What Does 1 Kings 11:27 Mean?
And this was the word that he lifted up his hand against the king. Solomon built Millo, and repaired the breach of the city of David his father.
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 this was the cause that he lifted up his hand against the king: Solomon built Millo, and repaired the breaches of the city of David his father.THE KEY
A breach can be closed in the wall while rebellion breaks through in the city’s human order.
THE MEANING
The verse places a hand raised against the king beside the building of Millo and the closing of David’s city breach. The stonework is being filled and sealed while opposition remains active in the same scene. For the reader now, it shows that visible reinforcement and relational wholeness are not the same condition.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A visible repair does not prove that the conflict beneath it has been resolved.
THE ROOT
פֶּרֶץ
perets
GROWS FROM
פרץ
parats
Break through, burst forth.
The Hebrew noun פֶּרֶץ (perets, “breach”) carries the force of something breaking through a boundary. The opening is not just a gap in the city; its root evokes an active rupture.
ALSO GROWS
parats: To break through, burst out.
פָּרַץ
The verb names the force that makes a breach, so the city’s opening carries the sense of a boundary being broken through.
pritsah: A breach, breaking through.
פְּרִיצָה
This related noun names the rupture itself, keeping the opening connected to the act of breaking through.
מִלּוֹא
millo
GROWS FROM
מלא
male
Be full, fill.
Millo’s name belongs to the language of filling. Beside the breach, it gives the construction scene a paired movement: filling and sealing what is open.
ALSO GROWS
male: To be full; to be filled.
מָלֵא
This verb’s sense of filling illuminates the name Millo as a structure associated with fill.
melo: Fullness; full measure.
מְלֹא
The language of fullness sits beside the breach, making the building work part of a picture of filling what is lacking.
סָגַר
sagar
GROWS FROM
סגר
sagar
Shut, close.
“repaired” in this verse is sagar. The Hebrew verb סָגַר (sagar, “shut, close”) gives the repair a clear image of sealing an opening. That closure stands beside the raised hand against the king, so the city’s physical boundary and its human conflict remain in view together.
ALSO GROWS
sagur: Closed, shut.
סָגוּר
This form makes the closure implied by the repair visible: the breach is shut.
misgeret: Frame, enclosure.
מִסְגֶּרֶת
This related word names a bounded frame, extending the root’s image of closing and containing.
THE PATTERN
A community’s condition is exposed by what it builds, what it repairs, and which barriers it removes.
A Song of degrees for Solomon. Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders toil in emptiness. Unless the LORD guards the city, the watchman stays awake in emptiness.Those who come from you shall build the dry ruins of the ages. You shall raise up the foundations of generation to generation, and you shall be called the mender of the breach, the one who turns the paths back to dwell in.For he is our wholeness, the one who made both one and loosed the middle wall of the fence.THE THREAD
Those who come from you shall build the dry ruins of the ages. You shall raise up the foundations of generation to generation, and you shall be called the mender of the breach, the one who turns the paths back to dwell in.Isaiah uses the same word, פֶּרֶץ (perets), for the breach a community repairs. The shared root carries this verse’s city opening into a living image of communal repair.
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