What Does Deuteronomy 2:16 Mean?
And it came to pass, when all the men of war were used up in dying from the midst of the people.
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
So it came to pass, when all the men of war were consumed and dead from among the people,THE KEY
At the root, “consumed” carries completion: the men of war reach the end of their lives until none remains among the people.
THE MEANING
You meet the full measure of an ending here: death has taken every man of war from among the people. The fighting generation is wholly absent, and the verse does not soften the loss.
THE ROOT
תַּמּוּ
tammû
GROWS FROM
תמם
To be complete, finished, or brought to an end.
“used up” in this verse is tammû. תַּמּוּ (tammu, “they came to an end”) names the men of war as a group that has reached its endpoint. The same root can describe a year ending or something whole, so it carries a sense of completion beneath the English “consumed.”
ALSO GROWS
vattitom: And it was completed or ended; in Genesis 47:18, the year comes to its end.
וַתִּתֹּם
The same root marks the end of a year there, making completion the shared thread between a span of time and the last of this group’s lives.
tamim: Whole, complete; rendered “perfect” in Genesis 6:9.
תָּמִים
This branch shows the root’s sense of wholeness: here, the group’s ending is complete because no one remains among the people.
THE PATTERN
A course reaches completion when its full span has run its course.
When that year was ended, they came to him in the second year, and said to him, We will not hide it from my lord, that our silver is used up. My lord also has our herds of cattle. Nothing is left before my lord, except our bodies and our ground.For the children of Israel walked forty years in the wilderness, until all the people who were men of war, who came forth out of Egypt, were used up, because they did not hear and respond to the voice of the LORD. To whom the LORD swore that he would not let them see the land which the LORD had sworn to their fathers to give to us, a land flowing with milk and honey.I have strained in the good contest; I have finished my run; I have guarded the trust.THE THREAD
When that year was ended, they came to him in the second year, and said to him, We will not hide it from my lord, that our silver is used up. My lord also has our herds of cattle. Nothing is left before my lord, except our bodies and our ground.The Hebrew root תמם (tamam, “be complete or come to an end”) is used when the year reaches its end there, as it is when the men of war finish dying here. The same word links a completed year with a whole generation gone.
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