What Does Deuteronomy 32:47 Mean?
For it is not an empty word for you, because it is your life; by this word you shall lengthen your days upon the ground where you cross over the Jordan to possess it.
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
For it is not a vain thing for you; because it is your life: and through this thing ye shall prolong your days in the land, whither ye go over Jordan to possess it.THE KEY
The Hebrew uses דָּבָר (davar, “word, matter, thing”) twice where the KJV says “thing,” showing that the word itself is named as your life.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks to you now: this word is no empty matter but your life. It ties the length of your days to the ground you inhabit, giving the teaching consequence in lived time.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that this teaching is an empty religious matter with no bearing on lived life is undone: the verse calls it your life and links it to your days.
THE ROOT
דָּבָר
davar
GROWS FROM
דבר
d-b-r
To speak or utter; the related noun carries the senses of word, matter, and thing.
The Hebrew uses the same noun for both “vain thing” and “this thing,” while that noun also means “word.” The verse’s matter is therefore not separate from its message: this word is called your life.
ALSO GROWS
dibber: spoke, uttered
דִּבֵּר
The verb makes audible the speaking carried in the noun davar.
davar: word, matter, thing
דָּבָר
One Hebrew word holds together what English separates as spoken word and ordinary thing.
חַיֵּיכֶם
chayyechem
GROWS FROM
חיה
ch-y-h
To live, be alive.
The verse names the davar as the hearer’s life, not as a supplement to it. The root’s branches describe both being alive and living beings, placing the word within the substance of life.
ALSO GROWS
chai: alive, living
חַי
This adjective shares the root for life named in the verse.
chayyah: living creature
חַיָּה
The root also names a living being, making its life-bearing sense concrete.
THE PATTERN
The word given by God is presented as life-bearing substance that sustains the hearer through actual days.
And he bent you low, and made you hunger, and fed you with manna, which you had never perceived, nor had your fathers, so that he might make you perceive that humankind does not live by bread alone, but by every word that goes out from the mouth of the LORD does humankind live.This is my comfort in my bowing low, for your word has brought me to life.It is the breath that gives life. The flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you, they are breath, and they are life.THE THREAD
And he bent you low, and made you hunger, and fed you with manna, which you had never perceived, nor had your fathers, so that he might make you perceive that humankind does not live by bread alone, but by every word that goes out from the mouth of the LORD does humankind live.Deuteronomy 8:3 uses דָּבָר (davar, “word”) for what proceeds from the LORD’s mouth and says that by it a person lives. The same noun appears here where the KJV says “thing,” and this verse calls it “your life”, the shared root binds word and life together.
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