What Does Deuteronomy 8:9 Mean?
A land where you shall eat bread without want, and lack nothing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and from whose hills you may hew bronze.
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
A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.THE KEY
Here, abundance is not a shipment arriving from elsewhere; the ground itself feeds, furnishes, and yields what is needed.
THE MEANING
This land provides bread without scarcity, and its stones and hills hold iron and copper. The verse says that nothing is lacking within it. Its picture of provision speaks now through food and useful materials already present in the land.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that enough means only bare survival: here, bread is unscarce, and the land itself yields what is needed.
THE ROOT
תֶּחְסַר
teḥsar
GROWS FROM
ח־ס־ר
to lack, be deficient, or be wanting
“lack” in this verse is teḥsar. The root חסר (ḥ-s-r) names a condition of deficiency; here, its negation reaches across “any thing” in the land. The same root appears in “I shall not want” in Psalm 23:1, connecting the land’s sufficiency with a person’s experience of lacking nothing.
ALSO GROWS
eḥsar: I shall lack or want
אֶחְסָר
This is the form used in Psalm 23:1, where the same root describes a life without lack.
maḥsor: want, need, or deficiency
מַחְסוֹר
This noun names the lack that the verse says the land does not contain.
THE PATTERN
Provision is pictured as the absence of lack across both daily food and the materials the land yields.
The young lions go lacking and go hungry, but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.For all these things the nations seek, and your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things.And my God will fill every need of yours according to his riches of weight, by Jesus the Anointed One.THE THREAD
A Psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd; I do not come up short.The Hebrew verb behind “I shall not want” is אֶחְסָר (eḥsar), from the same ח־ס־ר (ḥ-s-r) root rendered “lack” in Deuteronomy 8:9. The land’s sufficiency and the shepherded life’s sufficiency share one root: neither is left deficient.
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