What Does Deuteronomy 28:32 Mean?
Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, and your eyes shall see and run out toward them all the day long, and there shall be no strength in your hand.
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
Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long: and there shall be no might in thine hand.THE KEY
The eyes spend themselves reaching for the children, while the hand has no strength to change their separation.
THE MEANING
This is the terror of watching your sons and daughters transferred to another people while your gaze keeps reaching for them all day. The longing consumes the eyes, and no strength remains in the hand to change what is happening.
THE ROOT
וְכָלוֹת
wekhalot
GROWS FROM
כלה
kalah
To come to an end, be completed, or be consumed.
“run out” in this verse is wekhalot. The eyes do not merely look unsuccessfully; the word pictures them being spent in the act of looking. This root can describe something reaching completion, so here longing reaches its limit by consuming the one who longs.
ALSO GROWS
kaltah: Was consumed or spent; used of a soul that longs and faints.
כָּלְתָה
Psalm 84:2 uses this root for a soul fainting with longing, giving the eyes’ exhaustion here the same force.
vayekhullu: Were completed or finished.
וַיְכֻלּוּ
The same root can describe things brought to completion; here, what reaches its limit is the eyes’ strength to keep looking.
נְתֻנִים
netunim
GROWS FROM
נתן
natan
To give, set, or place.
“given” in this verse is netunim. The verse names the children as transferred, with another people as recipients: the root’s give-or-place action becomes the mechanism of dispossession. That concrete transfer makes the powerless gaze and hand at the verse’s end more severe.
ALSO GROWS
natan: To give, set, or place.
נָתַן
This is the root’s basic action, made painful here by the children being placed under another people’s possession.
mattanah: A gift; that which is given.
מַתָּנָה
This related noun shares the act of giving, while the verse makes clear that this transfer is a loss, not a gift.
THE PATTERN
Longing is pictured as a reaching that can consume the one who longs.
My eyes run out in tears. My bowels boil. My liver is poured out upon the earth for the breaking of the daughter of my people, because the children and the nursing ones faint in the streets of the city.My living soul pines, even runs out, for the courts of the LORD. My heart and my flesh ring out for the living God.My living soul runs out for your deliverance; I wait for your word.THE THREAD
My living soul pines, even runs out, for the courts of the LORD. My heart and my flesh ring out for the living God.The eyes that “fail with longing” and the soul that “fainteth” share the root כלה (kalah), to be consumed or brought to an end. The same word holds the pain of reaching for children who are gone and the ache of longing for the living God.
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