What Does Deuteronomy 25:13 Mean?
You shall not have in your bag a stone and a stone, a great and a small.
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 have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small.THE KEY
The deception is not a false stone but two real stones kept in one bag for two different standards.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks wherever one person or community keeps two measures in reach: one for this case, another for that one. Both weights may be genuine, yet the hidden choice makes the judgment crooked. What is held in the bag becomes a test of whether one standard governs every weighing.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It dissolves the claim that a measure is fair simply because the instrument is legitimate; fairness breaks when the same hand keeps two measures and chooses between them.
THE ROOT
אֶבֶן
even
GROWS FROM
אבן
Stone; here, a stone used as a weight.
The Hebrew repeats the word as “a stone and a stone,” leaving visible that both measures are real stones; the concealed difference is their size. The word also invites the sound-play av (אָב, father) + ben (בֵּן, son): a measure carried forward can carry the image of what one generation hands to another. The wrongness lies in keeping two standards where one measure should govern.
ALSO GROWS
avnei kis: Stones of a bag; weights kept in a bag.
אַבְנֵי כִּיס
Proverbs 16:11 uses this same image of stones in a bag, showing that the bag carries the means of weighing.
even pinnah: Cornerstone.
אֶבֶן פִּנָּה
A stone can establish alignment; here, the weight tests whether the measure stays aligned.
even negef: Stumbling stone.
אֶבֶן נֶגֶף
A stone can become an obstacle through how it is used, just as a real weight becomes deceptive when selected to change the measure.
THE PATTERN
A measure reveals the standard of the one who uses it, and judgment answers to the measure it applies.
You shall do no crookedness in judgment, in the rod, in the weighing, or in the measure.Scales of deceit are an abomination to the LORD, but a whole stone is his delight.For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with what measure you measure, it will be measured to you.THE THREAD
A leveled balance and scales of judgment belong to the LORD, and all the stones of the pouch are his work.This verse reuses the image of the bag’s stones: the Hebrew phrase for “weights of the bag” shares the words אֶבֶן (even, stone) and כִּיס (kis, bag) with the image here. The measure in the hand is not a private convention; Deuteronomy exposes the divided standard as a breach of what weighing is for.
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