What Does Deuteronomy 5:2 Mean?
The LORD our God cut a covenant with us in Horeb.
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
The LORD our God made a covenant with us in Horeb.THE KEY
The Hebrew verb translated “made” means “cut”: covenant is an enacted bond, and its “with us” brings that bond into the present.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks to you through its “us”: God establishes a bond with a people who call him “our God.” Covenant is not presented as a remote idea, but as a living relation between God and the people addressed.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that covenant belongs only to someone else or some distant time breaks against the verse’s plain “with us.”
THE ROOT
כָּרַת בְּרִית
karat berit
GROWS FROM
כרת
To cut, sever, or cut off.
The Hebrew phrase karat berit (כָּרַת בְּרִית, “cut a covenant”) uses the verb “cut” where English says “made.” The bond is pictured as an enacted commitment with binding force, and “with us” names the people who stand within it.
ALSO GROWS
karat: To cut, cut down, or cut off.
כָּרַת
The covenant-making verb comes from the concrete act of cutting, giving the bond the force of something enacted.
keritut: Severance; the term used for a certificate of divorce (Deuteronomy 24:1).
כְּרִיתֻת
The same root can name a formal severing, revealing the seriousness of the bond that covenant establishes.
THE PATTERN
Covenant is an enacted bond in which God claims a people and names himself as theirs.
On that day the LORD cut a covenant with Abram, saying, To your seed I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which the LORD has cut with you concerning all these words.For this is the covenant that I will set in place with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD. I will give my instructions into their minds, and scratch them upon their hearts. And I will be to them a God, and they will be to me a people.THE THREAD
On that day the LORD cut a covenant with Abram, saying, To your seed I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.Genesis 15:18 uses the same Hebrew covenant-cutting verb, karat (כָּרַת, “cut”), that Deuteronomy 5:2 renders “made.” The shared root shows covenant as an enacted bond, not merely an idea or promise left at a distance.
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