impulse. The verse keeps those senses together: the rulers’ inward movement is described with the word for moving air and living breath.
ALSO GROWS
rûaḥ: Wind.
רוּחַ
The word names air moving around a person, keeping movement central to the verse’s image.
rûaḥ: Breath.
רוּחַ
The same word names air moving within a living body, giving the rulers’ inward impulse a concrete, living sense.
וַיַּגְלֵם
wayyaglem
GROWS FROM
גלה
To uncover or reveal; in a causative form, to exile or deport.
“stripped them bare” in this verse is wayyaglem. The verb belongs to the גלה (gālāh, uncover or go into exile) family; here it means to carry people into exile. The same family holds both exposure and removal, as a people is displaced from its land and made visible in the places named here.
ALSO GROWS
gālāh: Uncover; reveal.
גָּלָה
This form shows the root’s sense of exposure, a shade that resonates with being removed from the place that held a people.
higlâ: Exile; deport.
הִגְלָה
This causative form shares the root’s consonants and names the act of sending people away into exile.
THE PATTERN
An inward movement awakened by God can enter public power and move entire peoples.
Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD through the mouth of Jeremiah might be filled, the LORD roused the breath of Cyrus king of Persia, and he caused a voice to cross through all his kingdom, and also in writing, saying,Polish the arrows; fill the quivers. The LORD has roused the breath of the kings of the Medes, for his purpose is against Babylon, to ruin it, because it is the LORD'S vengeance, the vengeance of his temple.For it is God who works in you, both to will and to do, for the sake of his good pleasure.THE THREAD
Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD through the mouth of Jeremiah might be filled, the LORD roused the breath of Cyrus king of Persia, and he caused a voice to cross through all his kingdom, and also in writing, saying,Ezra uses the same Hebrew root עור (ʿ-w-r, to rouse) beside the same word רוּחַ (rûaḥ, breath). In 1 Chronicles, the rulers’ awakened breath carries the tribes into exile; in Ezra, Cyrus’s awakened breath begins their return.
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