What Does 2 Chronicles 4:1 Mean?
Moreover he made an altar of brass, twenty cubits in its length, and twenty cubits in its breadth, and ten cubits in its height.
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
Moreover he made an altar of brass, twenty cubits the length thereof, and twenty cubits the breadth thereof, and ten cubits the height thereof.THE KEY
The Hebrew name מִזְבֵּחַ (mizbēaḥ, “altar”) carries the root זבח (z-b-ḥ, “to sacrifice”), so the structure is named by the offering enacted there.
THE MEANING
Here, sacrifice has a defined place and scale: a square twenty cubits on each side and ten cubits high. The altar’s name holds the structure and the act it hosts together.
THE ROOT
מִזְבֵּחַ
mizbēaḥ
GROWS FROM
זבח
z-b-ḥ
To sacrifice or slaughter; the act of offering.
מִזְבֵּחַ (mizbēaḥ, “altar”) grows from זבח (zāvaḥ, “to sacrifice”). The related noun זֶבַח (zebaḥ, “sacrifice”) keeps the act audible inside the structure’s name: the altar is the place defined by what is offered there.
ALSO GROWS
zāvaḥ: To sacrifice or slaughter.
זָבַח
The verb names the act carried out at the altar.
zebaḥ: Sacrifice; an offering.
זֶבַח
This noun shows the offering itself shares the altar’s root.
THE PATTERN
An altar is the bounded place where an offering is presented to God.
And Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean beast and of every clean bird, and sent up rising offerings on the altar.You shall make an altar of soil for me, and upon it you shall slaughter your rising offerings and your wholeness offerings, your sheep and your herd. In every place where I cause my name to be remembered, I will come to you, and I will bless you.We have an altar, from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat.THE THREAD
Then you delight in the slaughtered offerings of alignment, in the rising offering and the whole; then they ascend your altar with young bulls.The Hebrew word מִזְבֵּחַ (mizbēaḥ, “altar”) appears in both verses. Psalm 51:19 places sacrifices and burnt offerings on that altar, making explicit the offering-act already carried in its root.
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