What Does 1 Kings 4:23 Mean?
Ten fat oxen, and twenty oxen out of the pastures, and a hundred sheep, beside harts, and roebucks, and fallow deer, and fattened fowl.
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
Ten fat oxen, and twenty oxen out of the pastures, and an hundred sheep, beside harts, and roebucks, and fallowdeer, and fatted fowl.THE KEY
The table’s abundance is fed by the same root that names a shepherd: what sustains the feast begins in tending.
THE MEANING
The verse makes provision concrete: strong cattle, grazing cattle, a flock, wild game, and fattened birds. What reaches the table comes from living creatures sustained through feeding and care. The abundance is visible at the feast, but its roots are in the pasture.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the idea that provision appears fully formed, detached from the care that sustains it.
THE ROOT
רְעִי
re'i
GROWS FROM
רעה
To tend, pasture, feed, or shepherd.
“pastures” in this verse is re'i. The word for the grazing cattle comes from רעה (ra’ah), the root that also names shepherding and feeding. The English list can make the animals seem like a store of provisions; the Hebrew root keeps their ongoing care in view.
ALSO GROWS
ro'eh: One who tends a flock.
רֹעֶה
The grazing cattle belong to a world of tending, not just counting.
ra'ah: To feed or pasture a flock.
רָעָה
The same root names the act that sustains the animals before they become food.
THE PATTERN
Provision takes shape through the tending and feeding of living creatures.
A Psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I do not come up short.Know well the faces of your flocks, and set your heart upon the herds.Look at the birds of the air, for they do not sow, nor reap, nor gather into storehouses; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they?THE THREAD
A Psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I do not come up short.The Hebrew root behind the grazing cattle in 1 Kings also names a shepherd. Psalm 23:1 makes that connection explicit: the one who tends is also the source of provision.
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