What Does 2 Chronicles 8:5 Mean?
Also he built Bethhoron the upper, and Bethhoron the nether, walled cities, with a wall, gates, and bars.
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
Also he built Beth-horon the upper, and Beth-horon the nether, fenced cities, with walls, gates, and bars;THE KEY
The Hebrew word for “bars” shares its root with “flee”: the thing securing the city is defined by the passage it can stop.
THE MEANING
The verse gives you an image of protection with layers: an upper and a lower city, walls around them, gates in the walls, and bars securing the openings. A boundary can contain thresholds whose passage is held.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that any opening makes a boundary weak: the gate remains part of the fortified city, and the bar secures that opening.
THE ROOT
בְּרִיחַ
beriach
GROWS FROM
ברח
b-r-ḥ
To flee or escape; to move swiftly away.
The word for “bars” is beriach, linked to the root barach, “to flee.” The same consonants hold escape and the bolt that secures a gate, so the image turns on passage: what can get through, and what is stopped.
ALSO GROWS
barach: To flee, escape.
בָּרַח
This is the root’s movement away, sharing its consonants with the bar that blocks a passage.
beriach: A bar or bolt.
בְּרִיחַ
This is the word in the verse: a bar secures the gate, making the opening controllable rather than erasing it.
THE PATTERN
A protected place is built from layered boundaries and openings that can be secured.
For he has braced the bars of your gates; he has blessed your children within you.And the fish gate the sons of Hassenaah built. They also laid its beams, and set in place its doors, its locks, and its bars.And I also say to you, You are Peter, the stone, and upon this bedrock I will build my assembly, and the gates of Hades shall not overpower it.THE THREAD
For he shatters gates of bronze, and cuts the bars of iron in two.Psalm 107 uses the same Hebrew word for “bars,” but there the bars are cut apart. The shared root reveals that the boundary securing passage can also be broken open.
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