What Does Deuteronomy 3:20 Mean?
Until the LORD gives your brethren rest, as well as you, and until they also take hold of the land which the LORD your God has given them across the Jordan. Then you shall turn back, each man, to his possession, which I have given you.
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
Until the LORD have given rest unto your brethren, as well as unto you, and until they also possess the land which the LORD your God hath given them beyond Jordan: and then shall ye return every man unto his possession, which I have given you.THE KEY
The same Hebrew root names both what your brethren possess and the possession to which you return: your inheritance is bound to theirs.
THE MEANING
Your return to what is yours remains tied to your brethren reaching what is theirs. The land is already given, yet the return comes only when they also possess it. Individual inheritance sits inside a shared arrival.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that what has been given to you is complete apart from whether others receive what has been given to them.
THE ROOT
יָרַשׁ
yārash
GROWS FROM
ירשׁ
To inherit or take possession; in some contexts, to dispossess.
“take hold of” in this verse is yārash. English makes “possess” and “possession” look like separate ideas. The Hebrew forms share one root, ירשׁ (yārash, inherit or take possession): the brethren’s inheriting and each person’s own possession belong to one chain.
ALSO GROWS
yārash: To inherit or take possession; in some contexts, to dispossess.
יָרַשׁ
This is the verb behind the brethren’s possessing the land, linking their arrival to the possession that follows.
yerushah: Inheritance, possession.
יְרֻשָּׁה
This noun names what each person returns to, tying an individual allotment to the same root as the community’s inheritance.
יָנִיחַ
yānîaḥ
GROWS FROM
נוח
To settle or come to rest; in the causative form here, to give rest or let someone settle.
“gives ... rest” in this verse is yānîaḥ. The verb presents rest as being brought into a settled place. That rest becomes a shared threshold: one group’s return waits while the others are still arriving at theirs.
ALSO GROWS
menūḥāh: Rest, resting place.
מְנוּחָה
This noun makes the root’s sense of rest as settling into place visible.
Noaḥ: Noah; a name associated with rest or relief.
נֹחַ
The name echoes the root’s movement toward rest after unsettled labor.
THE PATTERN
An individual’s inheritance reaches completion inside the community’s shared arrival.
We will not turn back to our houses until the children of Israel have inherited, each man his inheritance.And now the LORD your God has given your brothers rest, as he spoke to them. Therefore now turn, and go to your tents, and to the land of your holding, which Moses the servant of the LORD gave you across the Jordan.God having seen ahead something better for us, so that they might not be made complete apart from us.THE THREAD
And he said to him, I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to take hold of it.Genesis uses the same root ירשׁ (yārash, inherit or take possession) in “to inherit it”: what is given is something a people must come to possess. Here, that possession is explicitly shared, one group’s return waits until the others enter theirs.
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