What Does 2 Chronicles 33:2 Mean?
But he did evil in the eyes of the LORD, after the loathsome things of the nations, whom the LORD drove out before the children of Israel.
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 did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, like unto the abominations of the heathen, whom the LORD had cast out before the children of Israel.THE KEY
The Hebrew root behind “cast out” also means “inherit,” holding those who receive the land and those driven from it inside one word-family.
THE MEANING
This verse places a person’s conduct beside what is evil in the LORD’s sight and names its likeness to practices associated with people driven from the land. It exposes how holding a place does not make a destructive pattern harmless; the same kind of conduct can carry the shadow of dispossession.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that receiving a place makes a person’s way immune to judgment: possession does not itself mean approval.
THE ROOT
הוֹרִישׁ
hôrîš
GROWS FROM
ירשׁ
y-r-sh
To take possession or inherit; in the causative form, to dispossess or drive out.
“drove out” in this verse is hôrîš. The verb translated “cast out” is causative: it means to make someone lose possession. The same root can name inheriting possession, so removal and receipt are two sides of one transfer.
ALSO GROWS
yāraš: To possess, inherit, or dispossess, depending on form and context.
יָרַשׁ
The same root spans receiving possession and taking possession from another.
yerushah: Inheritance or possession.
יְרֻשָּׁה
This noun names what is gained through the same possession movement.
hôrîš: To dispossess or drive out.
הוֹרִישׁ
This is the form in the verse, describing the former occupants’ loss of possession.
THE PATTERN
What a people makes normal can become the measure by which it is displaced.
For everyone who does these things is a recoiling thing to the LORD, and because of these recoiling things the LORD your God drives them out from your face.And the land is soiled. Therefore I visit its crookedness upon it, and the land itself vomits out those who settle in her.Do not be led astray. God is not sneered at. For whatever a person sows, that also he reaps.THE THREAD
And he said to him, I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to take hold of it.“Inherit” translates yāraš (יָרַשׁ), “take possession,” the same root behind this verse’s “cast out.” The word-family holds receiving the land and losing it together, so the comparison carries a consequence beneath the surface.
This reading is from Selah Verse.
You can read any verse this way in the app, keep it as a card, and send it on.
A Bible app where you send verses from your keyboard and in Messages, and every verse has a Deep Dive.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us