What Does 1 Kings 5:13 Mean?
And King Solomon raised a levy out of all Israel, and the levy was thirty thousand men.
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 king Solomon raised a levy out of all Israel; and the levy was thirty thousand men.THE KEY
The Hebrew says the king makes a levy “go up” from Israel, using the same root that names ascent and the burnt offering.
THE MEANING
You see a kingdom’s demand measured in people: thirty thousand men are drawn from all Israel into a levy. The number makes the human cost visible before the passage describes how the labor is organized.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that a kingdom’s burden belongs only to its ruler dissolves here: the verse names the thirty thousand people who are levied.
THE ROOT
וַיַּעַל
wayyaʿal
GROWS FROM
עלה
עלה (ʿ-l-h): to go up, ascend; in this verb form, to cause something to go up.
The verse says the levy is made to go up from all Israel. The same root forms the burnt offering that ascends, an echo the English verb “raised” does not show.
ALSO GROWS
ʿolah: Burnt offering; literally, an offering that ascends.
עֹלָה
It shares the root of “raised,” bringing the language of ascent into the verse’s account of a levy.
maʿalah: Ascent, going up; also a step or stair.
מַעֲלָה
This branch keeps the root’s basic movement visible: something rises or is brought upward.
שְׁלֹמֹה
Shelomoh
GROWS FROM
שלם
שלם (sh-l-m): to be whole, complete.
Solomon’s name carries the root of wholeness, while the verse names a burden imposed across the whole people. The verse holds that tension without explaining it away.
ALSO GROWS
shalom: Wholeness, well-being.
שָׁלוֹם
This familiar branch makes the name’s association with wholeness audible beside the levy.
shalem: Whole, complete, intact.
שָׁלֵם
It shows the root’s sense of completeness carried in Solomon’s name.
THE PATTERN
A kingdom’s power becomes concrete when its ruler assigns people to serve the state and counts what is taken from them.
Therefore they set over them taskmasters to bend them under their loads. And they built for Pharaoh storehouse cities, Pithom and Raamses.And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you. He will take your sons, and set them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.But Jesus called them to him, and said, You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and the great ones press authority down upon them.THE THREAD
And Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean beast and of every clean bird, and sent up rising offerings on the altar.In this verse, the Hebrew root for “raised” forms the verb used when Noah’s burnt offerings ascend. The shared root reveals an echo of ascent in Solomon’s levy while leaving the two acts distinct.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us