What Does 2 Chronicles 8:7 Mean?
All the people who were left of the Hittites, and Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites, and Jebusites, who were not 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
As for all the people that were left of the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, which were not of Israel,THE KEY
Hebrew names these peoples as what remains: survival is recorded as a roster, not a blank.
THE MEANING
A boundary can mark belonging without erasing those outside it. The verse holds both realities together: these peoples are not of Israel, and each remains visible by name.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Being outside a boundary makes a people indistinguishable or absent.
THE ROOT
הַנּוֹתָר
han-notar
GROWS FROM
יתר
y-t-r
To remain over, be left as a remainder, or be in surplus.
The Hebrew word translated “left” describes what remains over. The same root can name a remainder or a surplus, making this list more than a label for what is absent: it records the distinct peoples who are still there.
ALSO GROWS
yeter: Remainder, rest, or surplus.
יֶתֶר
In Exodus 10:5, this word names the residue left after the hail, giving the root’s sense of what remains a concrete form.
yitron: Profit, advantage, or surplus.
יִתְרוֹן
Ecclesiastes 1:3 asks what profit remains from human labor, extending the same root’s sense of what is left over.
THE PATTERN
What remains after a dividing or destructive force is named as present, not treated as nothing.
"Yet I have left seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not knelt to Baal, and every mouth which has not kissed him."And it will come to pass in that day, that the remnant of Israel, and the escape of the house of Jacob, will no longer keep leaning their full weight upon the one who struck them, but they will lean their full weight upon the LORD, the Set-Apart One of Israel, in truth.So also now, in this present season, there is a remnant left behind, picked out by favor.THE THREAD
They will cover the eye of the land, so that no one can see the land. They will eat what has escaped, the remnant that was left to you from the hail, and they will eat every tree that sprouts for you out of the field.The Hebrew word translated “residue” shares the root יתר (y-t-r) with “left” in this verse. Both name what remains after something has passed over it, though Exodus’s residue faces another threat while these peoples remain distinct and named.
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