What Does 1 Kings 8:3 Mean?
And all the elders of Israel came, and the priests lifted the ark.
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 all the elders of Israel came, and the priests took up the ark.THE KEY
The ark’s arrival is itself an act of bearing: the verb translated “took up” also gives Hebrew its word for a load.
THE MEANING
The elders gather, and the priests lift the ark into Israel’s midst. What holds the community’s center is carried among them by human hands. Gathering and bearing meet in one living scene.
THE ROOT
וַיִּשְׂאוּ
wayyiśʾû
GROWS FROM
נשא
n-ś-ʾ
Lift, carry, bear.
“lifted” in this verse is wayyiśʾû. English makes this sound like a handoff. The Hebrew verb carries the sense of lifting and bearing, and its branch מַשָּׂא (maśśāʾ) names a burden: the ark enters the gathering as a weight entrusted to human hands.
ALSO GROWS
maśśāʾ: A load or burden.
מַשָּׂא
The same root turns the act of carrying into the thing carried, linking the ark’s movement with the idea of a borne weight.
nāśîʾ: A chief or leader; one raised up.
נָשִׂיא
The root’s connection to being lifted places bearing and elevation in the same word family.
THE PATTERN
What a community holds together becomes present through people who bear weight for one another.
And you set the poles into the rings at the sides of the ark, that the ark may be lifted with them.And they came to him, bringing a paralyzed man, lifted by four.Carry one another's weights, and so you fill up the instruction of the Anointed One.THE THREAD
Surely he has borne our sicknesses, and carried our wounds. Yet we reckoned him struck, beaten by God, and bowed low.The Hebrew root translated “took up” here appears as “borne” for griefs in Isaiah. Carrying the community’s sacred center and carrying human anguish share the same root, bringing the verse’s physical action close to the weights people bear now.
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