What Does Daniel 9:5 Mean?
We have missed, and have bent ourselves crooked, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by turning aside from your precepts and from your judgments.
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
We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments:THE KEY
The verse’s many names for failure converge on one movement: turning away from the instruction meant to direct you.
THE MEANING
This confession gives you language for failure as more than a vague feeling: missing, crookedness, rebellion, and departure from the instruction that orders your life. It speaks plainly about each movement without disguising it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that guilt is only an inner feeling: the confession names a concrete departure from precepts and judgments.
THE ROOT
חָטָאנוּ
ḥāṭāʾnû
GROWS FROM
חטא
ḥṭʾ
To miss or fall short of a mark.
“missed” in this verse is ḥāṭāʾnû. The confession begins with a miss, not a free-floating stain, and ends by naming where that miss leads: away from the precepts and judgments. The same root can also name purifying (Leviticus 8:15), holding missing and cleansing within one word-family.
ALSO GROWS
ḥāṭāʾ: To miss; to sin.
חָטָא
This verb gives the confession’s opening failure the sense of missing a mark.
ḥaṭṭāʾt: Sin; sin offering.
חַטָּאת
The noun for sin and the offering associated with it grow from the same root as the confession’s “sinned.”
wayḥaṭṭēʾ: And he purified (Leviticus 8:15).
וַיְחַטֵּא
This form shows the root can also describe cleansing, so its word-family holds both the missing and its clearing.
סָרְנוּ
sārnû
GROWS FROM
סור
sûr
To turn aside, depart, or remove.
The confession makes wrongdoing directional: it is a turn away from the precepts and judgments. The same root can describe turning aside from a way or removing something from its place.
ALSO GROWS
sār: Turned aside; departed.
סָר
This is the same verb in a shorter form: the departure names a turn away from a path.
hēsîr: Removed; took away.
הֵסִיר
In this form the same root describes removing something from its place, adding a concrete sense to the departure in the verse.
THE PATTERN
Confession names wrongdoing openly, and what is named meets release and cleansing.
I make my falling short known to you, and my crookedness I do not cover. I say, I will speak my rebellion into the open before the LORD, and you release the crookedness of my falling short. Selah.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 I looked, and look, you had missed the mark against the LORD your God, and had made for yourselves a poured calf. You had turned aside quickly from the way the LORD had commanded you.Daniel’s וְסָרְנוּ (vesarnu, “and we turned aside”) and Deuteronomy’s סַרְתֶּם (sartem, “you turned aside”) share the root סור (sûr, “turn aside, depart”). The shared verb makes the confession directional: its failures gather around leaving the way that was commanded.
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