What Does Deuteronomy 18:12 Mean?
For everyone who does these things is a recoiling thing to the LORD, and because of these recoiling things the LORD your God drives them out from your face.
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
For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.THE KEY
The verb that says the LORD drives them out grows from the same root that says Israel possesses the land: inheritance and expulsion are one motion.
THE MEANING
You are confronted with judgment enacted as expulsion: the LORD drives people from their place over practices this verse names abhorrent. The sentence ties judgment to material displacement and does not soften the violence of being driven out.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that a practice promising hidden knowledge can be morally neutral.
THE ROOT
מוֹרִישׁ
morish
GROWS FROM
יָרַשׁ
yarash
To take possession or inherit; in the causative form, to dispossess or drive out.
“drives them out” in this verse is morish. The verb here describes causing people to lose possession, to be dispossessed. In verse 14, the same root describes possessing the land, placing taking possession and expulsion inside one root family.
ALSO GROWS
yarash: To take possession, inherit.
יָרַשׁ
In Deuteronomy 18:14, this root describes the land Israel possesses, linking that possession to the dispossession named here.
morish: Causing someone to be dispossessed; driving out.
מוֹרִישׁ
This is the form used in the verse: the LORD is the one causing the inhabitants to lose their place.
תּוֹעֲבַת
toʿavat
GROWS FROM
תעב
To abhor or regard as detestable.
“is a recoiling thing to the LORD” in this verse is toʿavat. The word belongs to the language of abhorrence: these acts are presented as detestable in the LORD’s judgment, not merely unfamiliar. The verse repeats the noun in plural, gathering the practices into the stated grounds for removal.
ALSO GROWS
toʿevah: A detestable thing; an abomination.
תּוֹעֵבָה
This noun names an act as the object of abhorrence, giving the verse’s judgment its force.
wayteʿev: He abhorred; he regarded as detestable.
וַיְתָעֵב
This verb form appears in Psalm 106:40, showing the same root can name the act of abhorring as well as the thing called detestable.
THE PATTERN
Practices carry consequences that can bring judgment and displacement.
And the land is soiled. Therefore I visit its crookedness upon it, and the land itself vomits out those who settle in her.Therefore God gave them over in the cravings of their hearts into uncleanness, for their bodies to be made weightless among themselves.Do not be led astray. God is not sneered at. For whatever a person sows, that also he reaps.THE THREAD
For these nations, which you possess, hear and respond to readers of clouds and to those who divine, but as for you, the LORD your God has not given you to do so.The same root יָרַשׁ (yarash, possess or dispossess) stands behind “drive them out” here and “possess” there. The paired forms make possession inseparable from displacement: one people’s taking a place means another people is driven from it.
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