What Does 2 Chronicles 6:1 Mean?
Then Solomon said, The LORD said he would pitch his tent in the thick darkness.
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
Then said Solomon, The LORD hath said that he would dwell in the thick darkness.THE KEY
The verse names thick darkness as the place where the LORD settles, so obscurity itself does not mean absence.
THE MEANING
What you cannot see through is not necessarily empty; this verse names even thick darkness as a dwelling place. The LORD’s presence is spoken of as settled there, beyond what sight can confirm.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that darkness proves God is absent.
THE ROOT
לִשְׁכֹּן
lishkon
GROWS FROM
שכן
sh-k-n
To settle, remain, dwell.
“pitch his tent” in this verse is lishkon. The verse uses לִשְׁכֹּן (lishkon), “to dwell” or “settle,” for the LORD’s presence in thick darkness. The same root appears in מִשְׁכָּן (mishkan), “dwelling place” or “tabernacle,” and שָׁכֵן (shakhen), “neighbor”, words that carry dwelling and nearness in their shared seed.
ALSO GROWS
mishkan: Dwelling place; tabernacle.
מִשְׁכָּן
The dwelling place shares the root used here for the LORD settling in thick darkness.
shakhen: Neighbor; one who dwells nearby.
שָׁכֵן
This branch carries the root’s sense of dwelling into nearness, opening the image of presence that settles close.
THE PATTERN
Divine presence is described as reaching into what remains hidden from human sight.
And the people stood far off, and Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.He sets darkness as his hiding place; around him is his booth of dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not take hold of it.THE THREAD
And the people stood far off, and Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.The same Hebrew word, עֲרָפֶל (ʿărāpel), meaning “thick darkness,” appears in both verses. Moses approaches the obscurity the people keep at a distance, and the text names God as there: hiddenness is also a place of encounter.
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