What Does 2 Chronicles 33:1 Mean?
Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and reigned fifty-five years in Jerusalem.
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
Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and he reigned fifty and five years in Jerusalem:THE KEY
Manasseh’s reign opens with a name meaning “causing to forget,” so the first clue to his story is carried in the name itself.
THE MEANING
Names can carry a story’s meaning before its actions unfold. Here, the name Manasseh, “causing to forget”, stands at the start of a reign that begins at twelve and lasts fifty-five years in Jerusalem.
THE ROOT
מְנַשֶּׁה
Menashsheh
GROWS FROM
נשה
n-sh-h
To forget; in the causative name form, to cause to forget.
“Manasseh” in this verse is Menashsheh. The English gives only a name, but its Hebrew form carries an action: “causing to forget.” Genesis makes that seed visible through a related verb, so this long reign begins under a name already carrying a story about forgetting.
ALSO GROWS
Menashsheh: Manasseh; one who causes forgetting
מְנַשֶּׁה
The name places the root’s action at the threshold of the reign.
nashani: He has made me forget
נַשַּׁנִי
Joseph uses this verb when explaining the name in Genesis 41:51, exposing the action embedded in it.
tinnasheni: Be forgotten; in Isaiah 44:21, “you will not be forgotten by me”
תִּנָּשֵׁנִי
Isaiah uses the root in a sentence that denies forgetting, showing how the same seed can describe what is either forgotten or kept in memory.
THE PATTERN
Scripture lets names carry story-meaning, so a name can announce an action or nature within the life it names.
And Joseph called the name of the firstborn the Forget-Maker, Manasseh, for God has made me forget all my toil and all my father's house.And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses, the one drawn out, and she said, Because from the waters I drew him out.And she will bring forth a son, and you will call his name Jesus, the LORD's deliverance, for he will deliver his people from their missing.THE THREAD
And Joseph called the name of the firstborn the Forget-Maker, Manasseh, for God has made me forget all my toil and all my father's house.Genesis preserves the wordplay that this verse leaves unstated: Joseph names his son Manasseh because God “hath made me forget.” The name at the beginning of the reign therefore carries an earlier story of forgetting within it.
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