What Does 2 Samuel 13:17 Mean?
Then he called his servant who attended him, and said, Send this woman out from me, and bolt the door after her.
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 he called his servant that ministered unto him, and said, Put now this woman out from me, and bolt the door after her.THE KEY
Amnon’s command to send Tamar away extends the assault into expulsion, and the bolted door makes that rejection physical.
THE MEANING
The harm continues after the assault: Amnon orders Tamar out of his presence and has the door bolted behind her. His servant carries out the rejection, leaving Tamar to bear both the violation and the forced exclusion.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie this undoes is that the violence ends once the assault stops; Tamar’s expulsion and the shut door are further harm.
THE ROOT
שִׁלְחוּ
shilḥu
GROWS FROM
שׁלח
To send, send forth, release, or let go.
“Send this woman out from me” in this verse is shilḥu. The command is to send Tamar away; the root carries the sense of sending forth and dismissal. Tamar names this same act as an evil in the preceding verse, so the expulsion is part of the violence, not a separate household detail.
ALSO GROWS
shilluaḥ: Sending away; dismissal.
שִׁלּוּחַ
This noun makes the act of dismissal visible, echoing Tamar’s naming of her expulsion as an evil.
Shiloach: Shiloah or Siloam, a water channel whose name is glossed “Sent.”
שִׁלֹחַ
The same root can name what is sent forth; here the sending is coercive, carried out by a command and a bolted door.
THE PATTERN
Those with power can turn sending a vulnerable person away into an injury that strips away belonging and protection.
And Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of waters, and gave them to Hagar, setting them on her shoulder, and the child, and sent her away. And she went and strayed in the wilderness of Beersheba.They answered and said to him, You were born wholly in shortcomings, and do you teach us? And they cast him out.THE THREAD
And she said to him, Nay, for this evil in sending me away is greater than the other that you have done to me. But he would not hear and respond to her.“Sending me away” uses the same root, שׁלח, as Amnon’s command to send Tamar out. Tamar names the expulsion as another evil, and the shared root reveals the bolted door as part of the harm she identifies.
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