What Does 1 Kings 8:62 Mean?
And the king, and all Israel with him, slaughtered offerings before the LORD.
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 king, and all Israel with him, offered sacrifice before the LORD.THE KEY
Hebrew names both what Israel does and what Israel brings with the same root, binding the sacrifice to the act of offering it.
THE MEANING
The king and all Israel act together in an offering before the LORD. The Hebrew binds the act and the sacrifice in one root, while Israel’s name carries the image of striving with God. The verse holds devotion as a shared act lived in the LORD’s presence.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It loosens the idea that a sacrifice is a detachable object: the Hebrew wording binds what is offered to the act of offering.
THE ROOT
זֹבְחִים זֶבַח
zōvḥîm zevaḥ
GROWS FROM
זבח
To slaughter; to sacrifice.
“slaughtered offerings” in this verse is zōvḥîm zevaḥ. The Hebrew phrase literally says “sacrificing a sacrifice”: both words grow from זבח (z-b-ḥ), the root of slaughtering and sacrifice. English separates the action from the offering, while Hebrew keeps them in one word family, the thing brought remains bound to the act being performed.
ALSO GROWS
zāvaḥ: To slaughter; to sacrifice.
זָבַח
This verb names the act the king and Israel perform.
zevaḥ: A sacrifice.
זֶבַח
This noun names the offering, from the same root as the verb.
mizbēaḥ: Altar.
מִזְבֵּחַ
The altar is the place associated with the act of sacrifice, extending the same root family into the setting of the offering.
יִשְׂרָאֵל
Yisra’el
GROWS FROM
שׂרה
To strive or contend; Scripture links this root with Israel’s name and אֵל (ʾēl), “God.”
The name Israel carries the image of one who strives with God, as the name is explained in Genesis 32:28. So “all Israel with him” names a gathered people whose identity includes that struggle with God.
ALSO GROWS
śārîtā: You have striven; you have contended.
שָׂרִיתָ
This is the striving language used in Genesis 32:28 to explain the name Israel.
Yisra’el: Israel; a name linked in Scripture with striving with God.
יִשְׂרָאֵל
The name gives the gathered people in this verse a nature shaped by relationship and struggle with God.
THE PATTERN
An offering becomes an enacted relationship when a community or person brings something concrete before God.
And he sent young men of the children of Israel, who made the burnt offerings rise, and slaughtered oxen as wholeness offerings to the LORD.I offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and in the nature of the LORD I call.Therefore I urge you, brothers, through the compassions of God, to set your bodies beside God as a living sacrifice, set apart, well-pleasing to him, which is your true service.THE THREAD
I offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and in the nature of the LORD I call.Psalm 116:17 uses זֶבַח (zevaḥ, “sacrifice”), carrying the same root from the king and all Israel’s shared offering into one speaker’s thanksgiving. The root holds the act of bringing something before the LORD together with the thing brought, while the offering takes a different form.
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