What Does 2 Samuel 5:1 Mean?
Then came all the tribes of Israel to David at Hebron, and they spoke, saying, Look, we are your bone and your flesh.
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 came all the tribes of Israel to David unto Hebron, and spake, saying, Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh.THE KEY
The tribes name their bond with David as shared substance: “bone and flesh” makes belonging kinship of the body.
THE MEANING
This verse meets you in the language of belonging: kinship is pictured as shared substance, bone and flesh. David, the beloved, is held within the people’s own embodied identity, so their bond with him is voiced as something lived through the whole body.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Belonging is only a label or agreement between people who remain separate.
THE ROOT
עַצְמְךָ
ʿatsemkha
GROWS FROM
עצם
To be strong or mighty; the noun also carries the sense of bone, substance, or the self.
“bone and your flesh” in this verse is ʿatsemkha. The word for “bone” also reaches toward substance and the very self. The tribes call themselves David’s own structure, naming kinship as something built into what they are.
ALSO GROWS
ʿetsem: Bone; substance or the self.
עֶצֶם
It makes their claim of belonging sound like shared being, not a loose association.
ʿatsum: Mighty or strong.
עָצוּם
The same root’s strength resonates with bone as the body’s supporting structure.
וּבְשָׂרְךָ
u-vesarkha
GROWS FROM
בשר
Flesh; the same consonants also form a verb meaning to announce or bring news.
The root holds flesh and announcement in the same sound-shape. Here the people speak their kinship aloud by naming the flesh they share with David.
ALSO GROWS
basar: Flesh.
בָּשָׂר
This is the word the tribes use to declare bodily kinship with David.
bisser: To announce or bring good news.
בִּשֵּׂר
The shared consonants echo the act of making their bond known in speech.
דָּוִד
David
GROWS FROM
דוד
Beloved.
David’s name carries the nature of the beloved. The tribes name their relationship to him through shared substance, gathering kinship around the beloved.
ALSO GROWS
dod: Beloved.
דּוֹד
It reveals the affection carried in David’s name.
dodim: Love or affection.
דּוֹדִים
This related form extends the name’s root toward the bond of love.
THE PATTERN
When scripture calls people bone and flesh, it names belonging as shared substance and kinship.
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for out of man she was taken.And Laban said to him, Surely you are my bone and my flesh. And he settled with him for a month.For we are limbs of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.THE THREAD
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for out of man she was taken.Genesis 2:23 uses the same bone-and-flesh language to name kinship as shared substance. Here that intimate phrase widens into the tribes’ declaration of belonging with David.
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