What Does 1 Samuel 5:6 Mean?
But the hand of the LORD was heavy upon Ashdod, and he laid them waste, and struck them with swellings, Ashdod and all its borders.
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
But the hand of the LORD was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he destroyed them, and smote them with emerods, even Ashdod and the coasts thereof.THE KEY
The “heavy” hand carries the Hebrew root of weight: here the LORD’s force becomes bodily affliction and devastation.
THE MEANING
The verse names affliction landing on bodies and spreading across Ashdod’s territory. The LORD’s hand is heavy: divine power is not abstract here, but felt in bodies and place. The text holds the violence plainly, the people are struck, and Ashdod is laid waste.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that the LORD’s hand always feels gentle: here it brings bodily affliction and devastation.
THE ROOT
וַתִּכְבַּד
vattikhbad
GROWS FROM
כבד
k-b-d
To be heavy or weighty.
The same root links this heavy hand to כָּבוֹד (kavod), weight, and to making a heart heavy. English separates physical heaviness from honor and hardening, while Hebrew holds them in the same word-family; here that weight presses into bodies and place.
ALSO GROWS
kavod: Weight; weight carried as honor.
כָּבוֹד
It shares the root’s sense of weight, so the hand’s heaviness is concrete force, not merely a figure of speech.
kibbed: To honor or treat as weighty.
כִּבֵּד
This branch shows that the root’s weight can also describe how much importance something is given.
tekhabbedu: You make heavy; translated “harden” in 1 Samuel 6:6.
תְּכַבְּדוּ
The same root describes a heart made heavy, echoing this verse’s heavy hand.
THE PATTERN
Divine judgment is depicted as a concrete affliction within bodies and the living world.
Behold, the hand of the LORD is upon your cattle that are in the field, upon the horses, upon the donkeys, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep. There shall be a very heavy plague.The LORD shall strike you with the boil of Egypt, and with the swelling, and with the scab, and with the potsherd, from which you cannot be healed.And at once the messenger of the LORD struck him, because he did not give God the weight, and he was eaten by worms and breathed out his last.THE THREAD
Why then do you make your hearts heavy, as the Egyptians and Pharaoh made their hearts heavy? When he had handled them roughly, did they not let the people go, and they went away?The verb translated “harden” comes from כבד (k-b-d), the same root as “heavy” here; literally, it describes making the heart heavy. The same word thus names weight pressing upon bodies and weight held within a heart.
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