What Does Deuteronomy 23:7 Mean?
You shall not recoil from an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not recoil from an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land.
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 abhor an Edomite; for he is thy brother: thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian; because thou wast a stranger in his land.THE KEY
Your contempt meets two mirrors: the Edomite is your brother, and the Egyptian is bound to the stranger you have been.
THE MEANING
The Edomite is named as kin, while the Egyptian is tied to your own experience of being a stranger in his land. Both kinship and remembered vulnerability remain present in how you see the people you might despise.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that a boundary between peoples, or a painful history, makes contempt fitting; the verse answers with kinship and the memory of being an outsider.
THE ROOT
גֵּר
ger
GROWS FROM
גור
To sojourn or dwell as an outsider in another’s land.
“sojourner” in this verse is ger. The word translated “stranger” names a condition of residence: you are living in another person’s land. It puts your own remembered vulnerability inside the verse’s restraint on contempt.
ALSO GROWS
gur: To sojourn or dwell as an outsider
גּוּר
The verb shows the movement and condition behind being a stranger in someone else’s land.
megurim: Sojournings or temporary dwellings
מְגוּרִים
This related form keeps the focus on a lived condition of dwelling away from one’s own land.
אֱדֹמִי
Edomi
GROWS FROM
אדם
Red or ruddy; the same consonants appear in related words for human and ground.
Edomite carries the color-name Edom; the same consonants appear in adam, “human,” and adamah, “ground.” Those echoes deepen the verse’s naming of the Edomite as brother: the name carries a reminder of shared human ground.
ALSO GROWS
adom: Red
אָדֹם
The name Edom is linked to red in the naming of Esau’s stew, so the people-name retains a color-name.
adam: Human or person
אָדָם
The shared consonants echo the broader human nature beneath the distinct people-name.
adamah: Ground or soil
אֲדָמָה
This related word brings the shared ground beneath human life into the name’s sound-shape.
THE PATTERN
A people remembers its own outsiderhood by refusing contempt and extending welcome to strangers.
Do not press a sojourner, for you know his living soul, since you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.But the sojourner who sojourns with you shall be to you as one who springs up among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.For I hungered, and you gave me food; I thirsted, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you gathered me in.THE THREAD
So love the sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.The Hebrew uses ger (גֵּר), “stranger” or resident alien, from gur (גור), “to sojourn as an outsider,” for both the stranger to love and the stranger you once were. Here the memory that restrains contempt becomes an explicit bond of love.
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