What Does Deuteronomy 19:14 Mean?
You shall not move your neighbor's boundary, which the former ones marked out in your holding, which you shall take as your share in the land the LORD your God gives you to take hold of.
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
Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it.THE KEY
A boundary is the line that keeps a neighbor’s inheritance from being quietly absorbed.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks wherever someone else’s allotted place borders yours: a boundary carries the weight of an inheritance, even when shifting it would be easy to conceal. The land beside you does not become yours to redraw.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that shifting a boundary takes nothing from the neighbor on the other side.
THE ROOT
גְּבוּל
gevul
GROWS FROM
ג־ב־ל
g-b-l
To mark out or establish a boundary; the boundary itself.
The verse places gevul (“boundary, border”) alongside gābal (“mark out a boundary”), words from the same root. English separates the landmark from the act of setting it; Hebrew keeps them in one word-family, so shifting the marker also shifts a neighbor’s defined territory.
ALSO GROWS
gevul: Boundary, border, or territory.
גְּבוּל
This is the boundary named in the verse: a line that defines an allotment, not just a stone in the soil.
gābal: To mark out or establish a boundary.
גָּבַל
The verse uses this related verb for what earlier generations did, joining the established line to the boundary itself.
THE PATTERN
A marked boundary protects another person’s allotted place from being quietly absorbed.
Some push back the landmarks; they tear away flocks and feed on them.Do not move the age-old boundary your fathers made.Do not move the boundary of the ages, and do not enter the fields of the fatherless.THE THREAD
Do not move the boundary of the ages, and do not enter the fields of the fatherless.The verse repeats the warning against moving the landmark, then names the fatherless person whose fields that boundary protects. The shared boundary language makes the consequence plain: shifting the line can become entry into someone else’s inheritance.
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