What Does 1 Kings 21:28 Mean?
And the word of the LORD came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying,
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 word of the LORD came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying,THE KEY
The LORD’s word is דָּבָר (dābār), both speech and matter, so what arrives carries substance.
THE MEANING
The LORD’s word meets you as an address with substance, not detached information. This verse holds the threshold before its message is spoken: what the word says follows.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a word from God is only abstract information; here the word arrives to a person and moves toward speech.
THE ROOT
דָּבָר
dābār
GROWS FROM
ד־ב־ר
d-b-r
To speak or declare.
דָּבָר (dābār) can mean both “word” and “matter” or “thing.” The English “word” can sound like mere speech, but the Hebrew carries the sense of speech with substance: what is spoken is bound to the matter it names.
ALSO GROWS
dibbēr: He spoke; he declared.
דִּבֵּר
This verb form shows the root’s speaking force: the arriving word leads into an address.
devarim: Words; matters or things.
דְּבָרִים
The plural preserves the link between speech and what is at stake, deepening the sense of the LORD’s word as more than sound.
THE PATTERN
The divine word arrives as an address and carries substance into the life it reaches.
Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying,While Annas and Caiaphas were the chief priests, the word of God came upon John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness.For the word of God is living and working, and sharper than any two-edged sword, reaching through even to the dividing of living soul and breath, of joints and marrow, and it separates the inward movements and thoughts of the heart.THE THREAD
Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying,Jeremiah’s verse repeats the same Hebrew word, דָּבָר (dābār), and the same movement from the LORD’s word arriving to speech following. Together, the verses let you hear “word” as both utterance and the matter carried by that utterance.
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