What Does 2 Kings 17:30 Mean?
And the men of Babylon made Succoth-benoth, and the men of Cuth made Nergal, and the men of Hamath made Ashima.
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 the men of Babylon made Succoth-benoth, and the men of Cuth made Nergal, and the men of Hamath made Ashima,THE KEY
Each idol’s name leads back to its makers: what is treated as divine here begins as a human deed.
THE MEANING
This verse exposes a living pattern: people can fashion what they later treat as sacred authority. Its repeated “made” keeps the makers present inside the names of Succoth-benoth, Nergal, and Ashima. The objects of reverence bear the trace of the human acts that brought them forth.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A sacred name alone makes something divine; here, the named powers are explicitly things people made.
THE ROOT
עָשׂוּ
ʿāśû
GROWS FROM
עשה
ʿāśâ
Do, make, perform.
The verse repeats עשה (ʿāśâ, to make or do), and its branch מַעֲשֶׂה (maʿăśeh, work or deed) names the result as a product of action. The maker and the made thing remain joined in one root: these gods carry the trace of the human deeds that formed them.
ALSO GROWS
maʿăśeh: Work, deed, thing made
מַעֲשֶׂה
The same root names both making and the work that results, linking these named gods to the actions that produced them.
ʿōśeh: One who does or makes
עֹשֶׂה
This form names the maker, keeping human agency visible beside what is made.
THE PATTERN
When people make what they bow to, the object of devotion carries the human work that shaped it.
And he took them from their hands, and shaped it with a cutting tool, and made it into a poured calf. And they said, These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.And the remainder of it he makes into a god, his hewn image, and falls down to it, and bows down, and prays to it, and says, "Snatch me, for you are my god."Since then we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think the divine is like gold, or silver, or stone, carved by craft and by human imagining.THE THREAD
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.“Work” here is מַעֲשֶׂה (maʿăśeh, work or deed), from the same root עשה (ʿāśâ, to make or do) as “made” in 2 Kings. The psalm states the connection directly: the named idols are works of human hands.
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