What Does 2 Kings 15:3 Mean?
And he did what was straight in the eyes of the LORD, according to all that his father Amaziah had done.
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
And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, according to all that his father Amaziah had done;THE KEY
“Right” means straight: the verse pictures a way that holds its line in the LORD’s sight and can be carried from father to son.
THE MEANING
A life can be straight in the LORD’s sight, and its shape can come through a pattern already lived by someone before it. What one generation does may become the next generation’s path.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that rightness must be invented alone: a straight way can be received and lived forward.
THE ROOT
הַיָּשָׁר
hayyāšār
GROWS FROM
ישר
To be straight, level, or upright.
“straight in the eyes of” in this verse is hayyāšār. The word translated “right” carries the image of straightness and levelness. The verse makes rightness a line held true in the LORD’s sight, a way of life that can be followed and passed on.
ALSO GROWS
yāšār: Straight; upright.
יָשָׁר
This branch makes the verse’s “right” a quality of a way that holds its direction.
yōšer: Straightness; uprightness.
יֹשֶׁר
It names the underlying quality that the verse sees in a person’s way.
mēšārîm: Levelness; uprightness; equity.
מֵישָׁרִים
It extends straightness into the idea of level paths, a line another person can walk.
עָשָׂה
ʿāśâ
GROWS FROM
עשה
To do or make.
“did” in this verse is ʿāśâ. The same doing word describes the king and his father. The verse shows inherited conduct as something made in one life and made again in another.
ALSO GROWS
maʿăśeh: Deed; work.
מַעֲשֶׂה
A deed is what doing leaves behind, and those deeds become the pattern the verse names.
ʿōśeh: One who does or makes.
עֹשֶׂה
This branch keeps the focus on the person whose repeated actions shape a way of life.
THE PATTERN
A way of life becomes transmissible when someone lives it before another person.
The aligned one walks in his wholeness; flourishing are his children after him.When I recall the trust without a mask that is in you, which first made its home in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, I am persuaded that it lives in you also.THE THREAD
On the way of wisdom I have pointed you; I have led you on straight paths.“Right paths” comes from the same ישר family as the verse’s “right,” so both carry the image of straightness that can be traveled. Proverbs opens that straightness as a path someone can teach and another can follow.
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