What Does 1 Samuel 2:31 Mean?
Look, the days are coming when I will cut off your arm, and the arm of your father's house, so that there will not be an old man in your 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
Behold, the days come, that I will cut off thine arm, and the arm of thy father’s house, that there shall not be an old man in thine house.THE KEY
The arm of the house is cut away, and its elders disappear: the verse binds a household’s power and continuity in one severing.
THE MEANING
You see a house stripped of the arm that carries its power, with no elder left within it. The loss reaches beyond one person’s strength: the house’s capacity and its continuity are cut together.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the assumption that a house can lose its strength and keep its future untouched: the severing of its arm is followed by the disappearance of its elders.
THE ROOT
זְרוֹעַ
zeroaʿ
GROWS FROM
זרע
z-r-ʿ
To sow or scatter seed.
The word for arm is linked to the root of sowing and seed. The verse places the father’s house’s arm beside the loss of its elders, making severed capacity and interrupted continuity resonate together.
ALSO GROWS
zāraʿ: To sow or plant seed.
זָרַע
Sowing is an act of outward extension; its shared root gives the cut arm’s loss of reach an added resonance.
zeraʿ: Seed or offspring.
זֶרַע
The seed word connects the root to what a house extends into the future, echoing the verse’s image of its elders disappearing.
THE PATTERN
The arm pictures power reaching into action: when it is strong, it can act; when it is broken, its reach is lost.
You have an arm with might; your hand is strong, and your right hand is lifted.Son of man, I have broken the arm of Pharaoh king of Egypt; and, behold, it shall not be bound up, to set healing upon it, to put a roller to bind it, to make it firm to grasp the sword.He has worked strength with his arm, and scattered those lifted high in the thinking of their hearts.THE THREAD
Son of man, I have broken the arm of Pharaoh king of Egypt; and, behold, it shall not be bound up, to set healing upon it, to put a roller to bind it, to make it firm to grasp the sword.The same Hebrew word for arm appears here as in 1 Samuel, where the arm of a house is cut off. Ezekiel makes the image bodily: the broken arm cannot hold a sword, while Samuel’s verse shows the loss reaching into the household’s continuity.
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