What Does 1 Kings 3:17 Mean?
And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman settle in one house, and I bore a child with her in the house.
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 one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house.THE KEY
The woman anchors her claim in the shared house, where birth is not abstract but a witnessed event.
THE MEANING
The reader hears a claim grounded in a shared place: both women live in one house, and one says she gives birth there with the other present. The circumstances of the child’s beginning are part of the testimony itself.
THE ROOT
וָאֵלֵד
va'eleḏ
GROWS FROM
ילד
Y-L-D
To bear or beget; to bring forth a child.
“bore a child” in this verse is va'eleḏ. The Hebrew says, more directly, “I gave birth.” The same root names the act of bringing forth and the child brought forth, holding together what English separates into “delivered” and “child.”
ALSO GROWS
yeled: Child
יֶלֶד
The child carries the same root as the act of birth, linking the person to the event that brings them forth.
holid: To beget; to father
הוֹלִיד
This related form uses the same root for begetting, so the root gathers both bringing forth and fathering under one seed.
יֹשְׁבֹת
yoshvot
GROWS FROM
ישב
Y-Sh-B
To sit, remain, or dwell.
“settle” in this verse is yoshvot. The verb for dwelling also carries the sense of sitting or remaining in a place. The women’s shared house is therefore concrete ground for the claim: the account begins with where they stay and what happens there.
ALSO GROWS
yoshev: One who sits or dwells
יוֹשֵׁב
The same root describes a person situated in a place, giving the shared household its human occupants.
moshav: Dwelling; place of residence
מוֹשָׁב
This noun from the root names a settled place, echoing the one house where the women’s lives and testimony meet.
THE PATTERN
Birth is spoken of as a concrete coming-forth into a shared human world.
And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, the gotten one, and she said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.And it came to pass on the third day after I bore, that this woman also bore, and we were together. No stranger was with us in the house, only we two in the house.A woman, when she brings forth, has pain, because her hour has come. But when she has borne the child, she no longer remembers the pressure, for the joy that a human has been brought forth into the world.THE THREAD
And it came to pass on the third day after I bore, that this woman also bore, and we were together. No stranger was with us in the house, only we two in the house.The next verse repeats the ילד (yalad, bear or beget) root for both women’s births and places them together in the same house. That repetition sharpens this claim: the dispute rests on two births sharing a time and place.
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