What Does 1 Chronicles 6:81 Mean?
And Heshbon with her pasturelands, and Jazer with her pasturelands.
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 Heshbon with her suburbs, and Jazer with her suburbs.THE KEY
The place word מִגְרָשׁ (migrash, open land around a town) makes each allotment wider than its built center.
THE MEANING
The verse holds each town together with the open land around it: a place to dwell includes room that sustains life beyond its streets. Heshbon and Jazer are named with their surrounding grounds, as complete allotments. The reader’s dwelling, too, has a center and sustaining space around it.
THE ROOT
מִגְרָשֶׁיהָ
migresheha
GROWS FROM
גרש
garash
to drive out, thrust out
“pasturelands” in this verse is migresheha. The word denotes open land around a town, bringing the surrounding ground into the same allotment as the built center. Its wider root family also carries the sense of driving out or removing, making the town’s edge audible in the word for the land around it.
ALSO GROWS
migrash: open land around a town
מִגְרָשׁ
This is the noun behind the repeated phrase and names the ground included with each city.
gerush: expulsion, putting away
גֵּרוּשׁ
This related form shows the root’s force of driving out, while migrash is the established word for a town’s surrounding open land.
חֶשְׁבּוֹן
Heshbon
GROWS FROM
חשב
chashav
to think, calculate, reckon, or devise
Heshbon belongs to the word family of reckoning and calculation. The verse preserves the town’s name in a precise inventory, alongside the surrounding land that belongs with it.
ALSO GROWS
cheshbon: account, calculation, reckoning
חֶשְׁבּוֹן
This is the name’s word family and gives Heshbon the sense of a reckoning or account.
machashavah: thought, plan
מַחֲשָׁבָה
This related word extends the root from reckoning into forming a thought or plan, echoing the verse’s ordered naming of places and their lands.
יַעְזֵר
Jazer
GROWS FROM
עזר
azar
to help, aid, support
Jazer’s name is associated with the root for help and aid. Here the name appears with the town’s surrounding open land, joining the sense of support in the name to the ground allotted with the place.
ALSO GROWS
azar: to help, assist
עָזַר
The root verb gives the name its association with aid.
ezer: help, aid
עֵזֶר
This noun carries the same help-family meaning and makes the name’s association plain.
THE PATTERN
A dwelling allotment includes both the town and the surrounding land that sustains life there.
The cities shall be theirs to settle in, and the pasturelands shall be for their cattle, for their goods, and for all their beasts.Heshbon with her pastures, Jazer with her pastures; all the cities together were four.But the field of the pasturelands of their cities shall not be sold, for it is their holding of the ages.THE THREAD
The cities shall be theirs to settle in, and the pasturelands shall be for their cattle, for their goods, and for all their beasts.The word rendered “suburbs” comes from the same Hebrew root family in both verses. Numbers names what the surrounding land holds, cattle, goods, and beasts, so the brief listing of Heshbon and Jazer opens into a fuller picture of the ground included with a dwelling.
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