What Does Exodus 20:12 Mean?
Give weight to your father and your mother, that your days may lengthen upon the ground which the LORD your God gives 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
Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.THE KEY
To honor your parents is to give them weight, and the verse joins that weight to the length of your life.
THE MEANING
Your relationship with your father and mother carries weight in the shape of your life. The verse joins honoring them to lengthened days on the ground the LORD gives you, holding time, family, and gift together.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the idea that your life begins with you, detached from the people through whom it comes.
THE ROOT
כַּבֵּד
kabbed
GROWS FROM
כבד
Be heavy; carry weight.
“Give weight to” in this verse is kabbed. The verb asks you to treat your parents as weighty, as people whose place in your life matters. The same root names weight and honor, so the verse holds both meanings together beneath the single English word.
ALSO GROWS
kavod: Weight; honor; glory.
כָּבוֹד
The shared root reveals that honor is the recognition of weight.
kaved: Heavy.
כָּבֵד
What is heavy has weight; the verse’s command carries that sense into how your parents are regarded.
יַאֲרִיכֻן
ya'arikhun
GROWS FROM
ארך
Be long; lengthen.
“lengthen” in this verse is ya'arikhun. The verse describes days being lengthened, not simply counted. The same root appears in a phrase rendered “slow to flare,” where length names anger held back; here, length is joined to a life extended on the ground God gives.
ALSO GROWS
orekh: Length.
אֹרֶךְ
This noun makes visible the same idea carried by the verb: days acquire length.
erekh appayim: Slow to flare.
אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם
The root’s sense of length also describes anger delayed, showing how the same seed can name duration in different forms.
THE PATTERN
Honoring parents is repeatedly joined to the continuance and length of life.
Give weight to your father and your mother, as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that your days may be lengthened, and so that it may be good for you, in the land that the LORD your God gives you.Hear and respond, my son, and take my sayings, and the years of your life multiply.Give weight to your father and your mother, which is the first commandment with promise. That it may go well with you, and you may be long in days upon the earth.THE THREAD
Therefore the LORD God of Israel says, I said indeed that your house and the house of your father would walk before me for the ages. But now the LORD says, Far be it from me. For those who give me weight, I will give weight; those who make light of me shall be made light.The word translated “honour” here shares the same Hebrew root as the command to honor your father and mother: both carry the sense of giving weight. The verse then sharpens the image with its opposite: those who despise the LORD are rendered light.
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