What Does Daniel 9:15 Mean?
And now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a strong hand, and made yourself a name, as at this day, we have missed, we have done wickedly.
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 now, O Lord our God, that hast brought thy people forth out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and hast gotten thee renown, as at this day; we have sinned, we have done wickedly.THE KEY
The prayer remembers God bringing the people out before naming their failure, holding deliverance and confession together.
THE MEANING
God has brought you out with a strong hand and made his name known through that release. You name the wrongdoing plainly, “we have sinned, we have done wickedly”, without erasing the deliverance or softening the confession. The prayer holds both truths together now.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The false belief is that being delivered leaves nothing to confess, or that failure cancels the reality of deliverance.
THE ROOT
הוֹצֵאתָ
hotsēʾtā
GROWS FROM
יצא
יצא (yatsaʾ): go out, come forth; in this causative form, bring out.
The root יָצָא (yatsaʾ, “go out, come forth”) makes deliverance an exit enacted, not an abstract status. The people are brought out of Mitzrayim (מִצְרַיִם, Egypt, the constricting place), and the prayer names their failure from within that story of release.
ALSO GROWS
yāṣāʾ: went out, came forth
יָצָא
This form names a person’s going out; it shares the root movement in the prayer’s “you brought out.”
yəṣîʾāh: going out, departure, exit
יְצִיאָה
This noun makes the movement itself visible: the verse remembers deliverance as a departure from the constricting place.
חָטָאנוּ
ḥāṭāʾnū
GROWS FROM
חטא
חטא (ḥāṭāʾ): miss, fail to reach, go wrong.
“missed” in this verse is ḥāṭāʾnū. The root of “we have sinned” carries the sense of missing the mark. Beside יצא, it lets the prayer hold two realities at once: the people are brought out, and they speak plainly about where they have gone wrong.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāṭāʾ: missed, sinned
חָטָא
This form shares the root consonants and makes clear that “we have sinned” names an action, not the whole story of the people.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: missing; an offering for the missing
חַטָּאת
This related word carries the same root and shows how the language can name both the failure and what is brought in response to it.
THE PATTERN
Scripture remembers divine deliverance alongside an unsoftened confession of human failure.
You set signs and wonders upon Pharaoh, and upon all his servants, and upon all the people of his land, for you knew that they boiled up against them. So you made yourself a name, as on this day.But they and our fathers boiled up, and stiffened their necks, and did not hear and respond to your commands.If we speak our shortcomings into the open, he is steady and aligned, to release our shortcomings, and to cleanse us from all crookedness.THE THREAD
And it came to be on this very bone of the day, that the LORD brought the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt by their hosts.“Did bring … out” carries the same root יצא (yatsaʾ, “go out, bring out”) as Daniel’s “hast brought … forth.” That shared root makes the remembered deliverance a concrete movement out of Egypt, held in the same prayer as the people’s confession.
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